Our civilization, and especially our country, is based on “the laws of nature and nature’s God,”—standards of right and wrong independent of earthly power—preached by the Christian churches.

But clerics, including popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests have always flirted with the temptation to swap God’s laws for the rulers’ causes and prejudices. When it’s Christians versus Caesar, clerics mostly choose Caesar.

Today, a chapter in that temptation is playing out among us as America’s Catholic bishops consider how better to identify and punish some of their colleagues and the priests they supervise who have been sexually abusing adolescents, 80 percent of them boys and young men.

On November 11, 2018 under pressure from enraged parishioners, and internal resistance notwithstanding, the U.S. bishops were about to vote on some proposals better to identify and expel what, by definition, is homosexual predation. But homosexuality ranks high among the icons of progressives, robed and not. Pope Francis proceeded to denounce the accusers as “tools of the devil,” not the perpetrators themselves.

As the shutdown heads into its fourth week, the nation is getting used to the radical idea that we can actually do without the fleets of bureaucrats who, in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, have been "sent hither to harass our people and eat out their substance."

For decades, as the federal leviathan has grown ever larger, and poked its voracious snout into all manners of unconstitutional fodder, the people of the United States have largely sat idly by, hoping to catch some of the droppings from the creature's maw in the belief that it will not eat them too as it forages merrily along.

Still, life has gone on otherwise pretty much as before -- and the longer the shutdown continues, the more easily the way we were can be forgotten.

So the longer Donald Trump wrangles with his two superannuated cartoon antagonists, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the stronger the president's position becomes.

America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.

On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.

On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences of America’s universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance.

Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge.

By and large, the bachelor’s degree, even in a liberal-arts major, no longer certifies that a graduate will be able to read, reason, compute, or draw on a body of knowledge far more effectively than those without an undergraduate degree.

The decline of the university has been an ongoing tragedy since the 1960s, but the erosion has accelerated because of ideological bias and its twin, incompetence. Here are five major recent and additional catalysts.

The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.”

By “rule of the best” ( the Greek aristokratia), I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those with proper degrees, and long service in the top hierarchies of government, media, blue-chip law firms, Wall Street, high tech, and academia.

The 2016 election and refutation of the ruling class did not signal that those without such educations and qualifications were de facto better suited to direct the country. Instead, the lesson was that the past record of governance and the current stature of our assumed best and brightest certainly did not justify their reputations or authority, much less their outsized self-regard.

In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.  Let us count the ways they are and how Donald Trump is their repudiation.

Pittsburgh—It’s just before 7 p.m. on a frigid December night, and already the Allegheny Elks Lodge No. 339 on the city’s North Side is filling up quickly—both the long bar and the tables in the adjacent hall.

There’s a woman collecting for a 50-50 raffle. (You may as well give in; she won’t take no for an answer.) Elks volunteers young and old are manning the bar and the kitchen, where the special tonight is a gourmet grilled cheese (black forest honey ham, Gouda cheese, and bacon).

Upstairs a six-lane sparkling white and red art deco bowling alley straight out of the 1920s is filled with young people from a local league. The floor above that is where lodge meetings are held; it is a beautiful ballroom also straight out of the Roaring ’20s.

The beer is cheap and cold. The food is cheap and tasty. Soon the entire building is packed to the rafters, people lining the walls in the hall and the bar. It’s as if Frank Capra made a movie in this century.

Civic life like this has been dying for decades, accelerated by the isolating effects of gaming and smartphones, and the anti-social components of social media. Today, the sense of community, security and civic duty that fraternal organizations can cultivate is returning.

How as Americans do we explain the intransigence of the Left when it comes to national security?  'Tis a mystery.

These people, these Democrats in Congress, are among the most privileged persons on the planet.  They have enjoyed, more than most, the blessings bequeathed by the Founders, the authors of the Constitution.  Yet they are determined, like Obama, to transform us into something this nation was never meant to be: a land without borders.

While all of them are on record supporting a border wall in the past, now that Donald Trump is president, they all oppose it with every fiber of their being.  They know that it will work, and they cannot abide Trump having a win.  These people – Schumer, Pelosi, Gutiérrez, etc. – are truly venal.

It should be obvious to every American by now that our “progressive” regressive Left does not have the best interest of Americans at heart.  Quite the opposite.  They have become a Curse blighting our beloved country.

Washington has long been a stranger to principle other than the principle of self advancement.

Yet, something new seems to be emerging across the country. Politicians have long felt the need to disguise raw political agendas in the pretense of principle. That pretense has disappeared.

In this Age of Rage, voters seem to have no patience, let alone need, for leaders speaking of abstract principles. They want immediate unequivocal action in supporting or opposing President Trump.

For Democrats, that all-consuming purpose has led to the abandonment of core unifying values, including many that first drew me to the Democrat Party. While they would vehemently deny it, Trump is remaking the party in his inverse image. This past month shows how far that transformation has gone.

Just as the Republican Party is purging itself of hackneyed lawmakers, bitter neoconservative commentators, and insatiable interventionists, along comes Mitt Romney to remind us of what we definitely are not missing.

In a late New Year’s Day sermon published in the Washington Post, the incoming senator expressed his disappointment in the president and, by extension, in all of us. It was filled with the sort of juvenile platitudes that at one time mollified Republican voters, but now either amuse or enrage them.

The reaction on the Right to Romney’s missive was fast and furious. His niece, head of the Republican National Committee, sided with Trump, while the President again teased the man he once teased with the prospect of a cabinet position, tweeting yesterday morning:

Thanks to the flow of foreign information into the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea is changing from the inside out — and Kim Jong Un is running to catch up. The growing split between the North Korean people and the state is proving difficult for the Kim regime to reverse.

The influx of foreign media and knowledge has been growing for years, and like the red pill from The Matrix, it has the power to transform North Koreans’ understanding of the world. It permeates all levels of North Korean life, and civilians are becoming increasingly self-aware.

Foreign media infiltrating the North — South Korean dramas, in particular — have done the most to reshape the way North Koreans view their southern neighbors and, in turn, their own realities. From fashion to an awareness of human rights, foreign ideas now increasingly color the lives of ordinary North Koreans.