“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual – or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” –Samuel Adams (1781)

(This essay was revised to provide post-election narrative and assessment.)

As a student of history, I would assert that in no election since 1860 has our nation been more viscerally divided along clearer battle lines than it was in the contest between Romney/Ryan and Obama/Biden.

The contentious contrast in this campaign cycle was not so much about political policies as about the overarching themes of tyranny versus Liberty – Rule of Law versus rule of men.

Unfortunately, Barack Hussein Obama’s propaganda machine prevailed in the 2012 election, which will fast-track our nation down the road to Democratic Socialism.

As has been the case since the dawn of American Liberty, today’s Patriots do not set our course on contemporaneous trends defined by polling and focus groups. Instead, we set our compass on true north, on eternal truths “endowed by our Creator” as outlined in what Thomas Jefferson called the “the declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.” Those rights are codified in our Constitution, which many of us have sworn to “support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

This eternal bearing is central to our Patriot mission, and it will not change with the outcome of any election – though the task before us will be much, much more difficult if enough of our countrymen lack the wisdom to vote for Liberty over tyranny.

In addition to the written records from our Founders of wisdom in support of Liberty and eternal truths, our team here at The Patriot Post is also blessed and humbled to count among the ranks of our readers hundreds of men and women from the Greatest Generation – a generation that possesses wisdom that only comes with age. They have lived through presidential administrations from Wilson to Obama, and their wisdom has been forged in the fires of the Great Depression and World War II. They have witnessed the proliferation of socialist tyranny through Eastern Europe and Asia and the resulting slaughter of hundreds of millions of innocents. They have witnessed the grotesque tribal carnage in Africa and the Middle East.

They are also the generation who, through hard work and innovation in the context of a free-enterprise economy, built the strongest manufacturing operations in history; an economy based on tangible products “Made in the USA” by skilled workers and managers.

I receive letters almost every day from these elder Patriots, many of them expressing grief for the state of affairs they’re leaving behind. Many of them bear a burden that they have somehow failed their posterity because the generations after them have not been instilled with a spirit of Liberty and civic duty sufficient to discern between candidates like Romney, who promote American Liberty, and those like Obama, who seek to undermine Liberty in their relentless pursuit of statist power.

One of these letters arrived Tuesday from one of my heroes – my father. He was born in 1923 and remembers well the hardship of the Depression. He became a Naval Aviator in World War II, came home to start a family, and over three decades built a small manufacturing operation into a company with hundreds of employees. That company was dealt a deathblow during the last Great Recession under Jimmy Carter.

On the eve of his 90th birthday, my father is very concerned about the future of Liberty, and his concern has the bold bona-fide stamp of the wisdom of age.

His generation created great abundance, with the unintended consequence that following generations became progressively complacent, apathetic and dependent. This progression follows the fatal “Cycle of Democracy”: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men).

Our nation is now suffering under another Great Recession. Like the last one, this recession is the direct result of statist interventionist policies. These policies led to the collapse of real estate values, which cascaded into the banking collapse, which nearly took down the entire economy. (For the record, I outlined this sequence of our current economic decline a month before Obama was elected in 2008.)

John Adams wrote, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” But it’s certainly easier to accept Obama’s recurring premise: “It’s George Bush’s fault.”

Just prior to the 2008 election, Obama said his objective was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and he called on his adherents to join him in “remaking this nation, block by block.” Four years later and that transformation is well underway.

Since his first election, Obama has undertaken measures in the name of “economic recovery” that will ultimately, by design, break the back of free enterprise. His “stimulus plan” is modeled on the Cloward-Piven strategy for economic transition, which he studied in depth as a student at Columbia University. This socialist stratagem calls for overloading the government welfare system to the point of crisis, requiring the replacement of that system with a national system of “guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.” This collapse is written into the genes of our nation’s projected debt load, a burden that will crush free enterprise in the coming decade, without dramatic intervention.

So, how is Obama’s strategy working thus far?

There are 23 million unemployed or underemployed Americans. Tens of millions who are working have not received sufficient pay increases to even keep up with inflation. On Obama’s watch, we have record spending on welfare – households considered impoverished have grown to one in six, and 47 million are on food stamps – up 50 percent since Obama’s election. Obama has also amassed $5 trillion in new debt, and our national debt now totals $16 trillion, which for the first time in history now exceeds U.S. annual economic output. On top of that, energy prices have doubled because of Obama’s restrictions on exploration, and economic growth has slowed to an anemic 1.3 percent.

Mitt Romney failed to mention the real “Obama tax” on the middle class is the fact that median household income has declined by $4,520 (8.2 percent) since Obama took office.

As more Obama supporters removed their heads from their, uh, sandboxes, Obama’s propaganda machine was running full steam, endeavoring to complete the colossal makeover to his “jobs president” façade in the remaining days of the campaign.

As you recall, a few weeks before the Republican Confab in Tampa, Obama declared, “The private sector is doing fine,” and insisted that we really need more government [read “union”] jobs. His Senate lap dog, Harry Reid reiterated, “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers…” Both of these remarks unveil Obama’s real “jobs” agenda.

Just before the 2012 election, as part of his “jobs” charade, Obama unveiled his phony “The New Economic Patriotism” brochure, a “plan” for jobs that will most assuredly seal the fate of our economy if he is re-elected. He’s calling on Americans to “embrace a new economic patriotism,” while his lapdog Joe Biden has declared paying higher taxes to be our “patriotic duty.”

Ah yes, I recall some other socialists in Germany and Russia, early in the last century, who equated “patriotism” with “statism.”

So, we found ourselves in quite a quandary on the eve of the 2012 election: We had a committed socialist president who has won the allegiance of an electorate so dumbed-down by apathy and dependence that it views the state as a benevolent master.

Obama can depend on two principle constituencies who are irrevocably tied to the Left. About 30 percent of voters (60 percent of Obama’s support) are primarily urbanites, whose allegiance has been co-opted by the state in return for redistributed wealth. Another 10 percent of voters (20 percent of Obama’s support) are ideological socialists, from Leftist academicians to Hollywood glitterati, and all the Marxists in between.

It’s not that independent voters who supported Obama are ignorant; it’s simply that, as Ronald Reagan once said of Democrats, “they know so much that isn’t so.” Indeed, they were enticed in the last election to support a candidate Joe Biden described as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

In this election year, there was a much clearer distinction between the candidate’s ideologies and, fortunately, some of Obama’s ‘08 supporters came to their senses, as typified in this Grassroots Commentary letter from “Karen,” expressing the buyer’s remorse of an ill-informed vote.

But Mitt Romney failed to close the deal with grassroots independent voters – not because he didn’t genuinely care about Americans from all walks of life, but because his staff was top-heavy with folks who, themselves, have little or no grassroots grounding. Though we know our “Memo to Mitt From Grassroots Americans” was delivered to his communications director, these critical talking points never made it to his debate strategists.

In the election of 2012, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we made “our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.” By a narrow margin, the latter won.

Obama is now determined to fulfill his promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

There will be a new morning in America, another Sunrise on Liberty, but in the meantime, we face some very dark years ahead.