In this year that would have been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, memories flood the senses of those of us present at the revolution. Reagan changed the Republican party and wrenched control of the party from the eastern blue bloods and country club Republicans who thought Reagan was not one of them, too conservative, and "quaint" in his concern for the "common man," but not all today in the GOP are Reaganites though they try to claim his mantle.
Some are not Reagan conservatives but neo-conservatives who lurk in the shadows of both parties. We were paleo-conservatives who believed in an America First bastion of freedom, free enterprise, a small central government, and anti-communism. We sought a "temporary" increase in defense spending to counter and defeat the Soviets.
Reagan rallied the nation to that rendezvous with destiny, and the old Soviet Union is no more. Liberty was not an abstract concept for us but the embodiment of all that our ancestors fought and died for in the American Revolution, and left to us in a sacred trust.
We, who believe that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are inviolable shields for a great nation blessed by God, heeded the warnings of George Washington about the danger of foreign entanglements and Eisenhower's cautions about the military industrial complex that now sucks ever shrinking resources out of the economy for a world police role that overextends the reach of a teetering American "empire" far from its supply lines to its temporal home and to heaven. The Defense budget has doubled in the last ten years, now equaling all the combined defense outlays of the collective nations of the earth, friend and foe, and recent accounting reports stated that many billions are just lost in Iraq that no one can account for...bounty for war profiteers.
We did not foresee the rise of the neo-conservatives and their penchant for foreign wars, big government of the right, a war on civil liberties through the Patriot Act, torture ordered by men in "high places", and a "free trade" that exports jobs overseas in a unholy syncretism with globalists who trumpet a perverted capitalism that bears no resemblance to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Today, the One true "Invisible Hand" seems absent from all calculations of right and wrong by some in power in both parties who want to be our gods and who are slaves of lobbyists. We did not sign on for 700 (some say 3,000) military bases in 170 nations and wars on nations who possessed phantom weapons.
One poll says that only 5% of Republicans in Congress believe that the defense department should be trimmed, and only 4% say that they would support cuts in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This posture, even as we drown in debt created by the financial machinations of Wall Street and central banks who some cannot bring themselves to hold accountable, weakens our fiat dollar as the world's reserve currency while the rhetoric of free trade masks a neo-feudalism and a new world order that some neo-conservatives long for.
We were blessed to be foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution and my private moment with my hero at the Mississippi Sheriff's Boys and Girls Ranch a week before the election in 1980 still resonates in my heart as if it were only yesterday. When the stagecoach came to take Reagan to the area where he would speak, you could feel change and hope in the air. You could taste liberty and smell the sweet aroma of freedom won at Lexington and Concord by men who risked all that they had to utter the phrase..."No king but King Jesus."
The Tea Party insurgents, who some in the Republican Party tried to defeat with hand picked candidates just as they tried to defeat Reagan with the anointed of his day, are more the legitimate heirs of Reagan than neo-conservatives or old professional politicians who invoke his name but who love the leviathan as long as it is their leviathan.
The left-right paradigm, a nebulous and shifting definition, is often used by some on both sides to appeal to our fears and to divert our attention from the core struggle for liberty while promising to keep us "safe" as they just tinker around the edges of the status quo. Such tinkering will no longer suffice as we slide toward the abyss atop a mountain of debt that we depend on the Communist Chinese to finance...unthinkable to those of us laboring for Reagan thirty years ago.
We have a brief window of opportunity and must be vigilant to hold all in the GOP accountable with the trust just placed in them, to support the bold and fearless reformers therein who know that the people should not fear the government, but that the government should fear the people, and to speak clearly our desires for the survival of this great republic as the founders intended it to be, and to never apologize for loving liberty, or He who gives us liberty...Jesus Christ.
It strikes me that I might sound almost "liberal" to some today who define the term in ways that are a mile wide but an inch deep and altogether foreign to those of us at the revolution. Some of us old gray hairs just recognize that America has drifted far from The Fountainhead of Living Waters...the One True God, the origin of all that we have been blessed with. Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill is more endangered today than when we took on the Soviets unless we bind down our servants with the chains of the Constitution and an engaged citizenry who understands that a Christless conservatism can never defeat a Christless liberalism...so evident in the dark stain on America of the abortion of more than 52 million babies. It is not the little "c" in conservative that will save us...but the big "C" in Jesus Christ. In the end, as Dr. Erwin Lutzer points out, it is not America that needs saving...but Americans.
Some already are dimming the flame in Lady Liberty's lamp, playing taps over the Bill of Rights, and bidding farewell to the America we once knew. The hour is late, and the clock is striking thirteen, but in the spirit of Reagan's optimism, in America with God as our Pilot "...every day is a new beginning, and every sunset is merely the latest milestone on a voyage that never ends. For this is the land that has never become, but is always in the act of becoming."
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