Maple Leaf, graphite on paper. Copyright 1975 by Craig Gallaway. As a graduate student in my mid-twenties, studying art history and theology, I also studied the forms of nature as an artist. In all of this, I saw how careful observation continuously opens up new insights into the deeper order and structure of things. This “critical realist” insight is the bedrock of genuine science. It stands in opposition both to the hyper “objective” claims of Logical Positivism, as well as the reductive “subjective” claims of a great deal of post-modern thought. Things are neither as clear, nor as ambiguous as those false alternatives make them out to be. This is true also of political claims!

Some of our friends and family have seemed incredulous or even hurt at times that Deb and I could vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and then that we have come increasingly to defend Trump and his administration in the four years leading up to the current election of 2020. In 2008 and 2012, Deb and I voted for Barack Obama. We did so on the basis of the best information that we had at the time as to what Obama’s policy positions would be on issues like Christian marriage, abortion (there did not seem to be a clear legislative alternative on the Republican side), social issues (such as race and poverty), and economics (the Bush administration had fouled things up royally by 2008). So how or why have we come to reject the now clarified legacy of Barack Obama, and to defend Donald Trump’s availing goal to “make America great again”?

I think the turn began for us when we saw Barack Obama abandon his commitment to traditional Christian marriage, and embrace the wild and wide-open pan-sexual agenda of gay marriage and transgender activism. We had taken him at his word in 2008 that he believed in traditional marriage, and would protect that tradition, and that he would also protect the civil rights of people with same-sex attraction. But then, not long after his election to a second term, he told the country that an offhand conversation with his teenage daughter had completely upended his former convictions. Henceforward, he would become, along with his Attorney General Eric Holder, a flaming activist for all things LGBTQ. He would force transgender bathrooms and gyms on the nation, and he threatened to withhold federal funds from states that did not comply. We began to see a very different Barack Obama from the one who had traveled to Saddleback Community Church in California in 2008 to make his quasi-religious case for traditional marriage and the family. The grounds for his seismic ideological shift were not convincing.

And then, after Trump was elected in 2016 and began to serve in 2017, we began to see and take note of the horrendously biased treatment that Trump was receiving from the mainstream press, including the papers (New York Times, Washington Post) and the major mainstream news channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR), not to mention most of the cable news networks (MSNBC, CNN, etc.). What we saw week after week and month after month was a continuous stream of one-sided stories claiming to expose Donald Trump’s treasonous and chaotic behavior told by news anchors who clearly hated him, and drawing on sources that were nearly always either leaked anonymously or were former Obama officials. It did not take much critical acumen to recognize that something very partisan and rather clandestine was going on.

And so, we began to look more deeply into the background of the news sources themselves. We began to realize that the major news sources were engaged in their own kind of collusion with the previous administration and its continuing legacy of people in staff positions at a great variety of government agencies. We knew that some would say that we were succumbing to a “conspiracy theory” mentality; and yet something very much like an “administrative state” or a “deep state” was more and more evident just beneath the surface of this great ideological and media collusion against the Trump administration. And so it has proven to be.

Perhaps the most important thing to say about our change of heart is that it has also led to an ongoing and ever deeper investigation on our part into the issues that divide the political parties from each other, issues such as: the environment, immigration, economic policy (foreign and domestic), education, race relations, abortion, the role of the family, and the Bill of Rights, including religious freedom. Looking deeper into the credibility of the news sources also required looking into how these sources handle these issues. We have come more and more to realize that the positions taken up on the left are usually ill-founded as far as factual evidence is concerned, being based more on ideological bias and bald assertion; while Trump’s positions on the same issues are grounded more often in empirical evidence, real results rather than big promises, and on Constitutional principles of freedom and rule of law rather than the kind of governmental force that has become Obama’s true legacy on the Left.

As a result, Deb and I have changed parties as far as presidential politics is concerned. We want to conclude this explanation of our reasons for changing by listing ten political issues that seem pivotal to us (though not at all exhaustive). These are at least some of the policy issues and reasons why in 2020 we support Donald Trump and his administration for four more years, rather than Joe Biden and a return to the Obama style of Left-wing ideological mandates that now fuel the Democratic party. We’ll give these in what we deem a descending order of importance.

10.  The Environment – In order to protect our environment and deal with climate change, Trump advocates innovation in and through the private sector supported by government funding (cf., what he has done with the pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic). This is surely the tried and true path of history and experience (see Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works) as opposed to the Democratic method (such as that used by Gavin Newsome in California) of announcing a government mandate and setting a date for compliance. This also stands in clear opposition to the petulant hubris and overreach of the hyper-bureaucratic Environmental Protection Agency (15,000 employees, average salary $85,000) which has led to a continuous series of successful court cases challenging the enforcement of EPA rules (one size fits all) as though these were laws actually passed by a legislature.

