Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. —Exodus 1:8

How the knowledge of history changes those who have it… Conversely, the ignorance of history is a ticket to repetitive mistakes, misdeeds, and calamity. These simple observations are especially relevant to us in 2020. The numbing speed of technology over the last twenty-five years has given us not only a generation of youth that is ignorant of our history but one with even less active interest in accoladed human history or respect for real-life experience. I could offer multiple examples, however, none of them are shouting as loudly as the under-thirty folks’ energetic support for Bernie Sanders and his gentile socialist programs supported by thin air and firmly undergirded by zero knowledge of our collective socialist experiences from the twentieth century. It’s as if Alfred E. Neuman is running for president; some may recall his famous “What—Me Worry?” dissertation a la Mad Magazine. Selah. 

Not only will 2020 be a year not forgotten, it may be the most unique political year in America’s history since the Civil War one hundred sixty years ago. The way things are currently rolling out, the Democratic Party will split into two warring groups, Sanders supporters and Biden supporters, both groups unwilling to yield to one another the party nomination for the presidency. The common view is that Sanders can’t be elected as a socialist with no brain for cost accounting, and Biden can’t win because he is too close to the old-school Washington, D.C. establishment Democrats. While Sanders has a significant youth brigade growing army, his fantasy agenda of “free this and free that” will sink with too many voters over forty years of age. It is of note that Sanders has run a campaign that has split the generations apart beyond anyone else in US political history. The 1972 election was generationally divided but primarily over the Vietnam War rather than such a sharp division over the nature of fiscal reality and the notion of replacing a privately driven economy with a command-based socialist economy. What is frightening to many of us is that large numbers of these youthful supporters are allegedly “educated” youth. What should we say about American education and the history of virtually all full-on socialist, national, economic disasters?

This division within the Democratic Party comes alongside an already fractured Republican Party. So, where is this division going? We have the forty percent heels-dug-in Trump populist group; the Evangelicals; the conservative establishment Republicans; the new hard-left Progressives with Bernie Sanders as their pied-piper drum major for now; the traditional Democrats; and numbers of others watching the parade knowing that this much division cannot go on for decades as history easily tells us. What I believe in the relative short run is the formation of the largest third-party group we have historically seen will emerge. Where that is going, I have no idea, or at least none I want to speculate on publicly right now. So, I will conclude this abnormally short Bottom Line like this; as I have said repeatedly before, 2020 is going to be a year to remember, and that is…

The Bottom Line.

To be continued…