I was reading the excerpt from Mitt Romney's upcoming biography on The Atlantic. The excerpt is a summary of Mitt Romney's decision to retire from the US Senate, the rise of "Trumpism", and the decline of intellectual honesty among the Republican Party's elected officials, especially in the US Senate. There are a lot of juicy nuggets worth their own blog entries in this article alone, but one really captured my interest.

America's Problem with Democracy

As a former presidential candidate, he was well acquainted with heckling. Scruffy Occupy Wall Streeters had shouted down his stump speeches; gay-rights activists had “glitter bombed” him at rallies. But these were Utah Republicans—they were supposed to be his people. Model citizens, well-behaved Mormons, respectable patriots and pillars of the community, with kids and church callings and responsibilities at work. Many of them had probably been among his most enthusiastic supporters in 2012. Now they were acting like wild children. And if he was being honest with himself, there were moments up on that stage when he was afraid of them.

“There are deranged people among us,” he told me. And in Utah, “people carry guns.”

“It only takes one really disturbed person.”

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, declining to answer the question his confession begged: How long can a democracy last when its elected leaders live in fear of physical violence from their constituents?

I mean, this is kind of how American democracy is supposed to work, isn't it? If the people who elected you feel completely betrayed by your actions in office, you SHOULD be afraid of the consequences. We take pantless Thomas Jefferson's "separation of church and state" as Constitutional Gospel, but we ignore him completely in another personal letter where he writes: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."

Ideally, yes, the "fear" should be that you'll lose re-election if you betray the people. But, Mitt Romney inadvertently addresses this issue later in the biography:

Several Utah Republicans were already lining up to run for his seat, and the talk in political circles was that he’d struggle to win another primary. Romney, who couldn’t stand the idea of being put out to pasture, insisted that stepping down was his call. "I’ve invested a lot of money already in my political fortunes," he told me, "and if I needed to do so again to win the primary, I would."

In other words, Mitt Romney already decided he would outspend his Republican rivals into oblivion if he wanted to run for re-election. This is why the threat of violence, and thus the Second Amendment, is crucial to American democracy. It's just uncomfortable to think about, especially since the reasonable and silent majority doesn't think the problems have risen to the level that would require violence.

America's Problem with Decency

The first quote I shared was inspired by the jeering and heckling Mitt Romney received at the Utah State Republican Convention. In particular, one woman's red-faced vitriol towards him was so particularly disgusting (in part because she had her child right next to her while the vulgarities flowed from her mouth), that Mitt Romney asked her from behind the podium "Aren't you embarrassed?"

Even though Donald Trump's lack of basic human decency should have taught us otherwise, I think those of us on the more conservative side of the spectrum tend to think of this loss of decency as mostly a problem among leftists. How many times have we heard of Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro being heckled or, as is increasingly common, having their speaking engagements canceled on college campuses because of intellectually intolerant and ignorant students and professors threatening violent protests? Increasingly, it's not just the people but the Government itself that's abusing its power violently, as in the case of the FBI raiding the home of a Catholic pro-life activist to arrest him after he offered to turn himself in. This lack of decency not only crosses all political lines, but it's more than just political disagreements that inspire it.

Every couple of weeks, violence and other bad behavior is causing commercial aircraft to land or turn around mid-flight. In cities across America, weekends with multiple shootings are becoming increasingly common (almost expected and normal), and it's not only the lack of policing that's the problem. Heck, I live in a very safe, well policed city and I narrowly avoided getting mugged while praying my Rosary on a walk one night. Despite all of the national attention on the issue and the billions of dollars spent on the sexual harassment training by employers, sexual assaults are still disturbingly too common. America is suffering from an extreme lack of empathy and decency.

Functionally, without belonging to a society that guides and judges your behavior, be that a church or fraternal society or women's club, a person's behavior will devolve to the lowest levels of what is socially acceptable. I worry that by telling Christians and really all Americans for 50+ years "don't judge others", we've (inadvertently or intentionally) created this horrific state of morality and decency.

