Opinion

Sorry Folks, Demagogue Donald Is No Ronald Reagan

Alan Keyes Former Assistant Secretary of State
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One of the reasons I admired Ronald Reagan is that he opposed communism, but he didn’t fear it. So, when he called us to stand against it, he didn’t simply rely on a litany of the fearsome damage the spread of communism had inflicted or would inflict upon us. Instead he pointed to the good fruits of our way of life and the great promise it held out to us and all humanity. He called us to defend that promise, and help extend it to people everywhere.

I think this is why, no matter how challenging the battle seemed, Reagan appeared in the end to be decisively undaunted and optimistic. He didn’t promise us victory because we were too powerful to lose. Rather, he helped us keep faith with the promise that makes us too good to lose.

Unlike Obama, or even most of the current Justices of the Supreme Court, Reagan was not too proud to acknowledge that our nation’s promise depended on God. He didn’t choke on the name of our Creator, or deny the reality of His authority in human affairs. Along with justice and mercy, Reagan accepted our national vocation to walk humbly with God. He knew that the motto, “In God We trust,” is the deep vein of pure confidence from which we mine our courage, and from the ore produce the currency of good faith that gives us the strength we need to substantiate our hopes.

Though he moved and inspired us as a people, Reagan was no rabblerousing demagogue. He spoke from America’s decent conscience to America’s decent heart. Like Abraham Lincoln in his day, Reagan called us to stand “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” This sense of confidence, derived from righteous purpose, is what gave him the steady will to act with forcefulness to defend people everywhere who are willing to be our friends in the cause of liberty. But it also gave him the steady judgment to negotiate with its enemies, when he had good reason to believe that doing so would help people they held in bondage find a peaceful path to rightful liberty.

Working for Ronald Reagan I was never called upon to act from fearful hatred or ill will. I was always challenged to act from love of justice, God and the liberty wherewith He makes us free. Perhaps that experience is what makes me so impatient with the elitist faction’s God contemning, deeply anti-American political sham; and why everything they now produce strikes me as a coldly calculated, transparently deceptive fraud.

I have tried to get this across to people I believe are truly loyal to the trust in God on which America was founded, but so far their false hope still triumphs over their undeniable experience. Despite the many egregious confirmations of GOP deceit and betrayal, so many who profess to love God and their country’s rightful liberty continue to give credence to the whited sepulcher the GOP has indisputably become. Too many such people continue willfully to ignore the willful deficiencies in principle, and the fraudulent contrivances that in fact bedevil every political vessel still willing to navigate the murky waters of its greed and power corrupted politics.

Donald Trump is a case in point.

He has lately called attention to the damage being inflicted on the United States by the invasion of our territory being pursued under the guise of “illegal immigration,” with the collaboration of the powers that be in both the Democrat and Republican Parties. A solid majority of Americans has consistently opposed that bi-partisan treachery. Donald Trump is presently surfing a wave of popularity generated by his successful exploitation of their resentment against it.

But Trump accentuates the negative, in a way that allows those who hate America’s constitutional self-government easily to portray its conservative defenders as war mongers and xenophobic haters. Yet, until lately, he has been one of the “made-men” in the elitist faction’s cohort of entrepreneurs and financiers, a darling in fact of its media propagandists. He therefore knows exactly how its propagandists will exploit his boisterous caricature of the anger many Americans justifiably feel against the self-serving elitists who are betraying our country. Yet he’s walking straight into their punch. Purposely or not, he’s setting himself up for a fall that will taint him and demoralize anyone who trusts in him.

As I’ve said before, “I am not convinced by supposedly conservative posturing characterized by personal opposition to some aspect of the elitist faction’s assault on our sovereignty as a free people, but without the common sense reasoning, grounded in America’s principle of justice, that prepares good people to answer false charges of bigotry and hatemongering before they are made. Passionate posturing may be nothing more than the fatally misleading footsteps of a ‘Judas goat.’

[I will be continuing this theme in my column this week at wnd.com, available after 8 PM ET on Friday]