For all of Donald Trump’s real or perceived excesses, eccentricity, chauvinism and prejudices, there is something about Hillary Clinton, something very secular-humanistic, that outrightly makes her an unwise choice for the White House.
It is an open secret that Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly take up and continue to run with the baton of Barack Obama, that outgoing American supremo who in a very unprecedented way has pushed America’s moral borders, failed to secure America’s physical borders, and ratified suicidal religious pluralism in a country that owes its enduring prosperity to its Judeo-Christian Founding Fathers and principles.
Trump, on the other hand, has an unmistakable and irrefutable appreciation of the profundity of America’s foundational Judeo-Christian origins.
{mosads}The 2016 American presidential election is not about Trump gloating a decade ago about groping a woman. Neither is it about Clinton’s cavalier mismanagement of classified emails as secretary of State. The 2016 election is not even about such secondary issues as the economy, foreign policy, immigration control, health insurance or racial disharmony.
At its core, this election is about the all-important battle over the presidential appointment of Supreme Court judges, who wield the power to reprogram the very moral and sociocultural trajectory of the United States of America, doctoring the Constitution in accordance with their own personal spiritual genome and moral convictions — or absence thereof.
America’s future cannot be gambled with because America is the present and the future at a global level. This is undeniably valid regardless of the rapidly growing number of scholars publishing papers and articles proclaiming that we now live in a post-American world, in light of the massive decline in America’s popularity overseas, a weakening economy, and America’s drastic demilitarization and disarmament exercises in recent years.
Some years back, Francis Fukuyama, a Washington-based social thinker and scholar, penned a hit essay titled “The End of History.” Inspired by what philosophers call neo-Hegelian ideology, Fukuyama postulated that civilization as we know it today has culminated from the cumulative ideological contributions of various societies that have taken turns to lead human development over time.
According to Fukuyama, at any given point in time in man’s history, a great nation, or lead society, would propound a “great idea” around which it would establish its ethos, institutions and thrust in driving human development. Eventually another superior nation would emerge and take over the reins to become the new lead society. It is Fukuyama’s thinking that this trend persisted up until the advent of America.
In his classic book, “Carpe Diem, Seize the Day,” Sociology Professor Tony Campolo comments on Fukuyama’s essay in a most articulate manner:
“History unfolded in this way, according to Fukuyama, until America was born. America, he says, marks the end of history because in its institutions and value system the last great idea of the human experiment has been articulated. In America we have found the final expression of the spiritual force of history. Fukuyama tells us that Americans are the people who incarnate the latest and greatest belief system of human civilization. We are the future! Social prophets argue that a hundred years from now democratic capitalism will be alive and well, and universally embraced. The future will be what America is in the present, only more so. Consider the fact that most of the other countries in the world have taken to emulating America. The new nations formed out of the Soviet Union for the most part, aspire to our way of life. They are imitating our free-market economy as best they can, and they are trying to figure out how our kind of democracy can work for them.”
Says Barack Obama in his book “The Audacity of Hope”: “America and its Western partners did design the current international system after all; it is our way of doing things-our accounting standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws, our technology, and our popular culture-to which the world has had to adapt over the past fifty years.”
The concern surrounding the 2016 election is that a staggering number of Americans do not realize what is at stake. They do not realize that their way of life is at stake, their freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of association — not to mention the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
What Americans need desperately is wisdom, because wisdom is the principal thing. The challenge with wisdom is that wisdom has too often been portrayed or construed as elusive. This, however, is not the case. As it is written in Proverbs: “Wisdom shouts from the street. She cries out in the public square. She calls to the crowds along the main street, to those gathered in front of the city gate.”
The wisdom that Americans need is to vote bearing in mind that “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34)
Humphrey Zinyuke is author of “Sex, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness: Wisdom for America’s New Sexual Order.”
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.