Ignite the Pulpit
Making America good again
Neither Donald Trump nor his Catholic opponents would dare campaign under the slogan Making America good again.
Why “making America good again” is a non-starter
Like higher education in general, and the social sciences and humanities in particular, the colleges and universities of America, unlike those of colonial America, must be morally neutral or “value free,” like the ”two state” solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Of course, a foreign policy that is value-free is worth-less. FOr that reason, the illustrious Lubavitcher Rabbi urged parents to discourage their children from majoring in the social sciences and humanities. These are steeped in moral relativism. This doctrine denies the existence of objective standards of good and evil, of right and wrong. And that is but one reason violence, drugs, and contraceptives are commonplace in America’s higher institutions of corruption.
“Making America great again” poses no delicate moral problems for Mr. Trump and his religious opponents because by “great” they mean enormously wealthy and incontestably powerful, and both wealth and power, on the level of commonsense, are morally neutral, and constitute the supreme ends of politics and of international relations.
The First Amendment of the American Constitution, in particular its negation of any religious establishment, has been so interpreted by the Supreme Court in the 20th century as to ban the public display of the Ten Commandments in any public monument.
Small wonder that the slogan “to make America good again” would be a non-starter in any political campaign. But how ironic! Politics involves the controversial, so only the non-controversial or what doesn’t arouse your emotions – like saying anything that offends a Muslim – has been excised not only from politics but from any domain of public discourse.
Nevertheless, this has not prevented Donald Trump from calling one or another of his opponents “nasty” or a “liar.” Trump is simply a vulgar maverick, one reason why he appeals to the less educated voters, as was manifested in the New Hampshire primary. But he is not about to campaign on the slogan to make America “good” again.
That slogan clearly implies that America today is bad, and has been for a rather long time – but not a length of time beyond the memory of ordinary voters!
For example, he wouldn’t dare suggest – indeed, it would never occur to him – that America ceased to have a solid and abiding ethical foundation ever since the ascendancy of the Progressive Movement and Woodrow Wilson!
It was Wilson, a graduate of Princeton, who
- Rejected the concept of limited government;
- Rejected strict interpretation of the Constitution according to the intentions of its authors;
- Rejected the “natural rights” doctrine of the Declaration of Independence; and completed his hardly known revolution by
- Advocating the notion of a “living” or evolutionary Constitution, contrary to the concept of the immutable Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, posited in the Declaration.
Moreover, it should be emphasized that the concept of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” was understood by learned men of eighteenth-century America and Europe as an abbreviation of the Seven Noahide Laws of universal morality embodied in the Book of Genesis.
To campaign on the slogan “making America good again” in our time of triumphant secularism, when permissiveness, pornography, pop culture, and a Supreme Court that sanctifies same sex marriage would be patently absurd!
There isn’t a single presidential candidate that is intellectually and spiritually equipped to making America good again, certainly not without the help of God.◙
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