Happy July 4th

Fly the Flag

At our cabins in Minnesota, we always fly the flag. It’s on a private road. No one drives by except other residents. But we fly it anyway. At my home in Vegas, I am looking for the proper place to install a flag. I tried on the palm tree out front a couple of times, but the flag holder keeps falling out. I think I found a suitable place and will do it when I get home.

I have a friend who emigrated here from Canada. He is the biggest flag-waver I know. He made a flag pole for his golf cart. He made some more for some others, including me, and I fly the flag on my golf cart. I take it down sometimes and put the Cubs W flag up. No one knows the W flag, but I get compliments on the American one.

“Good to see someone flying the flag.”, people will say.

Bari Weiss had a nice column about America. Turns out, Ben Franklin created the first meme. Maybe Franklin invented the internet and not Al Gore. He knew how to take stuff viral anyway.

In another FP column, a woman who was raised as a socialist progressive talked about her personal evolution and relationship to the American flag. I am happy she has transformed, and empathetic to her that she didn’t grow up loving her country. We could probably have dinner together, though that is getting harder and harder to do for members of opposite parties. I have a significant number of people I know who have lost friendships and had family members abandon them purely because they are Republicans. Interesting that it rarely goes the other way.

I was playing pickleball the other day and a guy had on a t-shirt promoting ranked choice voting. I said nothing. No one said anything. I don’t think if I had a “Don’t Tread on Me” or a MAGA hat on, I would get the same reception.

Despite all our imperfections in America, people are still trying to get here. There are no problems with Chinese borders because no one wants to emigrate there. No one is emigrating to North Korea or Vietnam. No one is banging the door to get into Russia. Back in the 1970s, a bunch of Black activists decided they would go back to Africa. They came back to America. Even supposed utopias like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark do not have a lot of immigration.

Only Muslims are leaving their countries for Europe now.

I think there are a few concepts to remember about America if you are on the left, or if you are a foreigner trying to understand it. Maybe the first thing you should read is Alexis de Tocqueville. He was a European trying to understand the new nation. He got it and had high hopes for France, but they were dashed by the Jacobins.

Don’t have time? Here are some broad points.

First, in the preamble to the US Constitution, the first thing it states is, “In order to form a more perfect union”. The US isn’t perfect. It never will be perfect. It wasn’t meant to be perfect. It’s manmade, so it can’t be perfect. It wasn’t perfect at the beginning, and it won’t be perfect a million years from now.

But, it is the best country in the world if you want a chance.

I think it’s important to note that we read the words exactly at our country’s founding. The Federalist Papers do a great job of explaining. Later on, people tried to perfect the imperfect. Woodrow Wilson changed the 17th Amendment, leading to popular votes for Senate seats. That’s led to the bastardized Congress we have now. How different would the legislative bodies be if the Senate were elected by state legislatures as originally intended? I think it would work as intended. The Senate would work as the “cooling saucer” if it worried more about the states rather than the popular vote in the states.

FDR instituted the New Deal. Today, it’s become our tyrannical bureaucracy. We also have the problem of Social Security.

LBJ initiated the trillion-dollar failure known as “The War on Poverty.” It became a war for government money and NGOs. Bloodsuckers and leeches were fed. People were still impoverished. He gave us the wonderful problem of Medicaid and Medicare. Socialized medicine sucks.

It’s also important to note that the US has not been colonial like the European or Asian powers.

We came as liberators in WW1 and WW2. Not conquerors.

We fought one of the bloodiest wars in history to end slavery and free people in human history. Prior to that war, it was the Democrats who embraced slavery and wanted to keep it. Post-war, it was the Democrats who instituted Jim Crow. Slavery was our original sin at our founding. We bled for it.

Even in the Korean War and Vietnam War, we came as liberators. It was a Democrat, John Kennedy that got us into Vietnam and LBJ expanded it. Nixon got us out. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in Vietnam. I know people who escaped North Korea. They love the fact that they are in the US now. If you see the videos of people who escaped Vietnam, it is heartbreaking. Given a choice between life and death, they chose life. My friend

Brian Lund

has blogged about his wife’s family’s journey. Incredible.

Chat up an older Vietnamese person who came over at the end of the war and see what they tell you. The church I grew up in sponsored a family. They had nothing. No clothes. Nothing. If they had stayed in Vietnam, they all would have been murdered by the communist government.

