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THE 2020 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: A SEMINAL MOMENT IN WESTERN HISTORY

By Dr. Hanan Shai
BESA [2]

President Donald Trump’s declaration in his Mount Rushmore speech of his
intention to defend the traditional values of the United States, and Joe
Biden’s declaration (backed by Bernie Sanders) of his intention to bring
about a transformation of the United States, indicate that the 2020
elections will not be, as in the past, a democratic contest between two
personalities and parties but a fateful contest between cultures: the
Hebrew-biblical cultural of freedom from which the Anglo-Saxon democracies
derived their values versus the Hellenistic culture of freedom from which
the European democracies derived theirs.

There is a fundamental difference between the values of the two ancient
cultures that formed the crucible of the modern West. The values of the
Hebrew-biblical culture were derived from universal logic, the laws of
which constitute an absolute and eternal truth, and among which harmony and
coherence exists that is designed to foster a similar harmony (social
justice) among human beings.

The values of the Hellenistic culture, by contrast, were derived from human
logic, which asserts that humanity is the standard that determines good and
evil, there is no external standard for the moral judgment of human acts,
and certain ideas exist that constitute an absolute truth that only elite
individuals can discover and impose, by means of “keepers,” on a
society that is “chained in a cave.”

European liberalism’s reliance on human logic led to the growth of the
Jacobin, socialist, communist, and Nazi doctrines, which were foisted on
the masses by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Conversely, the
forefathers of American democracy (Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and
Franklin)—some of whom, like John Locke and other British thinkers, read
and spoke Hebrew—adopted the values of Hebrew-biblical morality as the
basis of the values of the United States.

The fact that in American democracy not only science but also humanism is
based on natural law gave rise to longstanding stability and prosperity, as
well as a capability and a principled commitment to volunteer to salvage
and rehabilitate the world from the severe calamities wreaked upon it by
Europe’s utopian thinkers.

Apparently complacent from its victory over Nazism and communism, at the
end of the 20th century American democracy failed to identify the danger of
another erroneous theory that developed in Europe: post-structuralism (or
progressive liberalism).

That theory has penetrated deeply into American culture. Among other
things, it claims that the calamities of the 20th century were caused by a
proliferation of “truths” that emerged in Europe, and that preventing
similar calamities in the future entails denying the existence of a single
foundational truth and dismantling rational subjects that constitute a
source of stability and authority (such as the family, nationalism and the
nation-state, gender, the military, the police, and more) while
“critically” examining their historical development.

This is because the formation and activity of some of these social
frameworks were tied to processes, in some instances very far back in
history, that involved force and oppression.

The murder of George Floyd and the zealous protests that followed revealed
three painful facts about American democracy as it stands today:

It is suffering severe social disharmony that stems from a longstanding
interpretation of the values of freedom and justice that contravenes their
original spirit.
The domains of humanism and society have been completely taken over by the
ideas of progressive liberalism.
There is no intellectual elite that can mobilize to defend the values of
American democracy against the progressive delusion in the manner of the
“conservative” intellectual elite of the previous century that
mobilized to defend the country against the communist delusion.

Only the reestablishment of American democracy in the spirit of the
original values of freedom and justice on which it was based will
rehabilitate the American project and afford it further long-term vitality.
Conversely, an ideological transformation—i.e., a “Europeanization”
of American democracy along the lines that Biden envisages—will put an
end to both the successful American project and the democratic framework
that saved humanity from the chain of calamities wrought by European
liberal thought.

This dangerous transformation could also open the door to the next
“social project”—whose path to the West is already being paved by
China with its “One Belt, One Road” initiative.

What is needed is a massive mobilization that ignores contemporary figures
and problematic personality traits. Preventing the 2020 elections from
becoming a negative seminal moment in the history of Western civilization
is a supreme civilizational imperative.

_ACT For America is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not receive any
government funding or grants so that we are not muzzled from speaking the
truth. We rely on the generosity of patriots who believe in the importance
of our work so we can continue exposing America's enemies foreign or
domestic and mobilizing Americans to stand up and defend freedom. We would
be so grateful for your support. [3]_

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