MM#364--Election 2024--Common Ground?

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. We are living in the late 18th century and it describes the peaceful atmosphere of London with the chaos and violence occurring in Paris during the horrific French Revolution.

1:02 And doesn't every society that goes through a cultural and physical revolution, such as the one that happened in the French Revolution and is currently taking place in the United States right now, experience those? Don't they all experience those very same sentiments? The best of times and the worst of times. The best of times we see Elon Musk land a rocket back on a launch pad like a toy would do in the imagination of a 12-year-old boy's hand. Just incredible technology.

1:43 The best of times we for me, the incredible accessibility to almost any and every book ever written. This is truly the golden age of reading and access to information. The best of times are instant communication society. We find out from loved ones and friends with almost instantaneous speed the ups and downs in their lives. Now, that certainly started with the telephone for almost everyday Americans, but it's only increased with a digital age where text messages are sent by the billions.

2:25 Did you know the world sends about 23 billion with a B? 23 billion text messages around the world each and every day. Crazy right. Just to give you an idea of how good are the times in which we live. Just to give you an idea of how good are the times in which we live, in 1929, just a little under 100 years ago, an estimated 200 million telegrams were sent during the peak year of 1929 for the telegraph.

3:13 And in 1859, when Dickens was putting the final touches on the tale of two cities, the transatlantic telegraph cable had get the news out to a rapidly as possible and eager and anxious nation and, for that matter, the world over. Now, just a decade before that, the Associated Press was founded in 1846, partly to help fund those same telegraph wires and to give access to them and to share the cost and covering the news from the then Mexican-American war just beginning to take place. Now, that is not the direction of our podcast today, and our direction is that if we picked up the tale of two cities in 1859 and we read those words it's the best of times and the worst of times Could we foresee the political and cultural hurricane that was coming in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln and all of those events that happened in the aftermath as a result.

4:20 And so some of you might be thinking well, that's great, but this is certainly the worst of times. We've never had a political party impeach a sitting president two times in one four-year term. And was it justified? Overwhelmingly it was not justified. It's the worst of times, david, because this up-and coming election looks to be very tight and close, with only increases in causes, with more anxiety and trepidation on the country. And if our constitutional safeguard of the electoral college helping the small states from getting demolished from the big states that was put in place in the Constitutional Convention for the very reason of having some semblance of fairness and equality If that's put in jeopardy, then does the American Republic exist much more?

5:23 After that, perhaps we should do an episode on why the Electoral College matters in our American Republic and why we are not mob role only by a majority. We are not direct vote of the Athenian democracy of 500 BCE. And that was the beauty and the wisdom of the founding fathers that we were not, that we were a republic. But does repeated elections, where the electoral college is the determining factor for winning elections, cause the system to be weakened each and every time it happens, most especially if the end folks are not learning or being taught how good the American system of government actually is.

6:12 Most young kids can't articulate the reasons for it or, for that matter, the greatness of America. They only know the reasons to hate our country. The worst of times could be. We've never had a presidential candidate been put through five criminal and civil suits with the sole intention to bankrupt him, to incarcerate him and to not allow him to run for the president. It's what we call lawfare. Now these days We've even created a new word lawfare for that very thing Not allow him to even run.

6:55 Now, you'll remember that these trials didn't come about until Trump actually said he was running for president again. Then the lawsuits were filed. Then the Biden Justice Department began to make some dangerous and crazy moves, including, for that matter, the number three person at the Federal Department of Justice moving, demoting himself to the New York State to head up that investigation under Attorney Bragg, after Bragg himself dismissed the case, saying there was not enough evidence. Worst of times Now they could say the worst of times could be. We've never had a presidential candidate who was targeted for assassination on two different occasions.

7:41 Yes, and the fallout of those attempts appears to be grossed incompetence, to the point of sheer malice on the part of a Secret Service who, some three months later, still still has not given the American people a full accounting. Even both sides of the political spectrum now would agree there's never been such a collapse from a federal agency. The secret service, who takes an oath to protect those very candidates, no matter their party, under its jurisdiction, appears and smells and looks like to be rotten at its core, with hyper partisanship.

