Can America survive without faith in its institutions?

What is a nation? And what does it take to destroy it?

The 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan famously defined it not as a physical entity but as a spiritual one.

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past; the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received. Messieurs, man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions.

I agree. But my agreement disturbs me more than I want to admit. A spiritual entity is much more fragile than a physical one. It can be destroyed much more easily because it depends on faith. And faith can be shaken. It can even be destroyed. And worst of all, it’s most susceptible not to outside enemies but to enemies within.

In what did we have faith here in America?

First was surely our Constitution. It represented the constraints on our country that make us a good and just republic, which in turn shows us to be a good and just people, for how could one exist without the other?

What we see now is the Department of Justice using every legal device, no matter how questionable, no matter how unconstitutional, to destroy those officials see as inimical to their chosen ideology. Even the right to a speedy trial is being ignored for those who entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many have been in prison for longer than the sentences they would receive from biased courts in Washington, D.C.

Most crucial of all was our faith in our elections. The 2020 presidential election came and was undermined by massive and manifest fraud.

In state after state, we saw Donald Trump lead until, in the dead of night, the electoral count was simultaneously halted in exclusively Democrat-controlled counties in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, only to be followed by tens of thousands of newfound votes for a senile candidate who campaigned from his basement. We were told to believe that this man received, ultimately, an unprecedented 81 million votes.

We were once allowed to see all sides. Now, we need to be protected from “disinformation” or “misinformation,” as defined by the people who engineered a fraudulent election and corrupted our institutions.

The fraud was clearly a matter of pride for many: The perpetrators had no hesitation in boasting about the operation in Time magazine. In 2020, we witnessed an electoral process that can only be claimed to be fair by those who assert that mail-in ballots, without any independent validation, are justified by unconstrained expansion of voter access. Yet we know they are lying, for this depends on two highly questionable assumptions. One is that access to the voting process is a good in itself. The other is that there is no impetus toward fraud in the electoral process.

We know neither of those assumptions are true. Not everyone cares enough about elections to want to participate in them. It is those who have an investment in being elected who really care about participation. And these are the very people who have the most reason to want to commit fraud, which requires that voting be unconstrained by checks on validity.

Put the two together — those who don’t care and those who want to win at any cost — and you have the perfect recipe for stolen elections. Those who don’t care to vote can be “voted” willy-nilly, and no one will know, for those whose ballots are pilfered just don’t care.

All of this leaves us asking ourselves a terrible question: How many of our elected representatives were actually fairly elected?

Third was faith in the probity of our judicial system. We used to be able to go into our courts believing they would deal with any issue before them justly and fairly, with total impartiality, no matter with whom or what they were dealing.

Instead, the judicial system rejected all but a tiny minority of attempts to bring evidence of fraud before it, using any and all judicial technicalities to do so. The final blow was when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas lawsuit against states that had violated their own electoral laws on the ridiculous ground of “standing.” Yet in a federal system, what recourse does a state have when another state perverts an election that affects all states? If no state has standing to make such a claim, who does?

“No one” must clearly be the Supreme Court’s reply.

Fourth was faith in our federal institutions. Yet we remember how the Internal Revenue Service was weaponized against Tea Party groups in 2012, how the intelligence community was used to spread fraudulent information about Trump, and how the FBI suppressed evidence of the Bidens’ corruption, all the while giving Hillary Clinton a pass.

The investigations the Justice Department supposedly undertook to probe misbehavior by these institutions and individuals, both under Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, turned out to be meaningless shams. No significant player was indicted. Barr even gratuitously went out of his way to dismiss election fraud claims when he had clearly never looked into them.

Fifth was the honesty and impartiality of our media. No one sneered when Walter Cronkite finished his broadcasts with, “That’s the way it is!” Now, they would roll their eyes.

We all know that the American media is functionally an organ of the Democratic Party. In a true democracy, we would not have almost every media outlet insisting in unison that every assertion of fraud in the 2020 election is just part of the “Big Lie.” They would not require their reporters to write about claims of election fraud modified by the words “unfounded,” “false,” or “debunked.”

Sixth, as we see here, was truth. A small word, but a crucial one.

We were once allowed to see all sides. We were once given the facts and allowed to choose those that seemed to us to represent the truth. Now, we are told we should be protected from “disinformation” or “misinformation,” as defined by the very people who engineered a fraudulent election and corrupted our institutions. Add to this mix an ideology that violates all common sense, where men can be women on a whim and women men, and what truth do we have left?

Consider what motives there might be for all this, for partisan judges who ignore their oaths to uphold the Constitution, for civil servants who care nothing for the high ideals that they should adhere to, for reporters who have become ideologically captive hacks. Foremost is a profound contempt for the system that gave birth to and nurtured us, accompanied by an exaltation of anything that is not us.

Perversion of our system is a good thing to those who think like this. They despise it. A system so bad cannot, surely, be damaged by abuse of it, can it?

Join this with hatred of a single man, and a conviction that any device, any stratagem, any perversion of the legal system is acceptable to stop him. Constraint is not a word these people know. Nothing else can explain the wildly excessive attempts of those who despise Donald Trump to destroy him. They don’t trust the people. Indeed, they fear them. There is nothing they will not do to stop him. Nothing is too extreme. Nothing.

And what do we have left? A belief in our nation? But that needs faith in its essence, in its spirit. And where is our faith now?