No Matter How the Elections Go, Normal Americans Will Prevail

Townhall 

By the time you read this Wednesday column, you will likely know whether the midterms were a yah, meh, or ugh. If you are not already getting the Kurt Alert early email distribution of my columns, then the polls are certainly closed, and there’s nothing you can do now but have a drink. The only question left is whether you’re celebrating, drowning your sorrows, or you just like drinking.

But no matter how this election went, it’s just the beginning. It’s always just the beginning. There is no end to history. It doesn’t stop because our side wins an election, or our side loses an election. No matter how we did on Tuesday, there’s always 2028. It’s coming whether we like it or not, and that election cycle starts now. This is what happens when elections become existential; they’re always happening.

And they have become existential for reasons I’ve written about before. The fact is that the Democrats and their Republican establishment submissives are outraged that we normal people decided that we would actually presume to exercise the power that we’re supposed to have in what they wrongly call a “democracy” and elected the wrong people. They’ve decided America’s big problem is a system that lets normal people like us do that; in their view, the big flaw of democracy is the democratic part. So, if they get power again with no President Donald Trump in the White House to rein them in, they’re going to do everything they can to keep it forever: lie, cheat, censor, and prosecute. Nothing’s off the table. Just ask any of the cheering sociopaths who still celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk for the crime of exercising his right to free speech.

Maybe we cheated political death in this election cycle, or maybe the forces of evil notched a win. No matter how it turns out, we’re still here, and this is still our country. We normal Americans aren’t going anywhere. In fact, there’s nowhere to go. With only a few exceptions — exceptions that are merely reviled by the globalist borg like Argentina and El Salvador or absolutely hated for the crime of succeeding without submitting like Israel — the world is a battlefield where the old order is desperately clinging to power against the regular people who are sick of their mendacity, sick of their corruption, and sick of their inexplicable arrogance. They currently hold power not because of any great achievement but because they got the credentials and played the game that allowed them to move up in the system. It’s not a system they built. It’s not even a system they can sustain. They are unaccomplished, and they will destroy the very thing that they have inherited control over unless we, the normal people, stop them.

That’s one of the things that has struck me about the people who presume to rule us. I’ve had a chance to meet a lot of people in influential positions, positions of power and prestige. What’s astonishing is how mediocre most of these people are. They’re not geniuses. They’re barely capable of the most basic tasks, and a lot of these swells can’t even pull them off. You’re not being led by betters. You’re being led by mere others. William F. Buckley said it best — he would have rather been governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty and staff of Harvard.

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My new novel, "American Warlord," celebrates normal people. It came out on Election Day, and I don’t know whether that’s auspicious or not, but the message is sure on point. A leftist Democrat government takes over in the United States and promptly drives things into the ground. They can’t run anything because Democrats aren’t about running anything; they’re about accumulating and holding power, and they’re at least good at that. Civilization teeters, then collapses. But the devastation that the Left leaves everywhere is a universal constant. I spent a year living behind what was the Iron Curtain. It’s almost impossible to fully describe the sheer crappiness of socialism. It has a smell, an acrid industrial stink, that was the same whether I was in Ukraine or Kosovo. There’s no worker paradise under the Left, but it’s a pretty good life for the cadre. Normal people dig their ditches.

But normal people don’t want to live like that, especially normal Americans. We are proactive where other cultures are reactive, independent where others are obedient. The characters in my book don’t sit back and wait to be rescued. Vic Kinkaid, the hero of "American Warlord," is just some guy who ran a trucking company. He didn’t attend the Ivy League. His parents weren’t rich. He never listened to NPR. But he is smart and tough when he has to be, and he knows a little about Roman history to boot. As always, it’s people like him who built this country, feed this country, fueled this country, and defended this country at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg and Normandy and Fallujah. And if our country stumbles, and our institutions collapse, it’s going to be people like them who rebuild it.

I wanted to write about Americans in the worst-case scenario and how our national character could bring them through to the other side. So that’s what I did. "American Warlord" is not just action and adventure, though there’s plenty of action and adventure and some humor too. It’s about normal Americans who have that same spirit that 150 years ago drove normal Americans across this continent and turned it into the greatest nation in human history. Look around you. Look at all the businesses and the houses and the churches and the charities. The government didn’t build that. It wasn’t created by some politburo full of commissars. It was normal Americans, organizing themselves, working hard and succeeding — the opposite of the Astroturf model of the Left. There is nothing Americans can’t do. We just need to remember who we are and do it.

However November 3 came out, we still have that going for us. We still have normal Americans who have that American spirit. Oh, it’s not all of us. There are plenty of weirdos, losers, and mutations, as well as bums, chiselers, and scumbags. Like everything, the United States of America has a bell curve, and there’s always going to be some deadweight in the trunk. But we remain a tough people. We remain a patriotic people. We remain overwhelmingly a people who love their families, the Flag, and their faith.

There are always going to be people trying to take our freedom. That’s the way the world works. The fight for freedom doesn’t end. You can never take a knee for long. There are bad people out there, and they want to take your stuff. But there are also good people, and we’re not going to put up with it.

No matter how badly we did in the midterms, we can still fall back on normal Americans. Even if down the road things get as ugly as they get in "American Warlord," we’ve got the greatest people in the world, the hardest working and most industrious, and we will prevail. And even if we did well in the midterms, there’s still another fight just around the corner in 2028. It never stops. You must channel Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and don’t feel noways tired.

So, you can have one day, today, Wednesday. You can have one day to either be bummed out or to celebrate, but when Wednesday turns to Thursday, we’re back on task. We’ve got a country to keep and a civilization to save. It’s all on us, us normal Americans. There’s no one coming to save us, but that’s OK. We’re Americans, and we will save ourselves.