OPINION:
In “God in the Dock,” C.S. Lewis said, “Put first things first, and second things are thrown in. Put second things first, and you lose both first and second things.” This is why, even though I disagree with many of the speakers at this week’s GOP convention, I have decided to remain a Republican rather than declare myself an independent and take my ball and go home.
At its best, politics should be about first things, not second things. It should be about courage rather than capitulation. It should be more concerned with character than color. It should care more about debate than demeaning those with whom we disagree.
Politics should be about discovering facts rather than protecting opinions. It should be about embracing truth rather than simply being tolerant. The best political agenda should champion unity. Politics does not have to be divisive. It can bring us together rather than push us apart.
If your political party isn’t talking about the unum rather than the pluribus, virtue rather than vengeance and goodness rather than grievance, your party is too easily satisfied with the inferior rather than the best. To paraphrase Lewis again, it’s akin to being content with making “mud pies in the back alley when we could be having a holiday at the beach.”
We are doing our country great harm by enabling people to miss the first things by fixating on the second. As John Richard Neuhaus warned, such ontological dyslexia brings only “profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.”
Mark Galli made the same point in a cover story for Christianity Today a few years ago. “The problem with [identity politics] goes even deeper than disunity,” he said. “It encourages [us] to notice what is passing away while failing to notice the reality of what will last.”
He concluded: “Given human nature, [a fixation on] identity … seems to inevitably degenerate into judgmentalism and division. Identity based on common interest, experience, or [gender and race] cannot enable the one thing that Jesus is most eager for us to do: Come together in unity in him. The fixation on diversity … has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups. … Identity liberalism has failed. … National politics in healthy periods is not about ’differences’; it is about commonality.”
Over the years, the Republican Party has been accused of disenfranchising those who stand on the fringes and in the shadows of American society: the working class, single mothers, Blacks, Hispanics, religious minorities and the like. While the accusation was never true, surely no one with eyes to see and ears to hear right now can continue to make this claim.
If this week’s Republican National Convention proved anything, it is that today’s GOP is a party of the average man and average woman. It’s the party of coal miners, farmers, ranchers, steelworkers, autoworkers, restaurant workers, good teachers, frustrated libertarians and tried-and-true conservatives. As Sen. J.D. Vance said, it is a party of diverse opinions that welcomes a good, robust debate. It’s a party that acknowledges that the United States of America is “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” because God, not man, is our ultimate judge.
Today’s GOP is a party that embraces unity rather than division. It is a party that welcomes every lawful American into the family without hyphenating their identity.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are now the party of the elites, the bourgeois, those who look down their noses at the inferior classes and smirk, “Let the deplorables eat cake.” They are the party of compliance. They are the party of more rules for everyone but themselves. They are the Pharisees. They are the legalists who will take away your liberty under the heavy hand of their ever-expanding laws.
There is a huge difference between the Republican fight for unity and the Democrats’ attempt to force everyone else to comply. One is freedom, while the other is fascism. One celebrates the whole, while the other condemns those who are not part of the group. One has courage, while the other complains. One produces mature adults; the other enables self-absorbed snowflakes.
I am a Republican because I am an adult, not a child. I can handle disagreement without curling up in the fetal position and crying for the state to rescue me. I am a Republican because even though I disagree vehemently with what others said at this week’s convention, I will defend to the death their right to say it.
I am a Republican because I believe in first things, not those that are second.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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