Elections 2012, or "Was That the Event Horizon?"

Following the 2008 election I posted the following, ripe with all the wisdom contained in the mind of a first time voter:

"I attribute this election lost to a lack of conservative energy, and rightly so. The GOP betrayed its principles, and is paying a heavy price for it."

While there is some truth to this, I am sickened by the reality that GOP betrayed few of its principles. With the exception of the Reagan anomaly, the Republican Party has long held for an expansionary government role in the lives of Americans. 

There is despair in the camp of classical liberals.  The results of this election drive home a point seldom acknowledged. Our people no longer desire opportunity, but handouts. Our people no longer desire responsibility, but to be coddled. Our people no longer care for accomplishment of the difficult, but for the contrived comfort of welfare. 

Yesterday was a reflection of two voices trumpeting near identical ideologies. The increase of scope and magnitude of the federal government is only celebrated and never disparaged.

Absent are the days of Cleveland: "Though the people support the government; the government should not support the people.”

Coolidge's maxim lies cast aside: "Collecting more taxes then is absolutely necessary is nothing more then legalized robbery".

Kennedy is lionized yet ignored: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

How have we come to this?

The answer lies in a concept I have not yet fully developed, but I will proceed to venture forth with it due to the hour we are in. The expansion and regression of the recognition of individual human liberty is directly correlated with the level of individual worship of Jesus Christ. The state ought not present God to a people, nor should the state attempt to be God to a people. Faith and a relationship with the creator is an individual choice, independent of the collective. The eloquent consequence is an increased understanding that the individual is primary on earth, for man will not be held to account for the sins and righteousness of his brothers, but for the heart and actions. Individual responsibility is the keystone, and no amount of control, distortion or substitution by the state can alter this fundamental reality. 

This mindset has escaped the greater part of our citizenry over the past century. More work is needed to locate the roots, but my hunch is that it lies in a partial combination of a failure of Christians to love and in the malignant structure that is public education. Scriptures were cited and frequent references to the Almighty were a feature of so recent a president as JFK in his inaugural address. Such a speech would be decried today as excessively Christian, bleeding over the separation of church and state. We have come so far from a communal understanding of a Christian faith that it is now terrorizing to the nation to hear it spoken. This is beyond politics and the rhetoric of the parties; this is an issue of historical import centuries in the making. A people can change greatly in a short period of time, as a Jonathan Edwards should remind us.

Mankind has a proclivity to seek answers larger then ourselves, and if the answers are not sought by faith, they tend to resolve as a demand of the state. It was not on the behalf of God that the contemporaries of Samuel demanded Saul.

Our contemporaries who vote have done likewise, further demanding the rise of what will rightly be called socialism in the pursuit of a false deity to answer their needs.

The placement of trust and hope in the actions of men will lead to despair, so let us not put our trust for the future in men, for men perform miserably.