The chill of a "Second American Revolution"
Could this Independence Day mark the last peaceful commemoration of our nation's birth?
As we commemorate the 248th birthday of the United States of America, some news items caught my attention and disturbed me greatly because they represent the potential for a violent end to the American experiment as we know it.
The first of these news items revolves around Steve Bannon, who envisions himself, as New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it, “as populism’s grand strategist, its propagandist, its bad-boy visionary.” Bannon uses his podcast, “War Room,” to promote his vision for America, and he labels a significant percentage of his countrymen as enemies. Bannon imagines himself to be the commander of a revolution rather than a commentator or journalist:
I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt. This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.
Throughout his lengthy and disturbing interview with Brooks, Bannon uses the language of revolution and warfare to describe the populist movement’s tactics and objectives. When Brooks offers that the American way has always been to “have a conversation” because “most people are pretty reasonable,” and Bannon isn’t conversing with the other side, Bannon responds, “What do you mean, not conversing with? There’s nothing to talk about.” From his point of view, “on the fundamental direction of the country, we are separate. We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.”
As for the traditional conservatives who once ruled the Republican Party, he said his followers do not see themselves in them. He says to Brooks, who he counts among their number:
They think you’re an exotic animal. You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
He derides traditional conservatives as “an intellectual debating society” and counters with the statement, “this is a street fight. We need to be street fighters.”
Clearly, Bannon fully intends to lead a revolt. His stubbornness and refusal to cooperate with existing institutions, specifically the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, landed him in jail on July 1st for a four-month sentence. He remains unrepentant, declaring that going to prison will make his audience bigger and his message stronger.
That brings me to the next news item of the week, which is tied somewhat to Bannon because the comment was made on his podcast while he was sitting in a jail cell. In an interview conducted on July 2nd during the “War Room” podcast by guest host David Brat, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the long-time conservative think tank, spoke of Project 2025, the extensive policy plan his organization and other allied groups are developing in anticipation of a second Trump presidency.
The plan not only addresses policy proposals but also recommends personnel moves. The plan’s architects believe President Trump was not well served by many of his political appointees, who were seen as “holdovers” from the “establishment wing” of the GOP, or the career federal workforce, which Republicans have always considered hostile to any agenda that is not center-left. Project 2025 calls for the removal of tens of thousands of federal employees and a radical politicization of the federal Civil Service. Groups associated with the project have prepared lists of prospective appointees loyal to the populist movement for key positions in the new Trump administration.
Ominously, the Heritage Foundation is funding a project to identify current government employees who would potentially oppose President Trump:
Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.
With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings. “We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.
What chills me more than the project itself, which Skye Perryman of the group Democracy Forward correctly characterizes as reflective of some of the “darker parts of American history,” is how unbothered the project lead and its sponsors seem to be about revealing their efforts to the public. Their actions bring back memories of McCarthyism and its persecution of left-leaning Americans who were accused of being Communists or harboring Communist sympathies during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. McCarthy’s pursuit of these alleged “traitors’ was aided by chief counsel Roy Cohn, who eventually became the attorney and mentor of a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump.
It took a special counsel for the U.S. Army, attorney Joseph N. Welch, to bring a dramatic end to McCarthy’s witch hunt for “Communists and subversives” throughout American society. Welch’s stirring rebuke of Senator McCarthy during televised hearings after he falsely tried to discredit a young attorney in Welch’s employ echoes throughout history: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Welch’s statement marked McCarthy's end because our leaders used to feel shame when their misdeeds, lies, or lack of character were exposed. However, if I had to pick one word to encapsulate Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, “shameless” is a prime candidate. The outrageousness of their behavior has become as expected as the sunrise, “a feature, not a bug,” as some say.
As Mr. Roberts continued to discuss the substance and purpose of Project 2025, he made a statement to Mr. Brat with decidedly violent overtones:
But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
When asked later to comment on his remarks, Mr. Roberts doubled down, saying they were poised to take power back from “the elites and despotic bureaucrats” through the ballot box and that “Unfortunately, it's the Left that has a long history of violence, so it's up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.”
