Great News for America: The Constitution, Freedom and Prosperity are Coming Back! (2016)

By Gerard Francis Lameiro, Ph.D.

This book was recently reviewed [LINK] on a website I follow, Maccabee Society: A Journal and Community for Men [LINK] (“Men” should have “Conservative Christian” in front of it; the site is kind of like The Art of Manliness [LINK] with a specifically Christian slant). The author purports to analyse American history and predicts, based on historical cycles and so forth, that we’re about to experience a conservative groundswell/landslide in the upcoming elections that will transform the United States for a generation, resetting American government back to what the Founding Fathers intended.

Needing a little good news in what seems like a constant barrage of bad news on just about every front, I grabbed this book on Kindle and read it over the next few evenings after the aforementioned review appeared, then gave myself a couple days to digest it. Unfortunately, my initial impression did not change upon reflection. I found this book to be so unrealistically optimistic (as well as extremely poorly written and edited) as to be laughable – and no encouragement whatsoever. It is a great exercise in wishful thinking and nothing more. Besides ignoring how deeply entrenched the entitlement culture is in our society, Lameiro does not deal with the fact that there really is no viable conservative candidate still in the 2016 race that he sees as the key “inflexion point.” Trump certainly is not "conservative" no matter how he tries to sell himself as such today. Cruz is still in it, of course, but despite my personal preference for him among the announced candidates almost from the beginning of the '16 campaign, the sad fact is that he polarizes so greatly that I think having him as the nominee – which is unlikely given the current delegate numbers unless the Republicans blow up the convention to keep Trump out, which would be a disaster because Trump would then go rogue third party and split the vote – would assure a Democrat victory. The same is true, although perhaps to a lesser extent, if the Republicans put up someone else (Ryan? -- based on some of Lameiro’s recent posts at his book-centered blog [LINK], he seems to lean that way) which would, I think, end up losing at least some of Cruz's support from sheer pissed-offness. Without naming names, Lameiro seems to attempt to address those possibilities in the abstract, but not convincingly.

I just do not see an upsurge of truly conservative values-based governance – or a demand for such from the American people – coming. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong – and it would please me greatly to be able to revisit this post in eight months or so and eat crow – but I don't think it's going to happen. I really think our country passed the tipping point with the 2012 re-election of Obama (who had already proven himself the worst President we'd ever had, and has since descended even deeper into partisan disgrace), as I said then in my blog-commentary, "eyes wide open" [LINK].

Thanks for reading.