8:26 And all of this is to say, are we at an election of no return if one side wins? Are we at an election of no return if a Democratic Party who has been radicalized since the beginning of the 21st century and who was given wide latitude under the Obama administration, and who was given wide latitude under the Obama administration If the Democrats win the presidency under Kamala Harris, I think almost by everyone's measure, would certainly qualify to be the least intelligent US president candidate in US history and beyond, question, the most radical US candidate, only to be rivaled by Woodrow Wilson and probably that sociopath, andrew Jackson.

9:14 Would that be the worst of times? Perhaps, just perhaps. But let me share with you a more negative, implausible view. But let me share with you a more negative, implausible view. There's an old adage that says it can always get worse. And for us conservatives, and the traditional-minded folks who always foresaw that shining city on a hill that Reagan wonderfully word-pictured, for us, what can always get worse is when we lose our republic and that delicate of a gem of federalism. That could be the worst of times.

9:58 Now, what do I mean by losing our federalism, the American system of federalism? Well, that refers to that distinct and separate division of sharing power between the national and state governments. American federalism establishes a system of dual sovereignty where both the federal government and the state governments have their own spheres of authority and there's a certain level of autonomy for each. That means that the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. There's a division of powers, so to speak, and the Constitution outlines these specific powers for each level of government.

10:40 There's enumerated powers. Those are generally the powers explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution, such as the power to declare war, regulate interstate commerce and coin money. There's the reserve powers. The Tenth Amendment reserves powers to the states that are not delegated to the federal government. These include creating school systems and overseeing state courts and managing local government, even running state and federal elections. And then there's concurrent powers. These are the powers shared by both the federal and state governments, such as the power to tax and create lower courts.

11:25 Now the Constitution has a supremacy clause that establishes that federal law is the supreme law of the land, and when federal and state laws conflict, federal law generally supersedes state law. But that of American federalism has evolved over time. But that of American federalism has evolved over time. Initially, the federal government and state governments operated in separate spheres of influence with very minimal overlap. Since the 1930s, there's been a shift towards more cooperation between the federal and state governments to address common problems.

12:09 This has led to an expansion of federal government involvement in areas traditionally managed only by the states. Now the federal government is almost involved in every facet of American lives. Now federalism serves as a check on government power by creating two sovereign powers the national government and state governments, thereby restraining the influence of both. So, in summary, american federalism creates a complex system of shared governance and that balances national unity with state autonomy, allowing for both centralized authority and local control in different areas of governance. And the beauty of all this, from our founding father's point of view, is they took all power and diluted it, essentially spread it out.

13:02 So there was not a whole bucket of power to be corrupted in one area. That's the beauty of our national constitution. Now, the prime example of all this that plays out before our very eyes on a daily basis is in the states of California, on one side, and Texas and Florida on the other side. For the radical left, they would say that California is going just fine no issues there and for conservatives like myself, we would say that Florida and Texas are just fine. But in keeping and getting to the heart of the truth, I wanted to challenge my own assumptions and see if there was a better way or a way to get closer to the truth to help out all Americans.

13:52 In a sense, I wanted to check my own blind spots on the conservative side, see our way through a different sort of lens and perhaps see our way through these difficult times. And perhaps see our way through these difficult times, which brings us to our book of the day, the Stakes America at the Point of no Return by Michael Anton. It's a political analysis and commentary on the current state of American politics and society, and initially it was written for the 2020 presidential campaign, but I still think it's a great analysis for us today. Okay, let's go to the book and see what I mean. And now here we are, in so many ways more divided than we were in 1860.

14:37 In so many ways not even a we anymore. Restoring American unity in this climate sounds almost comically impossible. How to restore unity after five decades and counting of a cold civil war, the rancor of which only seems to intensify month to month? I have some ideas which I will get to. But first let's understand what is meant by unity. It does not mean a unanimous vote in the electoral college, such as George Washington won twice. It doesn't mean a return to a bipartisan consensus of World War II and the first decades of the Cold War era.

15:21 It doesn't even mean anything like 1972 or 1984, 49 state landslides which can almost certainly never be repeated. Unity in the American political context, really for any republic and one must say for republicanism simply means a shared set of basic goals and assumptions. It doesn't mean everyone has to agree on everything, or even like everyone else. Indeed, a unified republic may nonetheless be quite divided in certain respects. Historically, the most common division in any republic has been economic, with religion and culture providing the underlying bedrock of unity.

16:08 Divisions between patricians and plebeians, oversharing spoils and offices, continually racked Republican Rome. But the city also remained fundamentally unified as Rome, with both classes speaking the same language, believing in the same gods, adhering to the same morality and committed to Roman greatness and glory. To the same morality and committed to Roman greatness and glory. And I love the fact that Michael connects our issues to 1860 and to this now cold civil war which we've been going through, and to the Roman Republic which, well, frankly, why it lasted so long.

16:51 But here's our nugget of wisdom for today. Let's go back to the book. To say the least, there does not appear to be any shared interest or bond of unity underneath contemporary America's bitter red-blue divide. One side loves America, the other hates it or can tolerate it only for what it might someday become were the left's entire program to be enacted without exception. In a religious sense, the other invented the god of wokeness which it worships with a diocesan abandon.

17:39 One side speaks only English, the other boasts of literally hundreds of languages now heard in America's blue precincts. One side insists that the ultimate moral imperative is to punish the other, which in turn believes that morality requires fairness and equal justice under the law. What would partisans of either side cite as something that they share in common with the other? The land itself, maybe, but they each go to great lengths not to live anywhere near one another. The economy, maybe. It's been re-engineered to benefit one side at the expense of the other.

18:19 As for the culture, that reliable unifying bond throughout most of history, to ask is to laugh and cry at the same time. The mere shred of cultural unity would seem so far out of reach as to be scarcely worth trying to attain, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't believe the country can continue indefinitely without any semblance of a common culture, but focusing right now on the near and medium term impossibility would be folly. Which leaves us with economics.

19:01 Economics is the number one issue in this election because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris horrifically laid out inflationary policies and then executed on them. Now I have spoken of my love for supply-side economics because I believe, all along with Michael, that that can be and should be a unifying message. But the current GOP can't articulate any such thing and people feel Trump gets it. But we'll see what happens. A week from today, we will look at the greatest Republican President, abraham Lincoln, and see what was his economic vision for the country before the Civil War and before that dreadful war occupied most pretty much all of his time, all of his mind and all of his emotions.

19:55 And we're going to do that after everything settles down, after this election. So we're going to have some good Mojo Minutes coming up next week. Today's Mojo Minute as we reflect upon how we could have a California, share a culture, share a country with a Texas or a Florida when they seem so far apart. Perhaps economics would be our solution. Let's get everybody making money again, and then perhaps we can bridge our differences. So in today's Mojo Minute, let us pray for a fair and free election, one with complete integrity, no shenanigans from the other side.

20:49 First and foremost, we have to believe in our elections. They are well. We have to believe that they are the truthful answers to our nation's collective voting as a country. It's the bedrock, it's the foundation of our electoral process, as our founding documents remind us of this. In fact, that's why it's so important to study our founding documents in detail. It's our so-called political religion, as Lincoln so coined the term. The idea prominently appears in the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, stating that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

21:37 That idea comes to us from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, because they helped us to develop a will of the people. You would do well to study these ideas to understand why our republic is so exceptional. But for now, we have to pray for a free and fair election, one with complete integrity, no shenanigans from either side. And, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight. And, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight. Thank you for joining us.

22:18 We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at team mojo academycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Next time, keep getting your mojo on.