I am stunned by the audacity of his remarks. It wasn’t the left that resorted to violence on January 6th, 2021, to try and prevent the certification of electors that had characterized the “peaceful transfer of power” from one president to the next since the beginning of the republic. Of course, like all good propagandists, he is attempting to either minimize or redefine the horrific actions of the MAGA movement on that day, and that is unconscionable. I watched the horror unfold on television like so many others, and it is insulting to our intelligence and sense of morality to wave away what happened on that day. As a military veteran who took pride in highlighting how the lust for power didn’t hold our nation captive, it made me angry, and it angers me to this day what they took away from us.
Moreover, during my three years as a political appointee in the Bush administration, I found the “elites and despotic bureaucrats” in the career federal workforce to be hard-working, ethical, and patriotic men and women who took pride in their work and the expertise they had amassed during their careers in public service. Perhaps more importantly, they were my friends and neighbors with whom I interacted at our children’s schools, the local ball fields, the grocery store, or church on Sundays. Despite the skepticism of many of my fellow political appointees, I embraced the talents and experience of the federal civil servants, and we accomplished good things in service to the public. I would take them over these posturing ideologues who denigrate them any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
What Project 2025 proposes to do to the federal Civil Service is a return to the spoils system where federal positions were awarded based on loyalty to an individual or ideology over the Constitution, which all federal employees swear to uphold over the whims of one person or a group of people. Not only did the spoils system increase the likelihood of corruption since someone could use money or favors to win their way into a position rather than the skills the position required, but when the administration changed hands, a new group of spoils beneficiaries would come in, and what little expertise was gained would be lost. That is why the civil service was reformed in the late 19th century with the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883, and it is intended to be a long-term cadre of skilled professionals rather than a temporary political workforce.
Incidentally, that is also why Congress delegates the implementation of laws to the executive branch, specifically the federal agencies. Legislators cannot be experts in every discipline, and the agencies understand how to achieve the objectives of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. Their purposes are practically written in the constitutional designations and duties of the branches of government; Congress makes laws, and the executive branch executes them. The former is a “what” function, and the latter a “how” function. The recent Supreme Court ruling to effectively remove the discretion from federal agencies on how to execute laws means that Congress must know the details and nuances of every topic and write every possible action necessary to implement the law directly into the legislation. I’m not an attorney or a judge, but that is nonsensical, horrible public administration, and reflective of the triumph of ideology over common sense. But that is a topic for another discussion.
One can only conclude that these things don’t matter to the populist elites or those who follow them. Their agenda is more about reordering government to take power, the consequences of which I believe few people understand or would appreciate. The influential people engineering this “revolution” have the means and the knowledge to insulate themselves from such consequences. However, the people they’ve persuaded to join their side don’t have that luxury and are in for a rude awakening once their vision for governance is realized.
So what are we to make of this second, bloodless American Revolution? Will this new declaration be celebrated like the first, “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more,” as founder John Adams described in a letter to his wife, Abigail? As this new declaration is decidedly exclusive, with most Americans on the outside because they’ve been labeled as enemies rather than fellow citizens, I don’t expect much celebration should it come to pass.
We will face a time when this proposed revolution is before us because I believe the Democratic Party, the only political party dedicated to a secular, pluralistic republic where the nation finds strength in diversity and unity in a shared commitment to freedom and equality for everyone, is in a state of internal crisis. At the same time, the Republicans are united, regardless of the fact their unity came about as the result of a hostile takeover, the purging of “infidels,” and the fear of many who remain. Moreover, the adoption of this “revolution” by a significant segment of American evangelicals brings to the movement the fervor and dogma of religiosity. It’s no accident that every one of their mass events, from Trump rallies to the insurrectionist mob on January 6th, includes prayers, praise songs, Christian flags, signs proclaiming God and Jesus’s favor, and the expressive emotions of a worship service. Their actions violate the first two of the Ten Commandments, which they want to force into the public square. However, they effectively won the hearts and minds of millions tired of waiting on God to “take back America” and, like the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, believe they must take matters into their own hands. Mr. Roberts is right when he says, “Our side is winning.”
