In the Jeff Bridges version of the movie, True Grit, there is a scene in the middle of the movie where Marshall Rooster Cogburn has laid a trap for the bad guys. It goes disastrously wrong and utterly fails. Bridges, as Rooster, surveys the damage and says, laconically, “Well…that didn’t pan out.” Then he gets up and continues his quest for justice. I consider it one of the most Christian lines I have ever heard in a movie.
Cogburn makes no pretense that his plan was perfectly designed or that he is a victim of circumstance. He candidly acknowledges the disaster. Neither does he delude himself that this disaster relieves him of his duty to obtain justice. He gets up and, though somewhat wearily, continues the quest he has pledged himself to. That is at the heart of our Christian duty to God and to our fellows.
Though I read them, I am not generally a fan of first week takes on big political swings. Those who win are usually triumphant, as if they have resolved all the problems of history. Remember how, after Obama won re-election in 2012, there were a raft of articles and books about how this was the first episode in a permanent re-alignment, driven by demography – and Republicans would never win an election again? That didn’t age well.
Those who lose generally search for scapegoats they can blame, thus exonerating themselves, or take their favorite complaint before election and transform that into the hinge on which all was lost. (“If only they would have listened to me!”) You have some who had quiet misgivings who earnestly voice them after the election – and that can be useful and insightful. And then you have those too timid to say much of anything before an election but are always glad to give you their expertise with 20/20 hindsight – and those are completely worthless. Problem is, it is very hard to distinguish between the latter two. Unless you have a real history with the person involved, it is very difficult to tell whether you are dealing with useless, vain tripe or significant insight.
I like to take time to look hard at what happened when it was not what I expected…try to observe and assess the many different currents at work…and see emerging patterns. I had a 25-year period from about 1980 to 2008 where I was deadly accurate in almost all my political predictions. The spiritual was completely in sync with the temporal and I understood the currents at work in different directions very well.
I’ve been pretty good since the millennium, marvelously acute in presidential years, but very mundane in midterms. In the seven presidential races since then, I have been right in six out of seven of them. The only one I missed is the Obama-Romney race in 2012. But Obama is the sort of empty blowhard that I have never understood how he has such appeal, so I am kind of skewed there. But that presidential record includes calling 2016 for Trump while everyone was saying Clinton was a shoo-in…and I said right here on this site, just before the 2020 election that I expected Trump to win and then have the election stolen from him. Pretty acute stuff.
On the other hand, I have only gotten four of the seven mid-terms right since the turn of the millennium. More telling, I have been badly wrong on each of the last three midterms. That is suggestive of a serious problem. I’m not in sync with the country anymore, even in an anthropological way. Of course, 2018 was the year when the Democrats beta-tested their new wholesale fraud machine. They held all the levers of power in 2022. That could explain those two, but this last one is something to be pondered. And I don’t know that I have ever missed three consecutive comparable cycles before. Something is afoot.
The truth is I started losing my fine temporal intuitive edge on such things after the first year of Obama’s presidency. Before that, I was able to mentally get inside the internal logic of the Democrats’ strategy and agenda even when it was completely opposed to my own. From there, you simply extrapolate and you could foresee pretty well what their moves were going to be. The problem for me was that, come 2009, the leftist agenda lost all internal coherence. It simply became more and more a quest for dominance and power with no philosophical agenda whatsoever. That’s tough in America. You have to develop some seriously psychotic traits – making promises you don’t care about or believe in…all is just a tactic to gain the power and dominance you crave. For a while, ordinary people think you are on the square. It is a process with a limited shelf life. You have to choose a moment to drop the mask entirely and seize power or people will end up dumping you for good. Or will they? The rise of every authoritarian movement has been dependent on a small core convincing a whole raft of useful idiots that those idiots will be key powerbrokers in the new regime. After power is seized, most of those useful idiots that propelled the ruling cadre to power are imprisoned or executed…but you can’t convince the idiots that they are mere catspaws until they are stood up against the wall. The motives, the incentives behind such things are largely mysterious to me. Not impenetrable, but so alien that I struggle to understand the delusional internal logic.
I keep coming back to 2008, when a woman was trying to recruit me to do some communications work for the Republican National Committee. I declined for several reasons. The statement that somewhat haunts me is when I told her, somberly, that part of me feared that the stupids had become the majority – and if that was the case, our society was doomed to crash and burn – and it would be ours to rebuild from the ashes they leave behind. Though we have some significant differences, Mark Mallett recently published a deeply penetrating and insightful piece on the “stupids.” Being stupid has little to do with a person’s intellectual architecture.
