I generally do not like politics. Although I don't consider myself uninformed, I am not a partisan. I take pride in being independent and convincible, and have in fact voted for Republican, Democratic, and neither candidates in recent election cycles.
In other words, I am the quintessential swing voter. If either of the two parties wants to earn my vote in the future, this post describes how they could do it.
Do not gloat in your victory. Trump is still a hugely flawed man. I believe that my first opinion of him - given now nearly a decade ago - was that he's a clown. Now, I can happily enjoy a good clown show, and I'll certainly use a clown if a lunatic attacking me happens to have clown derangement syndrome. But I'm still not thrilled to have one as my president. On this front, I do have some hope that Trump will improve, as I believe much of his behavior is at its worst when he's an underdog. And hopefully, winning such a historical victory in such a remarkable manner can change him, at least a little, even at his age.
Much worse than Trump's manners are the election denialism and the violation of democratic norms that culminated in the January 6th "insurrection". Now, I do agree that the left has overblown this event. But still, it was a ridiculous and tragic thing to happen in America, and one that Trump could have easily prevented by simply conceding the election even a day earlier. His failure to do so is one of the most obvious and elementary failures of any American president. It casts him in a terrible light in comparison to Biden and Harris, who are even now conceding the election and committing to a peaceful transfer of power. It would be utterly disqualifying in any presidential candidate, in any normal times. Perhaps we do not live in "normal times" - but still, it's one thing to be the product of such chaotic times, and another to contribute to it.
Even now, Democrats are rightly apprehensive of Trump's second term, worried that he'll become a dictator and never leave office. And it's critical to acknowledge that this is NOT just a paranoid delusion. It may again be overblown, but the fact of the matter is that Trump DID refuse to give up power until the last minute, and that he DID contribute to a violent attack on the American government. At that point, it counts for little to say that he didn't directly command the violence, or that the other side denied elections first. Trump is the one man who bears the most responsibility for January 6th. He does have some authoritarian tendencies, overblown as they may be.
These dangers are amplified by the unexpected totality of Trump's victory. Again, this is a reason not to gloat, and to practice restraint. Many people voted for him while holding their nose from his stench. Many others did so without knowing that the Republicans would control every branch of government. The legacy media has been completely stripped of their credibility, and the ascendant alternative media are largely in the hands of Trump's supporters. I don't feel comfortable giving that much power to anyone, let alone to someone like Trump. Certainly, Trump has some kind of a mandate, but it would be a mistake to think that this means total support. And it would be an exceptional mistake indeed for him to use that mandate to indulge the worst of his authoritarian tendencies.
Going forward, I want to see Trump confess his mistake in this regard and renounce it. And it can't be just words: there must be something very solid to back up his repentance. I think that some of the following actions would be greatly helpful.
Trump should reconcile with Mike Pence. Give him a position of power in the new administration, or at least one of honor. Give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for standing up to Trump to do the right thing, at the great sacrifice of his personal safety and political ambition. Pence's actions on January 6th was one of the few unambiguously good things to happen in American politics lately, and everyone - including Trump himself - would be much worse off now if Pence had certified Trump's attempt to circumvent the election.
In addition, Trump should resign from the presidency - voluntarily and without compulsion. This doesn't have to be hard, or happen immediately. Assuming that there are no major crises, Trump can resign in the third year of his term, and let JD Vance take over. He can cite his old age, and say that while nothing is wrong with his health, he wants to repent of his actions on January 6th and set a good example for a new generation of leaders. He can compare himself to Washington, and implicitly rebuke Biden for clinging to power despite his mental decline.
Is any of this likely to happen? Are you kidding? From Trump? But it will be precisely that surprise that draws the stark contrast, and gives meaning to his actions. And so I wait for that surprise with hope, although with little expectation.
