Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider,
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before the break
we were discussing
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the sequatious history and
the incredible tos-and-fros
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on how the parties
got where they are today
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and, of course, along the way,
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their religious sensibility,
or their religious agenda.
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And I think you've done a
pretty good job to track it,
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as recently as the Tea Party.
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Yeah, and
there's two shifts here,
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tracks, we're going to
cover the Democratic Party,
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and how Kennedy
eventually took the party,
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and how the
Democratic Party has gone.
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But I first want to
talk about how the values
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of the Confederate south emerged
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into the Republican Party,
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starting with Ronald Reagan
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and even Edwin
Meese, attorney general,
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into this idea that
we're a Christian nation,
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it should be a
Christian nation by law,
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mentality that started to emerge
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with the
presidency of Ronald Reagan,
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where did that come from?
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That came from
the moral majority,
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it came from Jerry
Falwell, it came from the south,
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it came from a
southern-based evangelical
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Protestant Christian riot.
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It used to just be a wish,
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now it's become a
compulsion, I think.
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Yes, and so you have
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the emergence of something else,
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the confederate
values of the idea
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and its economic
values, they go clear back
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to Thomas
Jefferson's economic arguments,
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this idea that
agrarianism is the way to go,
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whereas Hamilton,
Alexander Hamilton,
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the father of our economy,
the father of capitalism said,
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"We must be an industrial giant.
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We must have a
strong central government,
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a strong central
bank, a speculative market,
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we must have a
strong standing army,
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we must have a strong navy,
and the only way we can do that
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is have a Federal Convention
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and call for a
federal government."
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Thus, the Constitution
Convention emerged in 1787.
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Jefferson believed
that the farmer was king,
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they could do
whatever they want.
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They were a law unto themselves,
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essentially they
could be self-supporting,
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they weren't answerable
to any township government,
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they weren't answerable
to any city government,
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they weren't answerable
to any county government,
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they weren't answerable
to a state government,
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and lo and behold,
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why should we be answerable
to a federal government.
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And so Jefferson's
philosophy, which by the way,
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if you study out Lincoln,
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Abraham Lincoln
in his upbringing,
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his father who
was this homesteader,
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he went from place to place
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from West Virginia to
Kentucky to Illinois...
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I'd forgotten
the West Virginia...
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Try to be self-supporting
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and, you know, to
plow his own farm,
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cut his own
trees, to plow his own...
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to plant his own
crops, to be self-sustaining
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and to be king, he
failed and failed economically,
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time and time again,
and so Lincoln grew up
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really not
respecting his father's views
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regarding
economy or even politics.
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And so he turned to study
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both Jefferson and
Hamilton's perspectives.
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Now Jefferson's point of
view, led to an economics
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that believes in austerity
without raising revenue,
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this idea that we
just pour ourselves up
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by the bootstraps.
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We don't need to rely
on any federal government,
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no taxation, no nothing,
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which has always kept
the south pretty poor.
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So how did
Jefferson raised the money
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for the Louisiana Purchase?
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Well, that's the point.
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When he became president,
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he totally
contradicted everything,
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he's the one that
raised a standing army,
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he's the one that
built our navy, okay.
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So everything he was opposed to,
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he ended up doing as president.
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And I don't think the original
founding fathers intended
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that to be a standing army.
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But there was a second component
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that's very significant,
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that still stays
with us in the south,
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in fact, it's
still, you see parts of it,
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you'll see parts of it
in other states right now.
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This idea of the
nullification doctrine,
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this idea that states
are ultimately sovereign
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over the federal government.
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Okay, which is problematic
for the future of this country,
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especially with
emergence of Donald Trump,
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Jacksonian populism,
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this idea that
the working class,
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we need to make
America great again,
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make America first, all right.
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All right, it lends
itself to this isolationism
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and decentralization
type philosophy,
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which means that we're
not reliant on the world,
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we should rely on the
world or international law
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or anything like that,
which I can understand.
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I can understand that fear
and paranoia about that, okay,
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but at the same time
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it basically says the same thing
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to the federal government.
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Basically, what
we're going to do
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is dismantle the
federal government
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to such a point that
we can remake America,
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it's not making
America great again.
