I consider myself a patriot, someone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law and representative government.
Under a President Hillary Clinton, none of those will any longer exist.
Electing Hillary will mean, quite literally, the end of the United States as it was originally designed.
{mosads}The Constitution will be de facto obsolete; the rule of law will be arbitrarily applied dependent upon one’s financial status or political clout; and we will have a government driven by crony capitalism and political expediency, benefitting only the rich and powerful, and one conspicuous for corruption, fraudulent elections and pseudo-representation.
Under Hillary’s open borders policy, the United States of America will be neither United nor America. It will not be a melting pot, a nation guided by the notion of E Pluribus Unum, but a collection of simultaneous arguments, where the only thing we have in common is our differences.
It will mean a president, who is, without any doubt, hopelessly corrupt and a pathological liar.
It will mean that the organs of government will not be used to enforce the law, but to enforce the political whims of Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.
Because, when blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to pursue its policies and remain in power.
For me, one who traveled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Hillary’s approach to government has a familiar ring.
In “Mountain of Crumbs”, a memoir of childhood in the 1960s and 1970s propaganda-soaked Soviet Union, Elena Gorokhova explains the meaning of “vranyo”, the Russian word for “a white lie or half-truth:”
“In Russia we played the ‘vranyo’ game on a daily basis. The government lied to us, we knew they were lying, they knew we knew they were lying, but they kept lying anyway and we pretended to believe them.”
“In practice vranyo provided a coping mechanism for both unbearable tragedies and petty annoyances. Can’t feed your starving children? Tear up a piece of bread to make a mountain of crumbs and declare it an abundance of food.”
Or declare: the failed Obamacare a success, a moribund economy as booming, a world wracked by Islamic terrorism as safer, illegal immigration as beneficial or the Clinton Foundation as honest.
Angelo Cordevilla provides an insightful comment about the 2016 election:
Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of Americans believe that elected and appointed officials — plus the courts, the justice system, business leaders, educators — are leading the country in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good, make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns, because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something like an ungentle enema.
Hillary Clinton represents that wrong direction, the constipated status quo, while Donald Trump provides a laxative.
The United States under Hillary Clinton will become ungovernable. Millions of Americans, those “basket of deplorables,” who are the bedrock of the country will simply “tune out” the federal government and the media.
Without the Constitution, the rule of law, representative government, a recognizable culture or even defined borders, there is no reason to be patriotic and little reason to participate.
America will become Hillary’s dystopia, the ideological and the incompetent leading the unwilling to do the undesirable.
Sellin holds a Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill