David Warren's perspective on the election and irrevocable acts

David Warren lives in Ottawa.

As I have quoted in the past, let me quote again, the profound words of the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, replying to the central lie in Marxism, which remains the central post-modern or post-Christian lie: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged."

A great danger in democratic politics comes with just this denial. We are tempted to think that just by voting for a demagogue, a charlatan -- for any politician who tells us cynically only what we want to hear -- we can change the facts of nature.

We think that we can "make the rich pay," or otherwise transfer our personal responsibilities to the Nanny State. By some mysterious "social contract," we transfer to politicians the responsibility for what we have ourselves decided. And in due course, we may punish them, for what we got wrong.

I invite any reader with the stomach for it to consider the incredible demonization of the outgoing U.S. president, which was used in turn to secure the election of the incoming one. George W. Bush, from the balance of evidence a decent man with an honest view of his own limitations, served his country as well as he knew how. He has been made a scapegoat as if he were personally liable for everything that went wrong on his watch. A true scapegoat: for in the end he is blamed even for what was done to him.

John McCain is perhaps lucky to escape that fate. For the same forces in contemporary North American society would turn against him as turned against Mr. Bush -- the vicious machinery of recrimination by which "progressive forces" make their advance.

The president-elect may seem luckier, still, for he has an articulate gift for deflecting his own failures of judgment, and for finding plausible scapegoats external to himself.

Watch for this in the trials that will soon beset him.

Yet also, he professes to be Christian. So pray for him, that he will find the courage, perspicacity and prudence that come with the remembrance of our Lord.

The rebuilding effort by the Republican opposition will also need prayers.

Every attempt to disown "conservative principles" -- the principles not only of the free marketplace, but of moral absolutes and human responsibility -- will be a furthersetback. The abandonment of the specifically Christian heritage on which America was built can only contribute to her further destruction.

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