9. The Pandemic – At one point about three months into the Trump administration’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci defended the President’s team and its work, “I don’t know how anyone could have done more than we have done to fight this virus.” During that whole time period, the Trump team members were giving daily TV briefings regarding how they were engaging the private sector to make PPE, build ventilators, create new testing procedures, launch vaccine research, and stay in touch with every state to supply equipment, hospital space, and personnel as needed. All of this stands factually and empirically against Joe Biden’s vacuous and unfounded claims that Trump has had no plan and has done nothing to defeat the virus. Subsequently, Joe Biden hasn’t named anything that he would do that Trump and his team haven’t already done. The only thing literally that Joe Biden has done to defeat the virus since it began is to boast about how much better he would have done if only he had been president. And he hopes to get elected on the basis of that braggadocio.

8. Immigration – Trump is in favor of legal immigration which vets who comes into our country and for what purpose. His policy protects American sovereignty, law, and employment. The promotion of illegal immigration by the Democratic party, though it purports to be motivated by social justice or compassion, opens the way not only for crime but also raises unemployment among Americans seeking entry level jobs. As a result, the Left’s proposals actually lead to injustice and further poverty for American citizens, especially low-income minorities, hardly the stuff of real compassion or justice. (See Carol Swain, Debating Immigration.) This is not to mention the scurrilous and unfounded “concentration camp” rhetoric of A.O.C. and others like her concerning the border.

7. Foreign Trade – It is difficult to imagine Joe Biden or the members of his party taking on China with anything close to the business and economic acumen of Donald Trump and his team. Biden himself recognizes that Trump significantly improved NAFTA with the USMCA trade agreement. These kinds of negotiations will no doubt remain crucial in the days ahead as the world recovers from the pandemic and also adjusts to China’s takeover in Hong Kong. We are going to need serious negotiators on the US side, as well as a President whose own past business dealings do not compromise his ability to take a stand and push back.

6. The military – Since Ronald Reagan, the principle of peace through strength, rather than appeasement, has demonstrated wide success. Interestingly enough, the Obama-Biden nuclear treaty with Iran, based on appeasement, led to continuous terrorist activity in the Middle East. Trump’s use of sanctions and military strength has led, by contrast, to major breakthroughs between Israel and the Arab nations. As a nation, we are less involved in wars now than four years ago. There is now even a pathway to serious peace negotiations with Iran if Trump is re-elected.

5. Economics – Trump promotes the free market approach to business and innovation, which is based on individual initiative and has made the American economy a model around the world. (See again Matt Ridley’s, How Innovation Works.) Biden’s big government agenda for health care, the environment, education, and other sectors relies on the failed promise of all central government strategies known to history. No one, and no group of elite leaders (whether in Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, or elsewhere), has had the knowledge, wisdom, or virtue to be entrusted with that much power and responsibility. The failure of administrative states always involves the ignorance of the would-be revolutionary leaders. For example, Pol Pot in Cambodia “didn’t know” what was going on in his own death camps, where millions were put to death who couldn’t or wouldn’t be re-educated. This is why we have a Bill of Rights for the individual.

4. Education – Trump is finally taking on the widespread infection of “critical social theories” (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) in our whole educational system, from college and university, where it began, all the way down to elementary public school. Biden shows no awareness of the Marxist and therefore inherently divisive sources of this way of thinking. In addition, Trump is also willing to take on the teachers’ unions which have become self-serving in their resistance to the success of charter schools, especially in underprivileged communities. Biden will stand with the teachers’ unions, like Bill DeBlasio in New York City, because that is part of his power base; not because it is in the best interests of children. (See Thomas Sowell, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.)

3. Racial Politics – Trump’s economic policies have achieved far greater concrete results for minorities than was achieved in eight years by the Obama-Biden administration, or by Biden himself for forty years prior to that. Trump’s approach to law enforcement is also in agreement with the majority of black and Hispanic citizens who oppose the “defund the police” agenda of so-called “social justice” activists such as BLM. All of this resonates, moreover, with the social and moral insights of black elders and leaders such as Robert Woodson and Shelby Steele. The path to genuine economic and cultural uplift for underprivileged minorities is through the recovery of faith, family, and individual disciplines grounded in the freedoms of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Government programs for the last fifty years have only hardened the problems they promised to address, while creating a caste of virtue-signaling politicians. (See Shelby Steele’s new film, “What Killed Michael Brown?”)

2. Abortion – As a nation we have lived now for nearly fifty years ignoring the rights of unborn children in the name of protecting the rights of women. What would enlighten this darkness once and for all is the passage of a “Life Begins at Conception Act.” Trump has exceeded all of his predecessors in standing with the pro-life movement in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, and finding better solutions to the challenges of unplanned pregnancies. Biden, by contrast, has played the part of the religious hypocrite, declaring allegiance to the Catholic Church while advocating policies that would require religious orders to help fund abortion in direct opposition to their religious vows and conscience.

