A FATEFUL HINGE, INDEED!

“As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you.” Edmund Burke

It is, and should be, debated how true that is or how true it’s ever been. Not only for the USA, but for the English-speaking world as a whole. We should be able to debate that, and other political questions, with both passion and civility, always with the awareness that our opponents may well have something worthwhile to say. How difficult that’s been for at least since the Clinton administration speaks unhappy volumes about the crumbling of our freedoms — and who’s doing nearly all of the crumbling!
But let’s set that aside for the moment as, in two days’ time, we come to a seriously fateful hinge.
I see the great ‘gifts’ that the English-speaking peoples have given to the greater world as these: first, the equality of all before the law and no one, not even the Crown, (let alone any president!) being above it.
Second, representative democracy and the idea that, given enough truthful information and time to digest it, we are all capable of participating in it. Third, that democracy is also a process, one which might never be completed but is all the more worth pursuing. Fourth, that certain freedoms (I think FDR’s Four Freedoms is an excellent summing up of them) are the God-given rights of every human being on the planet!
To all of you who have yet to vote in this election: whether we in the English-speaking world will have a rebirth and expansion of those freedoms or whether we, having turned…