Introduction
I don’t want to seem ungrateful because I really have benefited much from the contributions of what might be called “Banner of Truth” postmillennialism. However, the emphasis with this strand of theology is almost entirely focused on the gigantic ticker tape parade of evangelism, mission work, intense revivals, and more. Scarcely a thought is given to how we might clean up after the parade, who would be responsible for that task, and what our laws would look like after the revival.
Not only do I not want to seem ungrateful, neither do I want to give the impression that I am against evangelism, mission work, intense revivals, or any other good stuff. All such things are essential, the preconditions of the genuine work of reformation. But we must also remember that there are also post-conditions of genuine reformation. At some point, the Christian magistrates will have to confront the hard task of governance—they will have to start making real decisions. And please note—however massive the revival was, those decisions will still require courage to make.
Now what might have nudged me to start thinking down these grooves?
A Wee Bit of Background
As I write these words, Great Britain is in the aftermath of what might be called the Great Recoil election. All across the country, in local council elections, Labour found out what life in a slaughterhouse is like. But this was not your standard teeter-totter election, where seats that used to be held by Tories went back to the Tories again. No, there were two new interlopers—Reform and Restore. Reform, headed by Nigel Farage, is the Brit equivalent of the MAGA movement here, although they have the advantage over us in that they had already the word Great in Great Britain’s name. Restore, led by Rupert Lowe, was a split from Reform, and is a bit more hard line, and is a much younger national party. But for our purposes here, in the local council elections just held, Reform enjoyed what can only be called a massive blowout, and Restore, the start up, won all ten elections where they fielded candidates. This is a sea change—I don’t believe there is any other way to interpret it. For the moment suffice it to say, regarding Great Britain, that there’s life in the old girl yet.
And here in the States, something similar has just been happening. Here the battleground is that terrain of politics that we call gerrymandering—but what we really need is a verb that expresses the additional idea of un-gerrymandering. Under Democratic rule it is not unusual to find congressional districts that look something like a Mandelbrot set, with weird looking tentacules (let us call them) reaching out to scoop up some more appropriately colored voters.
So what happened? We had a cascading series of events when it came to these oddly shaped congressional districts. First, the Supreme Court essentially gutted one of our standing corruptions that the Voting Rights Acts was being used to justify. SCOTUS declared that “race” could not be used in the drawing of congressional districts anymore. That case came out of Louisiana, where they had a district that looked like a giant mutant earthworm stretching across the state. This decision is going to have a profound impact on elections all across the South. And while the case itself was heartening, the thing that appears to be really heartening is that Republicans seem to be rejecting their tried and true historical tactic of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Republicans actually pounced on this decision, like a duck on a June bug. Florida redid their district lines, finalized just a few days after the ruling. Louisiana got permission from SCOTUS to adjust their lines right away. Tennessee redid their lines in a way that might be described as ipso pronto. Other states are poised to follow suit.
And then the new Jacobin governor of Virginia had attempted a grotesque gerrymander, and the way they had jammed it through was struck down as unconstitutional. She had wanted to redo the districts of Virginia in a way that looked like a crab nebula sneaking up on some unsuspecting dainty morsels, those morsels being conservatives in southwestern Virginia.
What all of this means is that the mid-terms, which were looking to be a nail-biter for the Republicans, might not be anything of the kind at all anymore. It might even turn into a question of how many seats Republicans will pick up in the House, rather than a question of whether they would bleed enough seats to lose the House entirely. And of course if they lost the House, we all know that Trump would be facing seven or eight impeachments in a row, at least one of which would be for abusing a library card when he was in junior high school. But things are not looking that dire anymore. We might not be facing two years of lunatic churn in Congress.
And then something else happened in Indiana that should provide a salutary warning to those Republicans whose moral compass looks like Salvador Dali painted it and draped it over the back of a chair to dry.
