Why This Election Truly and Deeply Matters

I have been in Texas for a couple of days now and it is odd.  I am in Houston and environs and except for a few billboards desperately trying to make Talarico look normal, you could not tell an election is just days away.  It stands in sharp contrast to back home in Tennessee where yards signs are more common than litter.  I wish I could opine that such meant Paxton was a forgone conclusion, but I do not have enough data to actually formulate an opinion, I just know it is quite odd.  It also worries me a bit as this election matters – a lot.

Glenn Reynolds’ NYPost column last Friday looked at the rise of left-wing violence and concluded:

The roots of modern leftism are planted deep in the French Revolution — which produced the Terror, the first true police state, and eventually a military dictatorship and wars that killed millions — and in Karl Marx, who together with Friedrich Engels (neither of whom ever held a real job) called for a bloody revolution ending in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It’s all about envy, and about a desire for power and importance on the part of people who haven’t risen as high in existing society as they think they deserve.

These feelings of inadequacy and envy get expressed as violence.

We need to get them therapy instead.

I wish we could, but I think that there are forces at play that would use this lack of mental balance to true political advantage.  The Free Press this morning carries a piece by Nora Bussigny on the current happenings in France:

You might think that Saturday’s chaos was orchestrated by the same students who started the protests. But you would be wrong. The October 17 protests—and the ones planned for this coming weekend—were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists. They share a precise project: the rejection of France’s democratic institutions, and a desire to destabilize those institutions and cause the Republic to topple.

This coalition may sound familiar to readers across the West. The red-green alliance—the convergence of radical leftists with political Islamists, brought together by their shared opposition to Western values and institutions—has become increasingly difficult to ignore,….

Bussigny continues by pointing out examples in Europe, yet I cannot help but reflect on the fact that we, here in the US,  have a current election featuring any number of very left-wing candidates who are clearly Islamic.  It is a fact – spare me the charges of Islamophobia.  I am not talking about all Islamic people.

Bussigny discusses how Islamic movements infiltrated and supported the more innocent school protesters from the beginning, apparently intending to eventually commandeer the protests to accomplish no less than “destabilize those institutions and cause the Republic to topple.”  Given that the Islamic far leftists standing in this election have proposals that would likewise undo our baseline institutions – one has to see the connection.

Last week I noted that we are not France.  Things will not proceed in this nation like they are there.  That remains true, but that does not mean the same forces are not aligning for the same purpose, even if taking a different path.

Mid-term elections, especially those for the House, tend to be local in nature.  But I am not sure we can afford that right now.  There is clearly a national trend if not underway, in the offing.  A trend intended to send us careening in the same political direction as France.

This election matters more than most mid-terms.  Vote like America depends on it.  It just might.