There have been some significant red flags about massive fraud this time around. I rejected that on the Wednesday after election but as the week wore on, I saw too many gross anomalies to dismiss it. I have been subdued about it, though, because even if it is true, it would be a mistake to think Republicans did not have some serious problems that must be addressed. Have you ever seen a body as feckless and impotent as the last Republican Senate? And Republican Senators just re-elected the same leadership for the coming minority. Talk about invincible ignorance! I would not want even the proof of massive fraud to serve as an excuse for the tone deafness that we conservatives developed in so many ways. It is probably both/and rather than either/or.
On the other hand, I head up a coalition of about 18 counties in central Texas at the behest of my client and political partner, Kat Wall. Even in the midst of this tsunami, that coalition held strong, holding the Republican margin and even expanding our turnout by working together. (After losing a primary, Wall chose to continue the movement to build a rural, conservative coalition supporting traditional American and Christian values and I manage that movement). That’s all well and good…but it also argues against fraud – for where we were all working together, supporting each other’s efforts, and taking nothing for granted, we grew. There is meaning in that, but I am not fully sure what the full depth of it is yet.
I have been appalled at the way many conservatives have dismissed the pleas of young people on affordability. Yeah, it’s a catchword, but there is a reality to it. My parent’s first house, bought in 1960, cost $7,000. It was little more than a cottage (two bedrooms) on a corner lot, but even when $250 a week was a great salary, people could easily see that being in their reach. Their second house, bought in 1968, was a four-bedroom on a double lot for $18,000. This was not in any tony, rich area, but it was a safe, lower middle-class blue-collar neighborhood. Again, well within reach. This year, the median home price in America is just under $400,000. You can barely get more than a tent anywhere for under $125,000. Those are the sort of numbers that make a young person’s eyes glaze over ( Mine too, to be frank). When Boomers my age contemptuously tell young people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when this stuff seems so out of reach, it offends me.
I am not amused by fellow Boomers’ stories of how we walked five miles back and forth to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, when we hold more than a little responsibility for this. Yes, it is primarily leftist policies that destroyed the lower rungs of the ladder where people can get a start, but we LET IT HAPPEN – and need to own that. I did not even see any Republican messaging establishing that, just contemptuous dismissal of young people’s complaints. The fact is, if things seemed so out of reach when I was starting out, I would undoubtedly have consoled myself with extravagances such as Starbucks and Door Dash. The system is completely out of whack. Even if we fought against it, we let it get there. Even though it cannot be righted overnight, we need to offer credible plans to correct it. And even though it will take time, we need to do more than just tell those coming of age while we are working on a systemic fix more than that they are just out of luck…that maybe we can get it fixed for the next generation. We need to offer bridge solutions now while working with focus on permanent solutions. I am deeply gratified that the woman I work for and with is focused on those same things and we spend time developing different solutions, both permanent and short-term. I will tell you about some of those initiatives as we develop and announce them.
That just takes into account a tiny part of an entire society that has gone badly out of whack. All the proportions, the incentives, and the assumptions are wrong today. Even if you could quiet the shrieking madness that infects modern politics, those problems remain – and will not be tackled until we acknowledge what huge problems they actually are. How does a person raise a family on one income anymore? Why are there only four meat-packing conglomerations in America? Why can a small farmer make more money leasing his land out to wind turbines than actually farming his land? What does that mean for the survival of the family farm long term? What does that mean for the survival of America long-term?
The day after the election, the word that kept coming to me was “evangelization.” It came in the broadest sense, not just in the religious sense. First and foremost, if we are to survive and thrive another 250 years, we must become, again, one nation under God. That is the prerequisite for everything that follows. I firmly believe in John Adams’ assertion that our Constitution was, “made only for a religious and moral people, and is wholly inadequate for any other.”
We have lost touch with what our country was designed for, what its inalienable principles are – both in our people and in most of our “leaders.” When I hear people say there should be no billionaires, I chafe…for unless it is stolen or made by fraud, it is NOT anyone’s business what anyone else has and most assuredly not a subject to be decided by public officials. America was founded as an opportunity society, one where you could make your way without the interference of preening officials. The powers of government were intentionally made small and severely limited. Now government is looked to, even by most conservatives, as the means to answer our problems. Ronald Reagan hit it right on the nose when he said that a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take everything you have. Government in America was intended to be ancillary, not central, to our lives.