Indiana is one of the reddest states in the Union, and their legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. They were considering a redistricting plan that would increase the advantage of Republicans—their congressional districts had been 7-2 in favor of the Republicans, and the proposed new plan would have made it 9-0. Their House passed it, but it was then killed in the Senate because of a number of feckless Republicans who went over to the Democrats. Eight of those senators were up for reelection just the other night, and seven of them were primaried. Of those seven, one has apparently survived, one race is still too close to call, and in the remaining five, the challengers won. The old establishment politicians, bow ties and all, in the name of what they thought was high principle, had worked to prevent Republicans from using the rules of the game in order to win the game. In the minds of some Republicans, winning the game is just not to be done. But then the primaries came after them, and they got overwhelmingly shellacked. The voters, with some of them getting pretty surly by this point, want Republicans to actually use the political power they have been given. So the feckless Republicans were overthrown by Republicans with . . . I suppose we would have to say by Republicans with a good deal of feck.
Now I know and understand that there are many realms of life where we want to keep “politics” out. But I also think we are being far too fastidious when we try to keep politics out of politics.
This is especially the case when we fully expect the Democrats to be furiously partisan in processes like this, granting them leave to be that way, and at the same time demand that Republicans be the ones to keep politics out of politics. This perverse understanding of political “manners” has almost institutionalized the expectation that Republicans are required to bring a knife to the gun fight.
But legislatures are elected with the understanding that they will be in control of the district boundaries. To make those decisions with partisan politics in mind is to be expected.
What happens in New England, only with colors reversed, should be allowed to happen everywhere else. About forty percent of New Englanders vote conservative, and yet they have no conservative representation in Congress. Zero. If that is fine, and the Democrats seem to agree that it is, then shouldn’t also be fine across the states of the old Confederacy?
But to do your redistricting with nothing but partisan politics in mind is to be rejected, especially if zealots are segregating districts on the basis of skin color. So if you really wanted to remove raw partisan politics from this process, then it has to be even-handed. What you would need is a constitutional amendment requiring congressional districts to run along county lines. But as soon as you do that, you would find yourself with a bunch of conservative congressmen haling from New England . . . because there are plenty of counties there not dominated by the urban blues.
By Other Means
The great theoretician of war, Carl von Clausewitz once made this trenchant observation. He said, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” That is true enough, but we can also look through the telescope the other way. Politics should also be the means by which you avert a war. Why go to war to achieve your political ends if you can achieve the same results by winning a majority in the state legislature? But in order for this to work, there needs to be a willingness for hardball politics, politics that understands itself to be tougher than beanbag, but not as hard as war.
If I can revert to the situation in Great Britain again for a moment, you would have to be as blind as a cricket bat not to see that bloodshed was coming, and that the driver of that bloodshed was their insane approach to immigration—that approach being nothing other than a concerted effort to destroy British culture. And so the globalist open borders contingent will now want to represent this election as a triumph for the blinkered nativists, giving them permission to “legalize racism”—but with everything else staying pretty much the same. But it cannot stay the same. This election has to result in reversals of policy. What I see is a flickering and desperate hope that bloodshed might be averted.
By bloodshed, I do not necessarily mean civil war. There might not be enough guns, or will, or leadership for anything like that. But I am talking about riots, protests, strikes, massive unrest, and possibly terrorism. And please keep in mind the truth that predicting a dire outcome, and laboring to preventing said dire outcome, is not to be confused with wanting that outcome.
But in order for politics to serve instead of bloodshed, there will have to be decisions made that are extremely wrenching and painful. In the the case of Great Britain, there will have to be massive deportations. Let us say that in a few years, Nigel Farage is the prime minister—there will be enormous pressure on him to flake the same way Boris Johnson did. It is quite possible for a man to be swept into office on a popular wave, and yet the task before him requires him to do some very unpopular things. It is very easy to get your society to the point that Livy once described regarding ancient Rome—”in which we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies.”
That is also the case here in the States, and the problem is not going to be a simple one to solve.
So it is not enough to win elections. You must do something with those wins. If you were elected in order to change things around, then you must—and please follow me closely here—change things around.