Having been raised a German Baptist, I had earned a PhD in Hypocrisy before I finished High School. That education served me well, both as an observer and practitioner. It has long been said that if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find an idealist. I am not sure this is accurate. In my own case, I suspect if you scratch this cynic, you’ll find a judgmental backslidden Baptist. Still, my own cynicism seems insufficiently developed to keep up with the Republican Party. And there is a fine line between being sinfully judgmental and simply stating the obvious facts. One needn’t be much of a student of history to notice the cult that has become the Republican Party is simply incapable of governing. That party did not bother to have a platform, plan or set of goals: the party merely agreed to whatever Donald “I alone can…” Trump wants on the spur of that moment. This is not how our republic was designed. No one disputes Donald Trump is rude and crude; what we generally agree is wrong with our politics. And yet that formerly grand old party slavishly toes the line in regrettable, thoughtless conformity. One needn’t be much of a Christian to recognize an antichrist. But Republicans seem to be of the opinion an almighty god needs mere mortals to insure the aforementioned’s success. We can only chuckle at the Republican culture wars: Thanks, guys, but god doesn’t need your desperate certainty. In a regular cycle, roughly every 100 years, the populace loses faith in gravity and many other certainties; what has been called an apocalyptic miasma or an extinction panic. We suffer from that mood currently. Despite all the significant evidence to the contrary, about half the population is convinced the handbasket carrying us to hell is insufficient. Our tendency is to cry for a “strong man.” We encourage our readers to read Lewis Lapham’s A Wish for Kings: democracy at bay, published in 1993. While that wish for a strong man is blasphemous to everything we hold dear about our country, the urge is there and undeniable. We prefer our conservatism the old fashioned way. In the words of Michael Oakeshott, “to be conservative […] is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Maintaining our faith rather than surrendering to the cult’s panic is the only way to prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy.