As my three beautiful daughters grew up, I had ample opportunity to express my opinion on the young men that they considered candidates for becoming my son-in-laws. Of course, none of the candidates were worthy of my angels; nor did any of them meet my criteria of “Mr. Right”. Early on though, I discovered one uncomfortable fact. Like Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof, I came to the realization that one doesn’t simply choose his own son-in-laws, they are chosen for him. Oh I advised, I cajoled, I complained… I threw tantrums; but in the end a choice was always made… and I was never the one who made it. Oddly enough, and despite my worst fears, the choices my daughters made turned out mostly to be good ones; and when they made a bad choice, their world did not end. The doom that I prophesied went mostly unfulfilled, because in the end I discovered I had given my daughters something more precious than advice. My little girls were now strong young women with the ability to face life as I had taught them, to overcome mistakes, and to thrive.

As our nation looks to choose our next leader, warnings of the Apocalypse abound on both sides of the political aisle, and even within the many factions of the Republican party as well. Donald Trump joins the long list of characters likened to Adolf Hitler, his hypnotic rhetoric apparently so hateful and sinister that he ought not be allowed even to speak; his silver-tongued oratory apparently so wickedly compelling that for the good of the citizens his witchcraft needs to be silenced. Those who compare our candidates, left or right, to Hitler, should read up a little on Hitler. And those who warn of apocalyptic doom should we elect the wrong president, need to return to their Bibles to see what a real apocalypse looks like. There are talk show hosts on the right, and progressive non-profits on the left who make their living by making us all believe that we are on the cusp of oblivion. Every election cycle we hear it. We heard it with Bush, we heard it with Obama. But even as bad as the current administration has been; and we’ve certainly incurred some damage; we are still America with a fairly good chance of electing someone totally different, relegating the Obama administration to “the wrong side of history”, and moving on. We have elected and survived a wide range of Presidents: Wilson, Hoover, the Roosevelts, Coolidge, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Obama… It may be that America is not the fragile house of cards that we imagine it to be, one that can be toppled by whatever Hitler du jour we are presently designating. We conservatives perpetually espouse American exceptionalism, and the miracle of our Constitution and form of government. If it is a miracle, it is not a miracle of fragile freedom, many revolutions have brought temporary liberty, ours was something better. If our Constitution is miraculous, it is miraculous because of its durability; and we are exceptional as a nation because we are not easily subdued.

If we are indeed at the mercy of our leaders, then eventually we will fall. If we are like Sisyphus, condemned to roll the rock of freedom up the mountain only to see it roll back down, I fear we will not find his perpetual strength to guard and restore our liberty. Oh, I do believe that each generation must tend to the lamp of liberty, as Ronald Reagan warned,

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in their bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

But we have begun to assume that passing on freedom means electing the right leader, and then depending on them to shepherd our liberty. Revolutions are seldom won by majorities, neither are they maintained by them. Our greatness as a nation has never been dependent on elections, or we would have fallen years ago. Our greatness as a nation is embodied in the ideas at its core, and the willingness of a remnant to pass on those ideas to the next generation. Yes, the lamp of liberty must be tended, but it is tended in the hearts and minds of our young people, not just the voting booth; and if we fulfill our duty, that lamp will still light even the darkest times, and fly in the face of the worst leaders. We like to think of the world in terms of heroes and villains. We blame World War II and the holocaust on the demonic Adolf Hitler, without considering the role of the german people, or the people of the rest of the world that made a Hitler possible. We suffer from the notion that a single man can destroy us, or that a single man can save us, when a bad leader can’t destroy a good nation any more than a good leader can save a bad one.

IMHO: The republican party has for many years been looking for Mr. Right, and their choices have often been as disappointing as my daughters’. Like the scornful father, with each new candidate our disapproval has become the more vociferous, “John? Are you kidding, he’s a RINO!” “Mitt? Oh please, he’s so establishment!” “Ted? What do you see in him, nobody likes him! He’s from Canada!” “Marco? I heard some bad stuff about him!” “Donald? He’s full of himself, so controlling!”
Again, like the father I once was, we take increasing offense at the fact that our choice is rejected, “What’s the matter with Rand, he seems like such a nice boy!” “Have you noticed John, he’s so polite!” “Ben is so smart, and a doctor!” “What about Mike? He’s a good Christian.”. Our devotion to our own ideal choice heightens our disappointment with the eventual candidate and we throw a tantrum full of doom, gloom, and allusions to the Apocalypse. We cut off our nose to spite our face, and we risk continuing the streak of progressive rule to 12 or possibly 16 years, thus helping to fulfill our own false prophecy.
Paradoxically, when we set our standards impossibly high, people tend to ignore us and make choices based on no standards at all. The anger and vitriol that we are seeing on each side of this election should tell us that we have made the election of a president more important than our brotherhood as a nation, our constitutional principles, and the Union itself. We treat each other as though we were villains, devils, morons, and degenerates because we disagree on the direction our government should take. Even in the narrowest of differences within a party we have resorted to name-calling, crude insults, accusations, and assertions of evil motives… and I’m not talking about the candidates. Maybe this has become a little too important to us; maybe we’ve made it into all that there is, and forgotten the weightier, more difficult parts of tending the lamp of liberty. Yes, vote. Make your best choice from the candidates available. But then be at peace, rest, tend to your flame. We are still America,  we’ll be ok.