1. The Role of the Constitution – Our founding documents are, as Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, a “promissory note.” The Declaration of Independence points to the God-given and unalienable rights that belong to each and every citizen of the United States such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And our Constitution spells out in measured detail what these rights consist in: for example, the first five freedoms mentioned in the first amendment: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition (protest). And yet, it has become clear, at least to Deb and me, that the Left-wing of our current cultural politics and its media mob is ready and willing to barter away these very rights and principles if it will purchase for them the power to control our government and people. Since at least Charlottesville, the Left has shown its readiness to suppress the freedom of speech and assembly for groups with whom they disagree. And then, in places like Portland and Seattle, the left has ignored if not condoned the use of violence by groups such as AntiFa and BLM, when such criminal activity can be camouflaged behind the ruse of “protest.” This is not to mention the role of cancel culture in social and mainstream media, nor the widespread abuse by the Left of the charges of racism and “white supremacy” to try to shame anyone who disagrees with their policy positions. This is the way to undermine our Constitution, not to uphold it.

Over against this, the Trump administration stands in solid agreement with the first principles of our Constitution, which protect the rights and freedoms of the individual to his or her opinions, speech, and so forth. This does not place Trump, or any of his supporters, in league with the wrong-headed opinions of anyone or any group (whether white supremacy, or Black Lives Matter, or the ideological hatred of the Left itself). What it does do is to hold up the most basic principles of our Constitutional and Republican Democracy, grounded as these are in the basic biblical narrative of our Judeo-Christian tradition of faith, which together form the best foundation that we have for moving forward together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.

And that is why Deb and I have changed parties since 2008 and 2012 and are now quite freely and willingly supporting our flawed yet very human and hopeful President, Donald Trump.

THE STUDENT, charcoal, copyright 1979 by Craig Gallaway.

The critical link between education and political ideology is becoming more obvious all the time. President Trump’s recent outing of “Critical Race Theory,” as it has been practiced now for at least fifty years in the halls of higher education, is a timely case in point. Critical social theories that pit various identity groups against each other (whether by race, or gender, or something else) derive ultimately from Marx’s theory of class warfare, which pitted the proletariat (the working class) against the bourgeoisie (those who owned the means of production). According to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, the revolt of the working class would lead ultimately to an ideal economic community where everyone is more or less equal, happy, and well adjusted. The history of the Bolshevik revolution, and then of Stalin’s “Five-Year Plans,” not to mention the economies of Russia, China, and other socialist regimes to this day, tells a very different story; but more on that anon.

What is not in question, however, is the widespread deployment of critical social theories (echoing Marx’s lead) over the last fifty years or so in our American institutions of higher education (see, for example, Heather MacDonald’s The Diversity Delusion). When students go to college or university today, whether they are studying humanities or sciences, they are sure to receive a large dose of training in multicultural studies, or diversity training, or critical theory as applied to any subject they choose to study. Thus, in an English studies department, one may not read a lot of Shakespeare or discover the tremendous treasures of human wisdom stored there, but one will surely learn how to peg him as a white male representing an alleged tradition of racism, sexism, and classism. Critical theory has become the unexamined orthodoxy of our age.

The pervasive and often unexamined influence of critical social theories in the classroom actually makes it rather difficult to go to college today without being to some extent indoctrinated. Critical theories about race, or gender, or language, or history, are presented at most colleges and universities as the enlightened path, the path of virtue, of “wokeness,” noble character, and justifiable outrage. These theories also have the advantage of reinforcing the need of adolescents leaving home for the first time to separate from their parents as they form their own identities. And then, too, the world view and ideology on offer becomes a general movement among one’s peers. It can be difficult to think independently in such an atmosphere.

And yet, the assertions about history and economics and other subjects that come forth from the so-called “critical” theorists, often have the grave disadvantage of not being based at all on a truly critical or realistic view of these subjects or the evidence needed in each case to draw measured conclusions. One sees this at work, for example, in the actions of demonstrators and protestors today who endorse the racial bias theory of the 1619 Project, and yet can’t distinguish, in their frenzy to tear something down, between the statue of a great abolitionist and human being such as Frederick Douglas, and one of a confederate general.  Likewise, interviews on college campuses with randomly selected students often demonstrate an alarming ignorance, not only of the horrendous record of international socialism in various countries during the twentieth century, but also of the history and political structure of our own country. Nevertheless, these young people are stoked for revolution and ready to follow “woke” political leaders, such as A.O.C. and the “squad,” or AntiFa and Black Lives Matter, in fomenting a socialist violent take-over in America.

By contrast, one could wish that at least some of these folks could embrace a more truly critical and realistic approach to the study of socialist politics and strategies as these have actually worked out in various places. One can discover a great deal online, for example, simply by searching for the history of Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the results of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in China, or Stalin’s “Five-Year Plans” for economic development in Russia.