As for Trump's policies, I don't have time to get into them all, but I have a special concern for Ukraine. The most important outcome of that war is a free, secure, and independent Ukraine. As for how much blood, treasure, or land that will cost, that can be negotiated. We should negotiate hard, and we may fail, which may embroil us in greater costs. All that I can accept, but a simple abandonment of Ukraine is not an option. That is to say, I can understand if Ukraine has to give up some land. If Russia refuses reasonable terms, I can accept us spending many billions more in Ukraine - and at that point, it will be justified, because Russia will have proven itself a greater threat. But if Russia instantaneously devours Ukraine after Trump takes power, I will be furious with him, and his legacy and future agenda will have little chance of support from me.
Overall, Trump certainly has high hopes riding on him from his supporters - and why not, given his amazing story thus far? Much has been said of his character flaws, but these are often also his strengths. His impulsive, careless exaggerations are also what allows him to speak the truths that no-one else can say. His pugnaciousness, stubbornness, and trollish humor also give him his incredible resilience, and allow him to fight, fight, fight, and win. Sometimes, a clown is exactly what you need, when the enemies of freedom are canceling comedy, policing speech, and imposing a tyrannical order. Good luck, Mr. President, for all our sakes - you are already one of the most consequential men of our time, and you may yet turn out to be one of our greatest leaders. May the Lord my God redeem all your flaws and surround you with good people who can guide, restrain, or unleash you as needed.
But still, do not be proud, and do not gloat in your victory. Much of it was merely due to the many faults in your opponents - to which I will now turn.
Repent. You have pushed evil ideologies upon America. You have caused great harm to Americans. Unless you repent, you will surely perish.
The chief of your sins is this ideology of woke/DEI/identity politics. It is currently hard to name concisely, because it has not yet come to full bloom. But make no mistake, it is a grave, historic evil. It is like racism, sexism, and all the other evil prejudices of the past, under a mask of hypocrisy. It is like all seven deadly sins combined into a single political framework. Communism combined perhaps three of the seven deadly sins, and it killed a hundred million people. Wokeism will do far worse if it gains full power. In it are the seeds of the Soviet gulags, the Nazi holocaust, the American system of slavery, and the Chinese cultural revolution. And so, this is a non-negotiable: I will never freely support you unless you repent of this ideology. And if, God forbid, it ever does come to full bloom, and all the terrible seeds I mentioned above begin to bear fruit, I will take up arms and wage war against you. Literally.
Thankfully, you have some people on your side who are in fact calling for repentance - or "self reflection" if you prefer - and asking you to abandon this wicked and destructive ideology. Please, PLEASE listen to them. Even if you don't understand spiritual language, even at the crass level of basic politics, even in the nascent form of this ideology, you can see the harm that it has already done to your electoral prospects. Seriously, do you think it helps to call Black and Latino men misogynists for not voting for Kamala? Or to call white women racists for the same reason? Do you think it helps Latinos when you mutilate their language and call them LatinX? Or Black communities, when you defund their police? This ideology has demonized whites, demoralized men, deceived women, disparaged children, destroyed your cities, dismantled our traditions, and disconnected actions from their consequences. How is any of that helpful to your party, or to any of your constituents? Do you think it helps women to go to colleges where there's only one man to date for every two women, or that it helps the morbidly obese when you tell them that they're healthy and sexy? And what good could come to any of these marginalized groups when you systematically place them in positions where they're unqualified? You've artificially associated these groups with being unqualified, then forced that association to be actually true in the social environments that you've specifically engineered! Honestly, is there a better way to systematically perpetuate negative stereotypes? If Kamala's abortion of a candidacy is not enough to convince you that being a "DEI hire" is a terrible fate, I don't know what will.
In addition, I must specifically call out your ideology as it relates to human sexuality. Your positions are contrary to God's laws, and therefore against the basic biological pathways that ensure human flourishing. I am talking about things as "benign" as pornography or childless cat ladies, to issues as controversial as divorce laws, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and abortion. In every single issue in this broad spectrum, you have opposed every time-honored, time-tested practices that guard and guide positive human sexuality - practices such as monogamous, heterosexual marriage, or due diligence in selecting our sexual partners.
Certainly, not everyone gets to live out a fairytale love story, and there must necessarily be some deviations from living "happily ever after" with "prince charming". Such deviations are unfortunate, and they should generally be met with understanding, correction, and grace, with some tolerance, allowance, and acceptance. But the "woke" have instead chosen to amplify, celebrate, propagate, and worship these distortions, then shoved them all down our throats. In the rhetorics of propaganda, this difference is made to be subtle, but in the underlying morality, it is an absolute polarity inversion. Woe to you when you call good "evil", and evil "good".
And again, who is this supposed to help? Do you think that the women getting their third abortions are happy? Do you want more such women in America? Do you think divorce is fun? Or that the existence of "incel" men is a benefit, or that the scorn that your women heap on them helps your political cause? You have been "pro-choice" for decades now, and insofar as political affiliations are heritable, you've already aborted millions of your voters. But hey, they were only some clumps of cells, right? Merely "potential" voters? Uh-huh, sure - and the votes you lost were only some stacks of ballots, and merely the "potential" for the presidency. Again, even if you don't buy the spiritual or moral arguments, your ideology is costing you future voters by the millions. If you continue to think this way, you will surely perish.
To the individual human members of the Democratic party: I understand that not everyone is this extreme, or believes in the specific ideologies that I've denounced above. Maybe you just thought that Trump was worse, or just wanted a higher minimum wage, or more support for Ukraine. To those, I want to say that I understand you, and I can work with you. My fight is not against flesh and blood. I am not against people. I am only against evil ideologies that possess them. People are not ideologies, and they are not political parties. I don't even think that the leaders of the Democratic party are particularly bad people, and many of them I think I would quite like if we met in person. A younger Biden, for example, could have made a serviceable president in less interesting times. Kamala could do quite well in a cooking show. Nobody can deny Obama's charm and eloquence, and I would love to have a conversation with him. They were just constrained by the dominant ideology of their party for their time, and I can't blame them too much for being unable to break free. But now is the time to get the ideological wing of your party under control. Please, correct them, rebuke them, and expel them if you must. Because as far as I can tell, the ideologies I mentioned above seem to claim the moral center of the Democratic party, and if your moral center is off, everything else will follow.
And do not settle for a half-hearted compromise. The central ideology must be excised. Some of its adherents may offer to give a little on some small side issue, like a lizard cutting off its tail to escape with its life. But do not be fooled: this may delay your doom for a while, but it will not change it. Don't let them convince you that Biden and Harris were just bad candidates. Don't let them say that the economic messaging just needed to be a bit better. These are true enough, but they're merely symptoms, and you need to address the source. You must slaughter some of your sacred cows, because they are in fact golden calves, and abominations before the Lord God Almighty. You must fully repent. You keep saying "we're not going back", but that is exactly what you must do. That is what it means to repent: to turn back from your wicked ways. Otherwise, you will surely perish.
You may wonder what I mean by "perish". Well, when I saw the Trump-Biden debate, I thought it was the worst thing that happened to a president on video since the Zapruder film, and that it revealed something profoundly rotten in the state of our union. I said in a private conversation that this will presage one of the following dire consequences. So, here is what it means to "perish", in order of increasing calamity:
Obviously, this has already happened. Afterwards, I thought that the Democratic Party should have had a fully open convention, even if you had to face what one commentator described as a "knife fight on the convention floor". You would have probably lost the election anyway, but they would have come out of it with some kind of a legitimate moral center. You obviously did not do this. You did not repent. The party elites hardened their hearts, and chose to seek continued power over democratic principles. And so, as in the Ten Plagues of Exodus, we moved on to the next calamity.
I believe this is where we're at now. Obama will, of course, still be remembered as a popular leader and a great speaker, and nothing can take away his significance as the first Black president. But the candidates he endorsed afterwards were all disasters, and all lost the presidency in absolutely stunning fashion. His future endorsements will necessarily be of little value. Worse still, they all lost, in one way or another, to Trump - who is very much a boogeyman of their own creation. Like Voldemort marking Harry Potter as his nemesis, they chose Trump as their enemy, and were defeated by him.
If the Democratic party would not be Voldemort - if you can accept this legacy death, and relinquish power - then this can end here. Then whomever is the next Democratic president will be his own man. He will likely owe little to Obama and his power base, like how Bill Clinton owed little to Jimmy Carter, or Trump himself owes little to George W. Bush. He will need a new ideology, and this evil old ideology that powered the Democratic Party for the last few decades will be banished. I wish this future Democratic president all the best. I hope he's a righteous man, and I hope he will be a good leader for America. And yes, this person could be a woman, but she won't be the "woman" of the woke ideology, who cannot even define that word.
But let us take a brief pause here to take stock of our current situation, and what this "woke" ideology has cost the Democratic Party. You certainly don't need me to enumerate all the many ways that you've lost this election. You've lost everything. You're losing everyone. Nor is this a unique event: the electoral shifts are a decade-long trend. The shackles of your identity politics have been struck off the ethnic minorities: they are no longer your reliable voting block. Your anti-human sexual ideology has cost you your share of the youth, whom you've aborted before they were even born. Further children come from a healthy relationship between a man and a woman, which your ideology is actively undermining. The acolytes of your ideology are becoming ever more criminal and delusional. Your luminaries - Kennedy, Tulsi, Rogan, even Elon and Trump himself, all former Democrats or Democrat voters - are leaving you. Your cities are cesspits of drugs, homelessness, violence, and actual human excrements, and somehow they're still unaffordable. The people are fleeing your states, and bleeding you of your congressional seats, of your political power. All this is the due penalty of your sins: they are the natural, even mechanistical results of your ideology.
So, that ideology is now imploding. It is devouring and destroying itself, as is the fate of all evil ideologies. This is why you've been reduced to reaching for ever smaller "intersectionality", condoning ever more extreme sexual dysfunctions, corrupting other people's children, and padding your population with illegal immigrants, with a hope to eventually give them voting rights. This is why you've told such Stalinesque lies of Hitlerian malice, suppressed the free speech of American citizens, treated the common man with such contempt, propped up your puppet leaders, and become the same threat to democracy that you've projected onto Trump, the personal hatred of whom is your main campaign issue. Like Voldemort, you have become a ghoulish figure with a shattered soul.
Again, if you repent of this ideology and relinquish power, all this can end here. Yes, you've lost this election. Many of your current leaders will lose influence, and you'll probably lose a few more future elections. But you will be able to receive forgiveness, and get a clean start. This legacy reset doesn't have to take long. From Carter to Clinton was only 12 years. From Bush to Trump was only 8 years. Again, I sincerely hope that the next Democratic president is a good person and a great leader, who will do wonderful things for America and the world. I hope to be able to vote for such a person. Indeed, your attitude and rhetoric since the election seem to be headed in this direction, for which I am grateful - although you can never be sure in the moment with such things.
However, if you do not turn back - if you double down on your current ways, and continue to seek power in the same manner - then you will surely perish. The next level of calamity is:
Yes, the actual end of the entire Democratic Party. Do not be surprised: political parties like you have ended before. As I laid out above, the trends of a permanent decline are all there. This election is a "fact check" by reality that you're on the wrong path, and if you ignore it it'll get worse still. Both you and the Republican Party are less than 200 years old, and the election of Donald Trump is already at least a once-in-a-century event, according to some measures. Is it that surprising that such an event can herald the end of the Democratic Party, if you refuse to adapt and change? There are even faint rumblings of a civil war in some discussions, and in that case the end of the party would not be at all unexpected.
Now, I don't think this is actually likely, because I do think that you will adapt and change. And seriously, how are you going to continue on without repenting? You've already called Trump a fascist and a threat to democracy - what are you going to do to top that? Personally call every single person who voted for him a reincarnation of Hitler? Run an even more intersectional candidate, who accuses anyone who might vote for him/her/them of being a racist sexist fascist homophobic transphobic fatphobic greedy stupid authoritarian deplorable piece of garbage? Have a literal puppet powered by ChatGPT as the candidate, then lie to everyone about how real, authentic, and mentally sharp it is?
It's hard to even imagine the level of derangement required to reach this stage, and impossible that it can long endure. And so, it must be: the Democratic Party must repent. It must change. Or it will perish.
There are still greater calamities, like the outbreak of a civil war leading to the end of the United States. But let us leave such things as theoretical considerations for now. I have confidence that the Democratic Party will learn, repent, turn back, and change. The whole process may take some time, but I have confidence that you can do it.
So here I'm actually quite optimistic, in that I do think the Democratic Party will improve, at least to the point where they die more slowly. Compare that to how I feel about Trump, who I think is pretty set in his ways. And we badly need you to be better: as I said, I do think Trump poses some danger, and in your current state, you have no credibility to stop him. We need you to earn back that credibility, by telling the truth even when it's hard, and being completely humble and transparent with your motives and mistakes. There will always be the poor and the disadvantaged, and you may still be the better party to speak up for them - if you can do so without inverting good and evil, or disconnecting actions from consequences, and irrespective of identity politics. You're still more liked among some of our international allies, which may be useful in these turbulent times, if you can negotiate with them without forgetting that you serve America first. I would certainly like better health care and less gun violence. I want less income inequality. I want to stop climate change. In all these issues I think you may have a head start over the Republicans, as I still think of you more as the party of "policy". If you genuinely try to set good policies to solve these problems - in accordance with the eternal principles of the divine law, without ego, and without falling into another ideological black hole - I would gladly support you again.
I'm pretty sure that I've upset both parties with this post. I'm obviously not doing this to be popular. I don't like compromising truth for popularity, I don't like taking sides, and so I don't like politics.
My goal here is to lay out, as best as I can see it, the narrow gate and the hard path that leads to our nation's salvation and prosperity - because I do think that we're turbulent times, and we'll need both parties to be good. And so I do not hold back in saying what each party should do to earn my future votes.
Insofar as American politics is a choice between the lesser of two evils, it's hard to criticize one side without becoming partisan to the other. But I hope I demonstrated above that political parties can change pretty quickly. To a large extent, the party of Trump is not the party of Bush. The party of Obama is not the party of Carter. In that regard, the parties themselves are mere containers, with the rather nondescript labels of "Democratic" or "Republican" attached to them. It is the ever-shifting contents of the party - the ideologies, policies, and agenda - that actually matter. This is another reason I don't like partisanship, in that it's often just loyalty to a label. It's also a reason not to be too offended by my criticisms of "your" party, as they're generally fairly ephemeral things. Instead of thinking of it as criticisms of "your" party, please think of it more as a review of the shopping bag you happened to be carrying.
Above all, it is the people that matter. The individual humans, who were each created in the image of God. Note that God did not create a "political party", or a "good ideology", or even a "democratic system" to represent himself. His incarnation into this world was not any of those things. No, he created humans, and he became one of us. We are thus above all such constructs: as the bearers of the divine image, we are their masters, and they our mere tools. It is we who judge ideologies, we who vote for parties, we that implement systems. Therefore do not sell yourself to your political party. We say that we are "members" of a political party, and insofar as other "members" are also humans they should have our due respect. But do not confuse this membership with ownership. Rather, we subscribe to our parties, as we might to a magazine or a newsletter, as is convenient for us. We - even as each individual, as a single person - are bigger than our parties.
To every person who's independent - who can be convinced by good arguments, who can express and reflect on their ideas honestly, and can support any party that's doing good without being beholden to it - I salute you. I intend to never bear any such person any political animosity, even if we disagree on everything. Democracy depends on people like you. I hope this post is useful to you. In everything I say I hope to inform and convince you, rather than to pressure, manipulate, or "influence" you. I ask divine Providence that our efforts and discussions as I've put forth here are helpful to you and other Americans, and that He blesses our endeavors in trying to make the right decisions for our country.
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