Articles by Julio M. Shiling

The Poison of Identity Politics.

If the task is to lessen racial prejudices and alleviate disheartening statistics of poverty, income, fatherless families and crime within black American communities, the focus needs to change.

Francis Key Scott, the author of the poem used as the lyrics for the national anthem of the United States, “The Star-Spangled Banner”, would be appalled to hear how this patriotic song depicting the success of the United States during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812, was demoted recently in the Michigan State capitol before the Electoral College proceedings.

The anthem as identity politics

The Michigan State Senate found it fitting to play, both the country’s national anthem and the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice”. The notion of equating these two anthems, debases many principles, chiefly being the doctrine of equality. 

 

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Fraud as a New Electoral Modus Operandi.

Civility, law and order, and the legitimation that honest elections bestow, has now been dealt a massive blow with the malfeasance witnessed here.

The Trump administration, the Republican Party, and private institutions and individuals have sought relief from the courts to impune the gross electoral irregularities of the 2020 election in at least six key battleground states. These challenges have, for the most part, not achieved the desired results of the petitioners. Democrats, their mass and social media operatives, the techno tyrants, and some never-Trump Republicans have claimed victory. Regarding the argument that in the judicial realm, these petitions have been dismal for the Trump team, this is clearly the case. However, on the more paramount question of the systemic electoral anomalies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, the charges of fraud have not been disproven or debunked. 

 

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New Right or Trumpism?
A New Right had been forming before, and increasingly since 2016. Broadly speaking, it is soundly Conservative with Classical Liberal undertones in the economic sphere.

“Trumpism” is a concept commonly being tossed around these days. A “new” Republican Party of some sort is generally what this idea relates to, one which adheres to the policies and persona of Donald J. Trump. This characterization seeking to encapsulate the popular following that the 45th president enjoys, is misplaced and a flawed simplification of a much greater occurrence.

Within America, a sociopolitical paradigm shift has been under way. It challenges a prevailing left-wing, elitist and globalist worldview. This alien ideological superstructure contradicts America’s foundational principles. What we are witnessing is the consolidation of a major mass, popular movement.   

Thomas Kuhn in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), put forth the notion of paradigm shifts. The American philosopher and physicist highlighted, conceptually, that consummate alteration in the patterns, understandings and practices within a scientific discipline, establishes a change in the operating model. While Kuhn limited his postulation to the natural sciences, the tenet has been accepted and widely referenced within the social and applied sciences as well. Thus, structurally, as far as sociopolitical systems and worldviews go, paradigm shifts have been a historic constant. One of these realignments is taking place in America.  

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Trump, Hamilton and State Legislatures.

Trump, by insisting on going to the courts and, above all, to the state legislatures, to denounce the fraud in these elections with abundant evidence, is defending democratic institutions

Alexander Hamilton never met the Democratic Party of 2020. The seminal measures that this member of the U.S. Founding Fathers promoted for the Constitution in Federalist No. 68, however, seem to have been designed to avoid the very kind of political sleaze and corruption that we have witnessed in the recent presidential election. The political machinery built by Barack Obama, which constructed the Biden/Harris ticket, has put the legitimacy of American democracy at risk. Despite this, Hamilton may have formulated a mechanism to rescue the integrity of the system and, possibly, the Republic.

What did George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury and personal aide in the Revolutionary War (or War of Independence) write in this Federalist essay? Concerned that domestic political corruption or foreign interference could contaminate the nascent nation’s electoral process and “elect” an incompetent, or worse, a malevolent first chief executive, Hamilton structured in this essay, written on March 14, 1788, the moral and philosophical outlines for structuring an instrument that brought together popular sovereignty with the preventive parameters of republican containment. 

 

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