Before I go any further, I want to clarify that my love of America can withstand honest scrutiny, and my patriotism is beyond reproach. My father served for over two decades in the U.S. military, and I served for nearly 10 years as an air intelligence officer during the Cold War. Numerous relatives also dedicated themselves to service in America’s armed forces. I was a political appointee to a conservative president’s administration, and I worked to defend America against terrorism in the wake of 9/11. We served even though Black Americans were not accorded their rights as citizens and human beings for a significant portion of my father’s life and the lives of the family elders. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described this dichotomy well:
There is a paradox for this country and a contradiction of this country and we still haven’t resolved it... but what I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them, and that’s our legacy.
I still fly the American flag on Independence Day. I stand and salute or hold my hand to my heart when the National Anthem is played, even though I know its author was a racist who believed Blacks were “a distinct and inferior race” and that the song became the nation’s official anthem at the insistence of organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who were instrumental in whitewashing the fact that the Confederacy was a slave republic and its only reason for existence and the only reason they fought was to preserve white supremacy and expand the institution of Black chattel slavery.
“The elevation of the banner from popular song to official national anthem was a neo-Confederate political victory, and it was celebrated as such,” [author Jefferson] Morley wrote. “When supporters threw a victory parade in Baltimore in June 1931, the march was led by a color guard hoisting the Confederate flag.”
Despite its failings and vacillation regarding honestly facing its history and seeking true and lasting reconciliation with those it has wronged, I love what this nation aspires to be, and it has been good to my family and me. There is nowhere else I would rather be.
That said, as I have grown and matured, I’ve come to realize that, as a Christian, I am called to live solely for Jesus, and it is in His Kingdom where my citizenship resides, as Paul emphatically wrote to the church in Philippi:
For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. (Philippians 3:18-21)
Jesus, amid Roman occupation and oppression, Jewish capitulation, and Israel’s cry for a conquering Messiah, denied the people’s thirst for revolution and instead declared, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36).
Indeed, the last temptation of Jesus by Satan was to offer Him the kingdoms of this world and demand that Jesus worship him. He rejected Satan, who He called “the ruler of this world” (John 14:30), saying. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’” (Matthew 4:10).
However, we are not without purpose in this land. Paul tells us, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). He also reveals that “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (Acts 17:26).
We are created to do good works that He has already equipped us to do with the talents, abilities, and passions He has given us, and He has selected the time and place in which we are to perform those good works. Like an ambassador to a foreign land, He has given us an assignment, and we are to represent Him in everything we do.
However, those good works do not include seeking dominion over territory and people, bringing them to their knees, and declaring them under the rule of Jesus Christ. The “Christian nation” sought by the current populist movement is nothing of the kind. Christopher Haylett, whose writings I recently had the pleasure of discovering, put it best:
Do you want a Christian Nation? Believe it or not, I do. And I have it. If you're a Christian, you are already part of a Christian nation. It is called the Church. It is a nation without borders, of many cultures, with every tongue, tribe, and nation to be represented. It is the true melting pot of the World. The Church is a Heavenly nation extending across human borders; we must not trade it in priority for flawed human institutions of man-made Nation States.
On this 248th Independence Day, the Lord wants His people to know that our true freedom is not found in a man-made creed, however noble and aspirational it may be, nor in applying force to compel “right” behavior. Our freedom is from sin, death, and the judgment we deserve, which Christ freely endured for us.
We celebrate our freedom in Christ not by idolizing people or ideologies but by doing what the Lord requires of us, “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). We celebrate our freedom in Christ not by the imposition of our will on others but by loving our neighbor as ourselves, regardless of where they are, because we were also shown great love right where we were: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8)