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What they want to
do is remake America.
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And if you study
their philosophy...
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Well, it's a mythology.
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Well, but if you study
the playbook of Steve Bannon
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and Donald Trump,
it's a confederacy.
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It is a throwback
to the southern mindset
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of the confederacy.
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So this is problematic to
Lincoln and Lincoln's party,
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okay, but on the other hand,
you have the Democratic Party.
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Where has it gone?
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It's secularism run
amok, is what's happened.
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You've got the,
I mean, you know,
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we talk about same sex marriage
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and how that
you're not going to win
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a constitutional
argument against it,
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because of the
equal protection clause
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in the 14th Amendment.
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But at the same time,
where do you go from there,
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I mean, you know, the
pendulum has swung so far
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to the left with secularism
that it was bound to happen
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that the right
was going to come back
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like a big
mountain and crush it.
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I've always said that,
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the whole gay
movement is tempting the,
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you know, the
country people to come back,
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just like in Germany.
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The forces there that
preceded the rise of...
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Or even African-American,
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the African-American community
took great insult to the idea
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that somehow same sex people
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or homosexuals
were identical to them.
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Well, of course.
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You know...
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That the civil
rights movement is analogy
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to the gay rights movement.
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That we can't change who we are
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and, of course,
African-Americans,
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they're black, and
they're a different race,
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and so therefore, we
can't change who we are.
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So they got
upset with that analogy
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because most
blacks are Christian
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and they said, "No,
we don't accept that,
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we don't buy that
you were born that way."
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Which is fascinating,
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that's a debate
in and of itself,
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and I think there
are legitimate arguments
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on both sides on
that but nevertheless,
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and I'm not here to debate that,
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but the point is just
that, that created a chasm.
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Well, that seems to
me the Democratic Party
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which were
involved with social justice
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got confused
with social issues...
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Yes.
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Leftward
leaning morality issues.
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And they're in no man's land
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because they're
heading out of the mainstream.
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I mean, they might
think they've got a lot,
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oh, they have a
lot of following,
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but it's not where America,
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when crisis comes America
reverts to a very jingoistic,
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basic, protectionist, viewpoint,
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and so they've been
rejected at the moment.
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I think they'll
reinvent themselves
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as has been done before,
that's what's about to happen.
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I attended a big event at
the Muslim cultural center
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in Portland, Oregon.
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In Tigard, Oregon, to be exact,
to the west part of Portland.
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And there was
about 2000 people there
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and I was sitting near the front
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at the table with Senator,
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Oregon Senator Susan Bonamici.
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And there was a
couple of doctors
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and their wives at the table
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and some other
civil rights activists,
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it was about ten of us
around this one round table.
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And they asked us to discuss
what we thought was the reason
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why Hillary Clinton lost.
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And I was the first
one to speak at the table,
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and I said,
"Personally, I believe
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its Hillary
Clinton failed to reach
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the working class
people, the Joe plumbers,
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and the people that are
out of work at factories
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and how factories
have been shipped overseas
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with NAFTA and
free trade, and so on."
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And I said, "She
failed to go after them,
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she failed to at least try,
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instead she
relied on the assumption
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that the inner cities
would take over the top
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and she didn't need to reach
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this important group of people."
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Donald Trump cashed in on that,
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that's what got
him over the top.
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But this is simple
matter of history too
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other than Franklin Roosevelt,
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who was the
reason for the term limit
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for the presidency.
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After you've had two terms
of one president one party,
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the mathematical probability
that someone else can run
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and when saying
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that I'll give you
more of the same...
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Right. It's minimal.
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I listened to what she
said, and she said good things,
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but basically the message was,
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I'm going to
continue what you've had.
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And that was doomed to failure.
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Not only that but she treated
religious people as kind of,
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you know, extreme
cuckoo and everything else
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and paranoid and fear based,
00:09:02.94\00:09:04.57
instead of just
making that assumption.
00:09:04.61\00:09:07.91
I mean, she shot herself
in the foot by doing that
00:09:07.94\00:09:10.58
and that's what really hurt her.
00:09:10.61\00:09:12.51
But it was...