The first of Stalin’s plans, for example, ran from 1928 to 1933. It was focused on heavy industrial development, which Stalin promised to increase by as much as 350% under the Communist regime. Though this goal proved completely unrealistic, and Stalin reset his goals numerous times, the regime did boost industrial output by a remarkable 80% during the period. The human and economic costs of this expansion, however, were hidden behind Soviet propaganda, and its Western supporters such as Walter Durante whose glowing and Pulitzer-Prize-winning reports appeared in The New York Times. In reality, Stalin’s industrial miracle was bought at a cost of forced labor, mass incarceration, and the hoarding of agricultural products from the countryside, so that somewhere between 6 and 7 million ethnic minority peasants (Ukrainians, Tartars, Kulaks) starved to death. Not exactly a victory for the economy as a whole!

The fundamental problem with Stalin’s Five-Year Plans was that they underestimated the importance of individual initiative and creativity to propel thousands of people in a complex economic system to discover the best way to work and the best way to meet the needs of their countrymen. Instead, Stalin, like socialist theorists such as A.O.C. and Bernie Sanders today, claimed to have enough knowledge, foresight, wisdom, and virtue, to construct an economic system from inside a government agency that would outperform the free market. As Thomas Sowell argues in his book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, this claim to elite vision and knowledge is always the Achilles heel of socialist or communist theories. In reality, no one actually has that kind of knowledge and foresight. So, programs spawned in this way display a miserable record of failure, waste, and subterfuge, especially when it comes time to raise taxes for funding the next year. Sowell’s book is full of documented examples from our own American experiment with “The Great Society” under Lyndon Johnson.

Having observed the anti-intellectual bias of contemporary college students and Marxist demonstrators, one can perhaps be forgiven for doubting if they will ever be willing to take this critically realistic step, and examine the real evidence of history. Or, will the groundless assertions of their idealism and ideology blind them until they pull the house down around their own heads. The truly critical thing is whether or not one can learn from actual evidence; but the current generation also has against it in this regard the prevailing philosophical attitude of post-modernism which declares that all world views and philosophies are really nothing more than competing power games of vested interests by different identity groups. And so, we come back, despite the terrible history of Marxist economic ideas, to the Marxian critique of culture which pits us against each other.

Against the relativism of post-modernism and cultural Marxism, I recommend something very down to earth, that can be illustrated from the life of one of my own college mentors. When I went to Regent College in 1974, one of my most memorable professors was Clark Pinnock, whose courses on Systematic Theology and The Politics of Jesus I took with great relish. Clark was a brilliant man. A logician to be sure. And never one to brook any nonsense from his students, as I had to learn on more than one occasion. He was also, at that time, a voting member of the Communist Party in Vancouver, though he didn’t advertise this to us in the classroom. Under Clark’s leadership, I was introduced to the Marxist theologies of liberation as practiced in South America, and to the ideas of the Sojourner’s community in Washington, D.C., and their leader, Jim Wallis (who also taught at a Regent mid-term). I learned in this way of concepts such as “the preferential option for the poor,” and of the need to be suspicious of capitalism, as it can succumb to the greed of fallen human beings. In other words, along with my education in basic Christian theology, I was receiving an education in political ideas; and I was only partly aware at the time of the alternative viewpoints on any of these subjects that could be presented by others. I was a bit like some of the woke generation today, and perhaps so was Clark.

Imagine my surprise, a few years later, when I learned that after traveling in South America and visiting countries such as El Salvador and Nicaragua, Clark Pinnock went public with a complete about-face regarding the advantages of capitalism and the free market. As a result of his travels and further studies, Clark saw how poorly the economies of other countries performed under the awkward control of socialist regimes and, by contrast, how much better people responded when they were allowed to farm and bring their goods to market under their own ingenuity and creativity. Clark’s conclusion was that free markets were to be preferred to socialist economies if one’s true goal was to see the standard of living rise among the poor. And this was a lesson that was being learned elsewhere as well by the late eighties, for example, in China and in Sweden.

Perhaps the most important insight that can arise from this brief reflection on the relation between education and politics in our time, given the pervasive influence of critical social theory in the academy (and now also in public schools, corporate offices, among entertainment celebrities, and mainstream media), is the importance of embracing a truly critical approach to the study of history itself. Clark Pinnock was once committed to a Marxist analysis, but further study of real events and concrete evidence convinced him to change his mind. Despite the lazy minded trends of postmodern philosophy on college campuses, serious historical study is not a subjective power game between competing identity groups with opposing vested interests. Whatever point of view we may begin with as a result of experience or education, we can and should remain serious students of history and evidence. Only so can our grasp of political ideas remain open to discovering what is true and what is not.