When the US engages in regime change we screw up. That’s not an American problem as much as it is an intelligence community problem.

What’s hilarious to me is that Thomas Jefferson started the Democratic Party. Yes, he owned slaves, so Democrats come by that sin honestly. But, Jefferson was for decentralization and small government. Democrats are not.

The culture of today’s Democratic Party is big government and centralization. Big programs. Taxing continuously, on everything. Redistribution of those tax dollars, which winds up going to their cronies, and doesn’t solve the issues they claim to solve.

“We are from the government, and we are here to help.” Reagan’s satirical statement on Democrats and the worst words someone can hear when they are in trouble. If you didn’t think it was true, ask the people in Hawaii, Ohio, North Carolina, and Los Angeles how well the government has worked to solve their disaster problems.

Virtually every major city has been ruled by Democrats for generations. Sort of like monarchies. Our cities today are basket cases where they used to be amazing. They can be amazing again, but one party has to get out of the way.

The Republican Party started in the 1850s. It was formed out of failure. Lincoln was truly the first standard bearer, and while Lincoln was heroic, he had his faults. He suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and other liberties. Lincoln was not perfect, but after reading the book Grant by Ron Chernow, you could imagine what a post-Civil War America would have looked like if he had not been assassinated.

Republicans are far from perfect. Far from it.

But, they are the two parties we have, and because of inertia, network effects, and other forces, it is incredibly hard to change. Sisyphus would have an easier time.

But you can change the parties. We have witnessed that change in our lifetimes. Democrats used to be the party of the little guy, the small businessman fighting corporate power, and today they are led by the far, far left who, even if they aren’t outright Marxist, believe government should be involved in everything, and solve every problem. It is okay to be a Marxist/Communist/Socialist in today’s Democratic Party, and you will get leadership, respect, votes, and power. Scoop Jackson and Daniel Monihan are rolling in their graves.

We have also witnessed the change in the Republican Party. It used to be the corporate/country club party. Today, it is definitely not that. It is increasingly ethnic. The corporations have gone Democratic. It is the party of independent businesses, entrepreneurs, and the only place where small-government people have a home where they can get stuff done.

Libertarians are like toddlers. They whine, scream, and cry to get attention, but they have no power to do anything and no hard centering ideas. They are also not strategic at all. They should be ignored and put at the kids’ table.

Elon and others hate the big, beautiful bill. It will be signed today. They are directionally correct. It’s not the “small government bill” people wanted. But, in its defense, it’s a start. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and taking back our Republic and instituting what the Founders envisioned will take years. There is a lot to unwind.

The US is not about perfection, but about “more perfect”. The great news about the bill is that it further exposes Congressional members. Primary the ones that are for the status quo. Primary the ones that pay lip service to the deficit and do nothing about it. Primary the ones that are for big government. Elon and others with his beliefs can put money behind candidates and run them in Republican primaries.

Competition is good! It makes you sharper.

Bill Ayers offers the blueprint for Elon. He is a despicable man. But, he and his peons infiltrated the Democratic Party and changed it to what it is. They infiltrated our institutions and turned them into what they are. It took them a generation.

People like Elon have been coming here forever. People say we are a nation of immigrants, but that isn’t true. We were settled before immigrants decided they could take the risk to come. But, boy, aren’t we glad they came? Aren’t we glad we have the culture that lets them grab opportunities and go for them?

Lots of people have emigrated here. Below is a photo of my great-grandmother, Jennie Berg, that I grabbed off of Ancestry.com. I never met her or her husband. She came over from Norway in the early 1900s. I read parts of her journal about the trip. They left Norway, and a lot of people were there to see them off. Back then, it was doubtful that anyone would see each other again. Many tears. But my great-grandmother wrote that she was not sad in the least. She was happy to leave. She was incredibly hopeful to come to America. She met a man of German descent, and her name became Jennie Berg Merz. His family came over with the rest of the German migration in the late 1800s. She had two children, who had children, who had children. It’s the great American story. No doubt, your family has a similar story.

People who come here still have the same hopes and dreams today.

Fly the flag. It’s a great country. Best country in human history. Happy 4th. Celebrate with pomp and circumstance just like Adams and Jefferson said you should.