Take a look at this sentence from a Daily Mail article reporting on Donald Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter” given this past Saturday. “Included [in the contract] are six anti-corruption pledges, seven actions related to jobs and trade and five on immigration and the ‘rule of law.’”
Why is “rule of law” in scare quotes? Is this really where we’re at in our thinking? The rule of law is some niche idea conservatives include in their wish list—like a “culture of life” or a “free market”?
Perhaps it alludes to the typical reader’s comprehension—“Psst, there’s this thing conservatives refer to as ‘the rule of law.’ Haha, I know, right? I mean, everyone on the right side of history knows laws are for fools, but just so you know, some of the true believers are still out there.”
Regardless, it certainly fits everything we’re seeing this election season, both in the presidential campaigns and in our culture.
Hillary Clinton gets exonerated for mishandling classified information by claiming not to understand a system I learned literally my first day in the Army Reserves… as a freaking chaplain! “I made a mistake.” Oh, that’s what breaking the law is called.
The Left Is Above the Law—Whatever the Law Might Be
We could go on and on, listing the litany of laws the Left routinely ignores: immigration laws in sanctuary cities, abortion laws regarding the trafficking of body parts, bribery laws with the Clinton Foundation. Or we could bring up obvious cases of corruption: like the FBI giving special treatment to Hillary, or the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits. But if a tree falls in the woods, and the media don’t report it, does it make a noise?
Then there are the exposés of Project Veritas on election fraud. It’s blatant and for most of us, it only verifies what we all know anyways. But Republicans have been bending over and taking this for years. They handed over the presidency to Democrats in one case everyone knows was fraudulent (JFK’s victory in Illinois and Texas through voter fraud, which gave him the presidency)—so I guess it’s just the way of the world. Democrats cheat.
In the last few years, we’ve learned that the Left doesn’t stop with laws of government. They’re going after the laws of nature itself. Nature says the family is rooted in the sexual compatibility of male and female. Study after study demonstrates a child raised by his or her natural parents is the surest ticket to success. But the Left seems to think the broken lives and families you see in the poor parts of our nation should be programmatic for the rest of society. “Who needs dads? Or moms?” says a Left which must shortly see such designations as gender-construct micro-aggressions.
And then there’s the law of scarcity: the law that drives the cold realities of economics. No, everyone can’t have everything if we just tax the one percent. But in the fantasy-induced, law-defying reality of the Left, that 90 percent tax rate for the wealthy is the one thing between me and Shangri-La.
Really, this redistributionist vision has been the Left’s single economic program for decades. Every election season, we endure two minutes of hate against “the rich” orchestrated by the Left and their media message crafters. Sure, some respond. Donald Trump has done plenty to make himself an object of hate. But recall—they did this to Mitt Romney, a squeaky clean Mormon! And it sure works: it keeps them in office, where they oversee a declining economy with anemic growth and smartly tell us this is the “new normal.”
This lawlessness stems from the very iconoclasm begun in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left. According to their thinking, laws arise from fundamentally unjust systems. If they have to break a few laws to change the world, who cares? They have bigger fish to fry than to comply with your silly little laws.
Where Left’s Disdain For Law Comes From
Let’s look under the hood at this lawlessness for a moment. Antinomianism, a hallmark position of Gnostics both ancient and modern, is the belief that breaking laws is essential for the salvation of Self. The cosmic architecture of our world is governed by laws of nature, government, community, family, culture, science, logic, rationality, and language.
These laws, instituted by what the Gnostics called “the archons” (the powers that be), imprison me in their various “systems” and “institutions.” Everything of this world is nothing more than a mental construct, which in turn traps me in its various assumptions. Only by shucking off these laws can I break free and experience “gnosis,” which in today’s terms translates as some sort of existentialist “be yourself” moment of Self-discovery, or Self-invention.
As I argue in my book, this Gnostic-existentialist posture is the creed of America’s default cultural religion. When I was writing the book, I wrote from the position of an archon. I was defending what Rush Limbaugh calls “the institutions that make this nation great.” The laws keeping peace were good, and police should be respected.
The laws of nature regarding sexuality and gender give good guidance on how we should view marriage and family. The mandates Christ set up regarding the church, outlining where contact with God is to be found (i.e., doctrinally, sacramentally, and liturgically) should be upheld against the Self-orientated revolutions of the church growth and contemporary worship movements, which in antinomian fashion celebrated an “outside the box” (i.e. non-physical, non-Christ) God. As a conservative Christian clergyman and a male, how was I not an archon?
Here’s the thing. On all fronts, we lost bigly. We lost to that species of Gnosticism known as Hermeticism, sometimes called “Proletarian Gnosticism,” which believes those achieving gnosis about the evil of this world’s systems can take the archons’ reins and rule the world for good, a good roughly approximating the leftist vision. They took John Lennon’s lead in his song “Revolution” and realized armed revolt doesn’t work, but “you better change your mind instead.” Change minds they did, using every sort of media to craft new realities in souls vacated after decades of iconoclasm (because nature doesn’t tolerate a vacated soul). This was their long march through the institutions.
Now things get interesting, because now leftists are the archons. They are the “powers that be.” And they have new laws and codes, which they think will establish by fiat a nature-defying fantasy world.
But the Gnostic-existentialist creed remains in the hearts of Americans. Does the Left really think after several years of fallout from their program—sky-rocketing debt, declining economy, children of gay parents begging for a redo, transitioned transgendered people regretting their decisions—Americans will quietly sit back and accept the “new normal”?
It’s Time For Conservatives to Break The Law
A common respect for the rule of law, fortified by a media which actually does its job and investigates corruption, can weather the back and forth of partisan governance. By contrast, the view that laws are mere reflections of whichever archons happen to be in control—and that the Left’s archons are on the side of light, opposing conservative darkness—erodes any sense that the law is accessible to all parties. When the losing party wakes up to that reality, that’s when the fun begins.
Several years ago—I think it was during the Obamacare debates, when Democrats were doing all their “sausage making” shenanigans—I was at a red light at the end of my road. The light is unbearably long. No one was coming from either direction.
I said to myself, “F*** it,” and turned left on the red light. At that moment the red light became an icon of everything I was coming to hate about government: a coldly mechanized totem of inefficient government management, pretending to be the height of rational governance.
How easy it was to break the law their laws.
