Reminder: Things Could Always Be Worse

Everyone complains about the GOP, but here are three articles--all related in a general way--that remind us that things could be worse and that our votes and choices really do matter:

Paul Gottfried sees the threat clearly enough. Voters need to somehow get through to their representatives

The Emerging One-Party State

Republicans would do well to abstain from misleading talk about “bipartisanship” and refer to the Democrats as what they really are: a totalitarian threat to our constitutional system.

Amid Gottfried's warnings of the dangers we face and of the frustratingly myopic GOPe, there is this:

Despite all these obstacles, Republican victories in 2022 and beyond are still possible, providing the party pays attention to the guile and determination of its well-organized adversary. Republicans should not approach elections as ritualized contests in which sportsmanship is de rigueur. At stake will be the very possibility of meaningful opposition to the Left. Republicans would do well to abstain from misleading talk about “bipartisanship” and refer to the Democrats as what they really are: a totalitarian threat to our constitutional system.

Can this make a difference? In fact, yes.

I make fun of the fecklessness of Justices Amy and Brett, but Christopher Bedford's article illustrates how much better off we are--for now. The point is that a GOP Senate is essential to defend against much worse than fecklessness:

Unlimited Power: The Latest Supreme Court Dissent Is A Window Into The Mind Of The COVID Bureaucracy

The left thinks its power is so broad as to be essentially limitless, and so singularly vested as to be checked virtually solely at its own discretion.

Interested to know what the top liberal legal minds of the United States Supreme Court think about government power and your private property? First, take 10 minutes to read Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion, written for the majority, in the court’s Thursday night decision to stop the ban on rental income; then spend another 10 minutes on Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent.

Here’s a hint: The left thinks its power is so overarching as to impact nearly every citizen, so broadly interpreted as to be essentially limitless, and so singularly vested as to be checked virtually solely at the discretion of the bureaucracy itself.

...

And that’s where the split is: Breyer and his political allies on the left and throughout the Democrat Party have unfailing faith in the technocracy; it’s near-religious, and we’re all living in it.

For the past 18 months, we’ve suffered under the thumb of this sort of unchecked bureaucracy: Closed schools, masked children, shuttered businesses, canceled weddings, restricted hospitals, forbidden funerals — even the public drug dens and homeless camps now filling major cities are products of CDC “guidance.” For “public health and safety,” we’re told.

But while it’s been in full public view these past 18 months, the reality is we have increasingly suffered under the thumb of unchecked bureaucracy since President Woodrow Wilson; its power and influence growing stronger each year, while the executive and congressional power and will to curb it have lessened.

Some of that growth is natural: influence craves influence, power craves power. But much of it is the result either of active policies in favor of it (or a failure to enact policies restricting it), driven by men like Wilson and men like Breyer — highly educated and seriously intelligent men who think that we, the people, ought not rule ourselves; the experts will take care of that.

Between those two excerpts is a detailed analysis. When Bedford refers to the "COVID Bureaucracy," what he's largely referring to--as his references to Wilson, experts, and the technocracy make clear--is the entire progressive project that, beginning in the 19th century under the influence of Hegel, has morphed into the globalist project for a Great Reset.

Lastly, a relatively brief article on a topic I've referred to numerous times: The continued performance of private schools--often Catholic but far from exclusively so--as compared to the government schools. These schools deserve our support, and our children and grandchildren deserve these schools. The future of America may depend on them. The good news is that these schools, as well as the home schooling movement, are providing an essential service in these dark days of the Covid Regime. The author, inexplicably, fails to provide an obvious link to the full study at the Herzog foundation, although a simple search should turn it up:

Christian Schools Vastly Outperforming Public Schools During COVID-19, According to New Survey of Parents

Among last year’s other lessons, none may be more important than this: Our taxpayer-funded education establishment cares more about adults than children.

Consider the evidence: public school union bosses pressured officials to close schools and keep them shuttered beyond what medical authorities recommended. In spite of the obvious harm to children of school closures, unions throughout the country lobbed threats and issued demands. In Chicago, the union went so far as to sue the Mayor to keep schools closed; in San Francisco, the city had to sue its school board.

A public education system that failed to do right by our children has kept union bosses empowered and politicians cowed. ...

Christian parents reported their schools were open even as nearby public options closed. While only 8 percent of public school parents could report that their schools never closed, a quarter of Christian school parents did. 

...

... The data is unmistakable: In a panicked, trying year, Christian school parents and their children fared far better than their public school counterparts.

The data offers us hope on several fronts. Parents across the country are expressing growing anxiety about the teaching of “critical race theory” in classrooms. In this survey, 70 percent of all parents do not believe their school should teach that “white people are inherently privileged and Black people and others are oppressed.” 

Moreover, 80 percent of all parents do not think that their school should teach that achieving racial justice requires discriminating against white people. In other words, while America’s parents may disagree on a great deal, they are united in the belief that many of the central tenets of critical race theory should not be in the classroom—whether that classroom is funded privately or publicly.

... In the face of that, parents ought to consider a broader set of options—including Christian schools whose parents report more satisfaction and more attention to students than their public counterparts.