00:09:12.55\00:09:13.88
there's no question that
it was a very seminal election
00:09:13.92\00:09:17.39
that in my view didn't
so much create new realities
00:09:17.42\00:09:21.22
that revealed
where America has come,
00:09:21.26\00:09:25.39
distrustful of government...
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Yes, where it's been
boiling up for a long time.
00:09:26.80\00:09:31.07
While Obama and the
others did a good job
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of distancing those terrorist
actions from a religious group
00:09:32.97\00:09:37.27
and set the economies good.
00:09:37.31\00:09:39.87
It showed that there are people
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that feel they are being chased
out of the jobs by immigrants,
00:09:41.28\00:09:44.78
others feel that
religion is in the guise,
00:09:44.81\00:09:47.28
in this case,
Islamic fanaticism.
00:09:47.32\00:09:49.02
And they were
right to feel left out.
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The distrust of the government
is the deepest problem,
00:09:51.69\00:09:54.59
because while you and I might
not like some aspects about it,
00:09:54.62\00:09:57.89
no government can continue
if people don't trust it,
00:09:57.93\00:10:00.96
it's basically I
use the term again
00:10:01.00\00:10:02.46
social contract.
00:10:02.50\00:10:03.83
We all have to buy into this,
00:10:03.87\00:10:05.70
this fabrication
or it won't work.
00:10:05.73\00:10:08.10
Yeah.
00:10:08.14\00:10:09.47
And I think America is
very close to ungovernable
00:10:09.50\00:10:12.11
at the moment.
00:10:12.14\00:10:13.48
It's not quite, but
if something goes wrong
00:10:13.51\00:10:15.34
or if it's
mishandled from here on out,
00:10:15.38\00:10:18.28
it could
degenerate into something
00:10:18.31\00:10:20.82
roughly
analogist to the outbreak
00:10:20.85\00:10:23.15
of the last Civil War.
00:10:23.18\00:10:24.52
Well, the Lincoln party is
no longer the party of Lincoln,
00:10:24.55\00:10:27.19
we can see that very clearly.
00:10:27.22\00:10:29.26
And with the
emergence of the working class
00:10:29.29\00:10:32.89
and populism in this
country, we have the potential
00:10:32.93\00:10:37.03
for demagoguery in this country,
00:10:37.07\00:10:39.13
our beloved country,
00:10:39.17\00:10:40.94
and the party of
Lincoln has shifted
00:10:40.97\00:10:44.34
to being the party
of the confederacy,
00:10:44.37\00:10:46.47
which is sad to me as an
establishment Republican.
00:10:46.51\00:10:51.48
The Old Testament in the
Bible tells an interesting tale
00:10:51.51\00:10:55.28
of succession in
regard to King David.
00:10:55.32\00:10:59.42
When he got word
00:10:59.45\00:11:00.79
that his predecessor
King Saul had been slain,
00:11:00.82\00:11:03.83
he was actually
with the Philistines,
00:11:03.86\00:11:06.70
with the enemy,
having discussions
00:11:06.73\00:11:09.26
with the
arch-enemy of his nation.
00:11:09.30\00:11:12.33
But it turned out well
and he turned out to be a man
00:11:12.37\00:11:14.94
after God's own heart.
00:11:14.97\00:11:17.27
It's an interesting thing
00:11:17.31\00:11:18.64
when you study
the US party system
00:11:18.67\00:11:21.08
and some of the
political loyalties
00:11:21.11\00:11:22.54
that have set long
00:11:22.58\00:11:23.91
characterized
their political life.
00:11:23.95\00:11:26.18
Those things are
not fixed, they're fluid
00:11:26.21\00:11:28.68
as they should be,
because issues change,
00:11:28.72\00:11:33.32
opinions change, and
as Ellen White speaking
00:11:33.36\00:11:37.19
to the Seventh-day
Adventist Church members
00:11:37.23\00:11:38.99
at one point said
00:11:39.03\00:11:40.36
that, "We should
not follow party,
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we should follow principle."
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And we would hope that today,
00:11:45.10\00:11:47.24
the great political parties
continue to pursue principle.
00:11:47.27\00:11:51.77
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:11:51.81\00:11:54.71