Often times addicts insist, and indeed believe, that they are in fact all right. Their decision to take another drink or what have is just that; a decision. They could stop any time they wanted just by choosing something else. “I can stop any time I want, I just don’t want to.”

Except that this isn’t the case. And one day you’ll have to wake up to the fact that you aren’t just a man who gets drunk every now and again, you’re an alcoholic. You aren’t just a man who sometimes loses his temper, you’re a bad tempered man. You aren’t having an ‘off-day:’ you’re having a normal day. That time when you succeeded, that was the off-day.

No one wants to hear this, but sooner or later you have to face it if you’re ever going to turn your life around.

Looking at the rhetoric from American conservatives, not just this past election cycle but at all times, it really makes me wonder at how far we can go to hold onto an idea.

The unfailing trend of at least the past century, if not the entire history of our republic, of an increasingly centralized, powerful, and expansive federal government and the accompanying erosion of individual and local authority is not a fluke. It is not a kind of extended national ‘off-day.’ It’s not a reversible accident that only requires us to get the ‘right people in charge’ to correct. This is the logical consequence of our form of government and national ideology.

And trying to cling to the idea that it is just a mistake or correctable fluke frankly sounds a lot like “real Communism hasn’t been tried.”

Correcting course is going to require us to re-examine and probably to throw off or at least re-interpret a lot of what we thought were core American ideals. That’s the painful truth we’re going to have to face sooner or later.