The direction the Right is going sometimes reminds me of the Nephites.  I don’t know whether the parallel I’m seeing is real or not–I don’t vouch for it–but sometimes I do see a parallel.

The Nephites (or, within the Nephites, the Church) sometimes responded to unrelenting persecution and hatred by aping their enemies.
Alma 4:

For they saw and beheld with great sorrow that the people of the church began to be lifted up in the pride of their eyes, and to set their hearts upon riches and upon the vain things of the world, that they began to be scornful, one towards another, and they began to persecute those that did not believe according to their own will and pleasure.

And thus, in this eighth year of the reign of the judges, there began to be great contentions among the people of the church; yea, there were envyings, and strife, and malice, and persecutions, and pride, even to exceed the pride of those who did not belong to the church of God.

Or the Nephites in the last days of their civilization, who correctly perceived that the Lamanites would never stop until they had exterminated all the Nephites–and invaded the Lamanites to, I suppose, exterminate them first, and thus prompted their own extermination ahead of schedule.

This is not a direction I hope for the Right.

On the other hand, if politics is war by other means, for the longest time the Right has been practicing pacifism by other means, and the record is one of unremitting failure.


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