Table of Contents
To my wife Callista, whose support and love have made the adventure of our life together exciting, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
Introduction
T
his is a book I never expected to write.
After the victory of freedom over Communist tyranny, of religious liberty over secular police states, and of American pride over the malaise and cynicism of the 1970s, I fully expected America to follow an upward curve of consistent improvement.
I did not expect the Left to ignore the lessons of history and move further into ideological extremism. I did not expect them to react to their meager popular support by seeking to impose a corrupt, Chicago-style political machine on the entire country.
After leaving Congress in 1999 with a balanced budget and a booming economy, I certainly did not foresee Republican failure so vast that it allowed left-wing radicals to take over the House, Senate, and Presidency.
America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat.
The Left have expanded their power through their control of academia, the elite news media, union leaders, trial lawyers, the bureaucracy, the courts, and lobbyists at the state and federal levels. They share a vision of a secular, socialist America run for the interests of the members of the political machine that keeps them in power. It will be an America where government dominates the people rather than represents them. In short, they want to use government power to change who we are and how we think.
This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.
AN ALIEN IDEOLOGY
The left-wing Democrats who currently control the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and many state capitols are committed to a secular-socialist ideology that is alien to America’s history and traditions.
Traditional America values hard work, entrepreneurship, innovation, and merit-based upward mobility. But the secular-socialist machine rewards its members, punishes “overachievers,” kills jobs by over-taxing small businesses, and even exploits your death to tax the savings you hope to pass on to your children and grandchildren.
Traditional America was based on a profound belief that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But secular socialists are so opposed to God in public life that they can’t tolerate school prayer or even allow a cross to stand in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Our government traditionally regarded the protection of American lives as its top priority. Our primary concern with captured terrorists (or pirates, the old equivalent of terrorists) was interrogating them and using that information to stop further attacks.
The secular socialists, however, want to give our enemies the same constitutional protections we afford our own citizens, effectively placing the rights of terrorists ahead of the lives of Americans. With the Left in charge, when a foreign terrorist tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit, he was read his Miranda rights (which, as a foreign enemy combatant, he was not actually entitled to have). Taxpayers were forced to pay for the terrorist’s lawyer, who most likely advised his client not to answer questions except as leverage to get a plea bargain.
Americans traditionally believed in American exceptionalism—that America has a special mission to protect and spread freedom. For many in the secular-socialist Left, however, the only thing exceptional about America is our supposed viciousness. They believe America is an exploitive, imperialist aggressor, and that the U.S. military is a nefarious tool of corporate interests. Some on the Left even hope for America’s wartime defeat as a means to stop us from promoting American values across the world.
Historically, America was a low-tax, high-job-growth, small-business-oriented society in which families, charities, local governments, and the private sector were much more important to daily life than was the federal government. But the secular socialists believe the only reliable institution is a bureaucratic, centralized, supremely powerful government. Their answer to virtually every problem is higher taxes, more spending, and bigger bureaucracies, because they don’t believe Americans can be trusted to make the “right” decisions.