The Government Is Not Your Daddy

Article by J.B. Shurk from American Thinker cross-posted with permission.

(American Thinker)—It’s no secret that many Democrat voters have “daddy” issues.  They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths: a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.

When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace.  Why?  Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave.  They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity.  They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl.  They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children.  Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!

After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot.  Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone.  Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!

Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted.  We will see ourselves out.  We know what a woman is, right?  We know what is best for our kids.  We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”

Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away.  Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control.  They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.

This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent.  Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents.  Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully.  It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love.  Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.

Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug.  Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal.  Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got.  They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them.  It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”

This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry.  In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults.  Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood.  The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency.  Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.

When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults.  They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves.  They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself.  Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives.  The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.

I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children. 

Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children.  To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there.  When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.”  That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.

Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears.  Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?”  Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood.  Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”

Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities.  President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.

A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake.  He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud.  He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.

When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms.  When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings.  When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place.  At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!”  Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”

Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable?  Are we not all adults?  Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?

One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not.  Pretending is for young children.  Facing hard truths head-on is for adults.  Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”