The reason the American "experiment" worked for as long as it did was because we were fundamentally a Christian nation. Undoubtedly, every age before and during the United States had its heathens and hypocrites. However, the masses, by and large either feared being judged by God, or feared being judged by their neighbors who they believed believed in God. Just as importantly, believing in Christ back then meant belonging to a church community that preached a very specific code of conduct. Although most Americans do believe in God, they do not necessarily subscribe to the teachings of a church. Christians using the phrase "Spiritual not Religious" are dangerously close to worshiping a golden idol of their own image.

America's Problem with Truth

Socrates was a troll. The dude would go around, asking deceptively simple questions to the political, religious, economic, and military leaders of the day. When they answered, Socrates would pick their definition apart and make them look like fools in the process. The deceptively simple questions included such gems as, "What is justice?", "What is love?", and "What is truth?". His student Plato would record that Socrates himself didn't know the answers to these questions, either. Eventually, unable to get answers, Socrates asked his friend to visit the Oracle of Delphi to learn who the wisest man in all of Greece was, because Socrates wanted to ask him questions and hopefully get real answers. The Oracle said that the wisest man in all of Greece was Socrates, because while other men thought they knew something when they in fact knew nothing, Socrates knew that he knew nothing.

Socrates would eventually be executed by being forced to drink poison. Being a democracy, the people who once adored Socrates were persuaded to vote to execute him by the same rich and powerful people he had spent years embarrassing. Before he died, Socrates shared his theory on the questions he had been asking. Essentially, Socrates recognized that while nobody could truly define "justice", "love", or "truth"; everybody universally knew what they were. Therefore, he rationed that there must be a true "form" of these things that needed to be discovered: that there was such a THING as justice, a THING as love, and a THING as truth.

These things he called "forms"; but generations later, Christians would call "God". God is Justice. God is Love. God is Truth. Even though most Americans may still identify as Christians, when so many of these Christians are worshiping the golden idol of self, we are living in a society ruled, we find ourselves in a dangerously "relativistic" society. Relativism is the notion of "Everybody has their own truth." However, those who dare oppose this view and instead choose to recognize only one truth as truth are often labeled as bigots and oppressed in what Pope Benedict XVI called the Dictatorship of Relativism.

If you're a progressive, you likely believe there was no voter fraud and Joe Biden won the election fair and square. This would be your "truth." If you're a Trump supporter, you may think that there was rampant voter fraud and Joe Biden stole the election. This would be your truth. To make matters worse, progressives have news outlets like MSNBC and CNN saying there was no voter fraud, backing up their truth. Meanwhile, Trump supporters have Newsmax and formerly FoxNews saying the election was stolen, backing up their truth. What nobody is hearing is the ACTUAL truth; which is that there is voter fraud in every single election, but the level of voter fraud needed to turn the election to President Trump was impossible. In addition to letting our personal political philosophy guide what we decide we'll recognize as true, the "free press" isn't even reporting truth and is just catering to their respective audiences.

Democracy will die if the free press won't even report THE truth! This isn't even just an American problem, it's happening all over the world. The leftists spun lies to try and undermine a victory by the center-right Brotherhood of Italy. In Russia, there are people honestly believe that they will be conquered by NATO if the war in Ukraine fails because that's how the state media spun the conflict.

This unfortunately reverts back to a Democracy problem, however. People worshiping themselves instead of God, even conservatives sacrificing even unborn children on the altars of personal convenience, only want to hear news that verifies their truth and only want to elect politicians who agree with them on everything. These news outlets fear losing money (and stockowner confidence) more than losing truth. The politicians, as Mitt Romney observes in his biography, run for re-election because their very lives depend on it the older they get. Re-election matters more than truth to too many in Congress. This creates a loop where the country falls deeper and deeper into debt, the politicians who are trusted to act on truth and the reporters who are trusted to report the truth are only interested in power and money, which ultimately comes from a people that increasingly worship themselves.

American Democracy Is Not Supposed To Work Without God

The American Revolution worked where the French Revolution failed because the American people were steadfastly devoted to God. Because the Church (fearing the chaos that would follow) sided with the French nobility and monarchy, the Church (and therefore God) became the enemy of the people. Like modern America on steroids, the French Revolution's brand of democracy quickly devolved into chaos with violence, terrified politicians, and people scared to speak an unpopular opinion.

The solution to the French Revolution was a dictatorship and years of warfare under Napoleon. Will the United States suffer the same fate, or will it return to faith and worshipping the God that is Truth, Justice, and Love?