Nobody much speaks for me this election cycle. Democrats believe we can tax our way to prosperity, achieve peace through weakness, and find nirvana by replacing every healthy social institution with a government bureaucracy. Congressional Republicans don’t believe in much of anything. Like a desperate lover in a deteriorating relationship they offer to be whatever we want, apparently oblivious that the problem is that there is no there there any more. John McCain agrees with the left as often as he does the right. He is liable to toss his most fundamental principles to the curb when he gets to hankering for the New York Times to talk nice about him.

A friend, commenting on my complaints, suggested we have entered a political Bermuda Triangle. All the dials are spinning wildly as our guidance systems have gone haywire, leaving many of us disoriented, confused and disheartened. It is an apt description for this cycle.

Two of my once must-read columnists have gone completely round the bend. I used to look forward to Fridays so I could read the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan. The insight, warmth and humanity she brought to bear on every subject she covered was a real treasure. She never reduced the people she wrote about to mere caricatures. But over the last year or so her columns have degenerated badly. They are filled with a hectoring bitterness. Rarely do the characterizations of the people she writes about rise above the level of garish caricature now. I cannot bear to read her at all any more, both because of what she says and the memory of what she was. Tom Roeser thinks she is embittered by her failure to land a spot in the Bush Administration. If so, what a tragedy that her disappointment has become a sort of emotional malignant tumor, steadily eating away at what was best in her.

Then there is Douglas Kmiec, who was a profound Catholic intellectual and constitutional Scholar. He is an occasional contributor to the Chicago Tribune. This year he is enamored of and has endorsed Barack Obama for president. In his latest Tribune column Kmiec describes a meeting Obama held with representatives from various faiths. Kmiec is quite taken with Obama’s respectful approach to religion and his nuanced handling of the abortion issue. But when Obama was in the Illinois state senate he worked to kill the Born Alive Infants Protection Bill. The Democratic nominee believes if a baby survives an abortion attempt the right thing to do is put it on a shelf, ignore its cries, and let it die of shock or starvation. However powerful an anesthetic Obama’s words are to Kmiec’s faculties of reason and logic, the only nuance is in those words; Obama’s policy position is pitilessly absolute.

In his ‘House Divided’ Speech Abraham Lincoln said that the controversies then roiling the nation would not be resolved until a crisis had been reached and passed. We are headed for a crisis that people like me cannot forestall. Following are seven truths that may help us recover our bearings once the crisis has been reached.

1) What you punish you get less of and what you reward you get more of. This is perhaps the most ironclad rule of economics – and life, for that matter. When we punish those who produce goods, jobs and prosperity it will not lower prices. It will raise prices, create shortages and kill both jobs and innovation. However viscerally satisfying the politics of resentment might be, it is the ideal formula for extending widespread misery.

2) You can’t increase circulation to your arm by cutting it off to your leg. You’ll just lose your leg. An economy requires the robust and open flow of goods, services and money to retain vigor. Throughout history wise rulers have understood that trade is the most reliable path to national wealth. Wars were often settled by opening up trade relations, not by shutting them down. Even today, the more restrictive a nation’s trade policies, the feebler its domestic economy.

3) The only thing a command economy is good at is making poverty universal. Whether the utopian totalitarian states of the 20th Century or absolute monarchies of old, the only people to benefit from a captive economy are government officials and their cronies. This is almost as ironclad a rule as #1.

4) We are not the Titans. In the 19th Century man thought he could reverse the course of mighty rivers. Nature was not so pliable. Today Global Warmists are furious because the earth has cooled slightly every year since 1999. The planet just won’t behave like their computer models say it should. The same hubris is at work in both errors. Nature is greater than us. Her elemental power is far more difficult to influence – for good or ill – than we flatter ourselves it is. Even so, man was not made for nature, but nature for man. We should approach it as good stewards with respect and humility, but from that understanding. When superstitious primitives tossed a virgin into the volcano it did not appease any gods; it just killed the virgin. If moderns consign millions to grinding poverty it will not save the planet; it will just consign millions to grinding poverty. Our modern witch doctors have the tools to know better.

5) People do not rally to the call of the uncertain trumpet. We may be the only great power in history in which a substantial portion of the ruling class believes it is prudent to treat our friends with contempt and our enemies with craven servility. Trying to understand a tyrant who threatens to use WMDs is not an act of enlightenment, but an evasion of responsibility. When a tyrant is foolhardy enough to make such a threat the burden falls on him to prove he cannot carry it out. To adopt any other standard is to play Russian Roulette with the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. If we fail to use the power we have with sure resolve it will gravitate into the hands of those that will – and they are terribly unlikely to share our genuine concern that great power be exercised justly.

6) The family is the authentic cradle of freedom. A building is only as strong as the materials with which it is constructed. The family, not the individual is the basic building block of society. The intergenerational bonds forged in healthy families create a love that dramatically transcends self-interest. In fact, it encourages people to sacrifice their own wants and needs for the good of others – others who can offer them no material or sexual benefit. It connects us with the past and commits us to the future even as we act in the present. Maintaining healthy families is not a lifestyle choice; it is the critical ingredient in a society’s survival. The sexual revolution and easy divorce atomized the family, leaving millions of women and children abandoned and in poverty. Our anti-poverty programs have often been moated islands of desperate dependence rather than covered bridges to dignified independence, creating intractably violent ghettoes from which there is little hope of escape. Tradition is not always right, but it is the accumulated deposit of thousands of years of human experience. To dismiss it cavalierly is to invite massive social dysfunctions. Our intentions have been good, but this is what happens when sentiment is divorced from reason and evidence. At the very least we should declare a moratorium on new social experiments until we clean up some of the messes from the old ones. Most of our social errors are not even new. They are just a revisit of errors tried and discredited hundreds or thousands of years ago. Our ignorance of history and culture has robbed us of the power to even be original in our errors.

7) Respect of human rights is the criteria by which a state establishes its legitimacy. Rights are not created by the state. They inhere to the person and precede the existence of the state. The state can grant and revoke entitlements, but it can only acknowledge rights. To the extent it fails to do so it forfeits legitimacy. States may declare some classes of persons sub-human in order to codify the arbitrary denial of their rights. That makes it legal, which is not to be confused with justice. Such a state not only forfeits legitimacy; it embarks upon a course that leads to the rule of raw power. We have become a savagely schizophrenic society. Call a cripple a cripple and you might be indicted for hate speech. But pull the plug on his life support system and you will be hailed as courageously compassionate. In the early 20th Century eugenics was all the rage in the Western World. It reached its horrifying, but logical, end in Nazi Germany. We are still enthusiastic practitioners of eugenics in the west, though we scream in protest if anyone calls it by its proper name. The only institution that had its origins in the eugenics movement that is still prominent is Planned Parenthood, though it goes to great pains to obscure its origins. But a cesspit by any other name would smell the same. Whatever we call it, the logical outcome remains inexorably the same.
Getting these guidance systems back online is what may ultimately get us back out of what we are staggering into.
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Charlie Johnston, a conservative grassroots expert and former radio talk show host is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.