Election day this year was a very clarifying moment for me. I know something about how this story ends up…and something about how certain key moments must play out, but I am left to try to figure out the details of how God intends us to get there on my own. Some people want to withdraw, piously saying that only God can rescue us. I partially agree…but I also agree with St. Teresa of Avila that we are God’s hands and feet on earth. If we think we are being pious by throwing our hands up and saying we leave the entire mess we made up to God to clean up, we are useless fools. We are to apply ourselves vigorously, taking the next right step according to our condition in life and trusting completely that, however things seem, when we put our shoulder determinedly to the plow, neglecting nothing, that it is then (and only then) that the God of the gaps will cover our many inadequacies. And He will leave us plenty of room to doubt, putting us sometimes in dire circumstances to prove to us whether we will persist or not, both in season and out of season. In his masterful City of God, St. Augustine insists that the fire that consumes the chaff and purifies the gold is the same fire. It is us who reveal whether we are chaff or gold when those fires come to all of us. So be not afraid when trials come: it is your opportunity to reveal (perhaps even to yourself) that you are gold in the Refiner’s hands, not chaff. For the fire comes to all. To mix metaphors, it rains on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45). The just and the unjust reveal who they are by how they react to it.
It has finally resolved, intellectually and spiritually, the most vexing project I ever undertook. I have been working on the CORAC handbook for five years now, even almost entirely finishing one edition and then tossing it out when I knew this was not what God intended, far too narrow and off-point. Thankfully, many of you have watched me struggle with it since the beginning. I know where I have to go with it. I don’t think I know…I know. Now it is the little matter of getting it down in a coherent, organized matter. I expect to issue it early next year…and this time, that is what will happen. It is built around the word that kept coming to me the day after election. Evangelization, in the broadest spiritual and temporal sense of the word. We will do both or we will fail miserably. “You must tell them true and they must choose or perish!” my angel irritably and enigmatically told me in July of 2000. It is 26 years later and I persist. I say thankfully many of you have watched that particular project from the start because God deeply values and rewards our persistence. St. Monica prayed for so many years for her wayward son Augustine. Had she given up after seeing so many years of no apparent results would we have the great Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine? God asks if we mean it. If we do, we will persist until the seed finally sprouts…and then nurture it. Just as He did with Peter after then Resurrection, Jesus asks all of us, “Do you love Me?” The answer is not to be found in our words, but in our actions and our will to persist.
Things have not panned out yet, but if we put on the full armor of God, they will. In God’s good time, not ours. Our job is to persist as His hands and feet on earth, in season and out of season. Onward Christian soldiers!
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CORAC lost a good friend, member, and supporter last Sunday. Jan Brennan, of Belleville, Illinois passed Sunday evening after battling cancer since last summer. Jan hosted several visits I made to the St. Louis area. She was a woman of profound faith with an incredibly bright, infectious enthusiasm. I am so thankful I got the chance to visit with her in the hospital in St. Louis last month. Please pray for her soul and for the consolation of her large family and many friends. She was a joy who will be much missed by all who knew her.
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In my effort to evangelize going forward, I have set up an ambitious and disciplined publishing and broadcast schedule that I will launch fully after the first of the year. Henceforth, I will publish here on Mondays and Thursdays. If a piece I am working on is not soup yet, I will post a reprise from an old article from here or from the original site, The Next Right Step. I will continue to write a piece for the CORAC newsletter twice a month…and will be publishing some things in other venues on the Texas and American liberty project. I will also be going back to doing some serious radio stuff right after the first of the year. To incorporate that with all the other things I am doing, I have to go with a very disciplined, vigorous schedule that takes into account the reality that I am 70 years old and am going to have to have a crash day every couple of weeks. I’m telling you, the battle lines have been drawn, the angelic troops have been deployed against the massive demonic infestation of these late times, and it is time to evangelize. Part of me wants to channel my inner Danny Glover and wail that I am too old for this stuff – but on the bright side, many people my age are battling with loneliness. I am many things…tired, harassed, overwhelmed, but by gum, the good Lord has decreed that I will not be lonely in my old age. Thanks be to God! How glorious it is to play a little role in His great project to renew the faith and face of the earth! That, my friends, is gonna pan out just fine for all of us who believe, all of us who trust, and all of us willing to put our shoulder to the plow and not look back. Glory to God in the highest – and peace to His people on earth!
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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