Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum
(Part One of Three)

Excerpted from The Unfounding of America
by Michael Russell
TheSecondDeclaration.org

The principles responsible for the creation of
America are, and have always been, required in equal
measure to sustain America. Only an independent-minded
citizenry can preserve a free independent nation.

While bicycling alone from California to New Hampshire in the summer of 1982, I contemplated and learned at the age of 25 what it meant to be an American and what America was founded to enshrine and protect. Such was not the purpose of my self-propelled expedition, but it was a life-affirming consequence. Two years later, during a university debate between calmly articulate capitalists and rabidly emotional "democratic socialists," I observed via audience response America's likely future and understood that the singular hope for my country was not political, but educational, and that public "education," by producing massive numbers of citizens unable to think conceptually, was ensuring the destruction of America. It would take another 27 years before I grasped with equivalent certainty that the authoritarian-collectivist Left's patient program of indoctrination had all along been bolstered by a perceptual counterpart: corporate-media manipulation of what Americans are "allowed" to see and hear.

It has been a masterful endeavor: strip young minds of the means to reason about reality while depriving all minds of the means to discern reality. Public education's true goal, presciently identified in 1924 by H.L. Mencken as "to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality," was celebrated openly in 2020. After generations of methodical underpinning and on levels both obvious and subtle — from the Covid ruse and America's Summer of Thuggery to undisguised censorship and Constitution defilement — from Newspeak-scale word redesignation to barefaced election theft — Americans witnessed, and in large part succumbed to, the commencement of an inalienable-rights-desecrating new normal.

On the third of July 244 years earlier, John Adams summarized in a letter to his wife the cultural precondition for the founding of a free nation. "The hopes of reconciliation," he wrote, "which were fondly entertained by multitudes of honest and well-meaning though weak and mistaken people, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished."

Today, with an unelected, cognitively vacuous, morally corrupt, grotesquely incoherent, brazenly treasonous, rotting husk of a propped-up criminal parasite representing "The Face of America," an honest revision of Adam's pronouncement would read: "Hopes of reconciliation continue to be fondly entertained by multitudes of honest and well-meaning, normalcy-bias-impaired, circus-games-addicted, convenience-dependent, weak and mistaken people waiting for someone to lead them out of a mess deeper than they comprehend."

Far too many sincere American patriots are mistakenly convinced that politics can reclaim a pro-America future, that what the Republic of America needs is "a Donald Trump," that Elon Musk is a First Amendment hero and not a benighted corporate front-man purposefully manufacturing the essentials for world-government control, that increasing reliance on "smart" and convenient everything is not the forging of shackles that make 18th-century iron a doddle. Fortifying these errors are FCC-approved Conservative talk-show hosts — with blind spots wide enough for the passage of an infantry division — charismatically escorting their followers through a cataclysmic landscape of worsening news while the most popular among them extract a luxuriant living on the bent back of a collapsing nation.

In the end, no matter how often or convincingly these "show" hosts avow that their particular message is critical to the saving of America, if it sounds like entertainment, looks like entertainment, tastes, feels, smells and sells like entertainment, it's entertainment. And, conditioned as Americans are for prepackaged programming, most will subconsciously file what are indeed shows under "Entertainment" or "Regularly Scheduled Background."

Presenting a crucial subject on a par with dog-itch-cure and time-share-relief commercials makes a burlesque of the subject and a fool of the presenter. The ideas that gave birth to America and those that are destroying America are not entertainment. They are not for "shows." They are not vehicles for product pitches or follower-collectors or a means to financial enrichment.

What if the reason Leftists seem unable to successfully host political "shows" is not, as Conservative show hosts have suggested, because Leftists lack wit, humor, and personality? What if it's not even because, when broadcast, Leftist ideology sounds as bad as it is? What if the real reason is that Leftists are too earnestly, too busily, and too successfully crafting in their image the mound of excrement they have long envisioned for America?

Shortly after his defection from the Soviet Union, Yuri Bezmenov wrote that Americans are unable to see "overt, legitimate, and easily identifiable" ideological subverters because the subversion is "'stretched in time.' In other words," Bezmenov explained, "the process of subversion is such a long-term process that an average individual, due to the short time span of his historical memory, is unable to perceive the process of subversion as a consistent and willful effort."

Almost without exception, today's most influential Conservative essayists and show personalities are unaware that their ability to see and think beyond a preordained point has been manipulated. And as the Perpetual Political Pendulum continues its journey from right to left to right to left — steadily, consistently, relentlessly less to the Right and more to the Left with every pass — Americans hungry for hope gratefully embrace hope's dubious signs. A Supreme Court decision suggests constitutional origin — a rights-respecting bill gets passed — a politician utters words his constituents desperately want to hear — all the while benevolent American optimism obscures the phenomenon described by Jane Welsh Carlyle in the mid-1800s: "When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favor."

And as the Perpetual Political Pendulum continues its journey from right to left to right to left — steadily, consistently, relentlessly less to the Right and more to the Left with every pass — preordained-point-limited and controlled-opposition think tanks, foundations, institutions, and shadowy political contributors dictate their guy's Pendulum-perpetuating policy.

This was so of the Gingrich-era "Contract with America"; it is exponentially so of the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise. Self-described as "a collective effort of hundreds of volunteers who have banded together in the spirit of advancing positive change for America," the book, produced in 2023 with an advisory board of 54 foundations and institutes, 34 authors, and 276 contributors, is apparently intended to assist "the next conservative President" manage the complexities of a modern constitutional republic. Although "A Conservative Promise" is a suitably descriptive bromide, a more-precise subtitle would be, "Tweaking Yet Again Along the Periphery."

"It's not 1980," this Federal Income Tax Code-size document declares in preamble. "In 2023, the game has changed."

No, the "game" has not changed, although the casual assertion sets the stage for addressing the symptoms of America's demise while ignoring the principles responsible for her birth and the tenets that have, since the ratification of Amendment XI, mapped her demise.

"The bad news today," Mandate 2025 continues, "is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline."

No, the political establishment and so-called cultural elite are, and have always been, incapable of driving anything. America's inclination toward declination began shortly after her founding. Her citizens, long since indoctrinated to trust political "solutions" to problems that are not fundamentally politically solvable, have merely become increasingly acquiescent to the persistent relentless nudge of authoritarianism.

"The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left — at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again."

Really? Nothing in the 900 pages that follow this concern-appeasing boast suggests knowledge of a way "out." On the contrary, there is scarcely a recommendation that does not breathe life into mistakes of the past, condemn independent thinking to the scrapbook of history, further entrench government-endorsed cultural nihilism, and betray what is right by compromising with what is wrong — the contemporary understanding of what it means to "be pragmatic." And, "We did it before and will do it again," like a deja-vu mantra, is etched into the base of the Perpetual Political Pendulum.

Whether the authors and editors of this myopic manifesto of superfluous micromanagement are unable to think beyond a preordained point or are actually willful America-subverters, they are absolutely perpetuators of the Pendulum's asymmetrical impetus. In the spirit of benevolent American optimism, might they be innocently stuck asking the wrong question?

"How do we fix what's broken without upsetting what we have today?" is, and has been approximately since the 1860s, the wrong question. The correct question, the objective answer to which illuminates the only American way "out," is:

"What act, law, movement, person, or force in America since 1776 has slowed for more than a moment the Perpetual Political Pendulum's ever-Leftward drift toward liberty's demise?"

(to be continued)