America Is Doomed ... Again?

By Rod Anderson, CP Cartoonist Monday, September 26, 2016

Recently longtime evangelical leader James Dobson, now venerably age 80, warned of irreversible consequences if Hillary Clinton is elected.

"… We won't ever recover from it!" Dobson said, "We will go down in flames, maybe literally, if we put the wrong person in power."

Maybe Dobson, who's justifiably concerned about growing assaults on religious liberty and conscience rights, is right. Others sound similar warnings about Trump, whose authoritarian rhetoric they fear foreshadows collapsing confidence in democracy and constitutionalism in favor of strong man rule. Maybe they're right.

There's nothing new about apocalyptic chatter in American politics. New England Federalists in the 1800 election claimed the allegedly atheist Thomas Jefferson, who was actually privately Unitarian, would as President close churches and burn Bibles, like the French revolutionaries with whom he initially sympathized. Frontier revivalists countered that John Adams was a closet monarchist serving the British crown. Neither of these scenarios unfolded.