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It's Fourth of July week, and something feels different. Every year when this holiday rolls 'round, we celebrate our American liberties and our divinely-guided history, and gather to watch the fireworks and listen to patriotic songs.
But for about as far back as we can remember, it's seemed that even amidst the parades, there's a bittersweetness - while we still have some liberties, and more than most, nearly all of us can reflect on liberties we used to have but have now lost, from the trivial to the profound. Do you remember Fourth of July skyrockets as a kid? Most modern American kids will never light a bottle rocket or cherry bomb - they're illegal for the majority of the population. And so on.
That hasn't changed, yet something has. For the first time in a long time, Americans are feeling optimistic about the future of the next generation. No doubt this is largely driven by the fact that our unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in the 21st century, but there's more to it than that.
In a word, as the New York Post reported: "The Left needs to face reality: Trump is winning."
One of Mr. Trump's more memorably unique campaign lines was:
We're going to win so much. You're going to get tired of winning. you’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don't win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You're gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning.’
Has there ever been a Presidential candidate, much less an elected President, who could mangle the English language so badly while at the same time getting across a point that every single listener understood? Taken by itself, this quote is priceless, but it makes even more sense combined with what he said just before:
When we were all younger -- many of you are my age and many of you are younger -- but when we were all younger we didn't lose so much, right? We don't win anymore. As a country, we don't win.
Mr. Trump was speaking about America, but he could have been speaking about conservatism as a movement. Through the entire existence of Scragged, we've observed and argued in frustration that we don't know how to actually win anything anymore - the best we've been able to do is to, occasionally, not lose. When Gov. Scott Walker beat back the Wisconsin public-sector unions, that was the first substantive offensive victory in many decades.
Today, as grand as Gov. Walker's accomplishment was, Mr. Trump dwarfs it just about every day. The lefty rags we read fill us with pleasure and glee as they weep and wail over how our President is doing so many horrible things that they can't possibly keep up with them all, much less protest or stop them. Of course, from our perspective, their litany of woes is our honor roll of victories.
And, again for the first time in forever, we can se the potential of even more transformative victories on the horizon. There's no guarantee that the judicial depravities of Roe v. Wade (abortion) and Obergefell v. Hodges (homosexual "marriage") will be reversed - but for the first time since either took place, we can see a clear potential path to this taking place.
The Democrats have been lavishly funded by forcibly-extracted union dues for many lifetimes, while generation after generation of Republican "leaders" doesn't even attempt to do anything about it. At a stroke, Mr. Trump's Supreme Court appointee rips this bottomless golden vial from the lips of corrupt union pols with Janus v. AFSCME.
We've been technically at war with North Korea since Mr. Eisenhower was in uniform, with the Norks all the while accumulating deadlier weapons - and only now is it even plausible that this risky situation might possibly be improved. Again, no guarantees, but not pipe-dreams either.
Do we have problems? Sure we do - we have a treasonous fifth-column Left that hates historical American values. Their anti-American message is fervently supported by most of the media, educational system, and popular culture, which is close to taking over one of our two political parties. Yet their frothing insanity is boiling over so publicly that even longtime leftist stalwarts like the LA Times can't help but warn of a pro-Republican backlash. The much-vaunted "blue wave" this fall is now receding.
Most of all, the pending replacement of Justice Anthony Kennedy with a rock-ribbed conservative justice will help on all fronts. The Democrats and the Left will scream, froth, and carry "The End is Nigh" placards - to no avail, displaying both their extremism and their impotence. The appointed justice will, like Neil Gorsuch, be of such stellar credentials that opposition can be cast as nothing less than rank bigotry - particularly if the appointee is the devoutly Catholic lady Amy Coney Barrett, whose previous judicial appointment dragged Democrat anti-faith bigotry in front of the cameras for all to see.
The religious liberty that was the hallmark of America's founding, if not its very purpose, is finally up out of a defensive crouch and forcing back the forces of secular bigotry. And in so doing, the rest of our First Amendment freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, are joining on the march.
This Fourth, for the first time in many a year, our liberties are... just about where they were last year, all things considered. More importantly, we can readily foresee how next year's Fourth might find us with more freedom, and those more secure, than they are today.
And that's worth celebrating!