Election 2026: Looking for liberty? You won’t find it in Washington!
With the 2026 election quickly approaching, one thing remains clear: America is no longer a land of liberty, and neither Republicans nor Democrats in Washington will change that sad reality.
There’s been a lot of armchair quarterbacking by politicians and pundits in both the Republican and Democrat parties about the changes we need to see if we ever want America to be guided again by the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Unfortunately, however, the only solutions they offer is more of the same ol’, same ol’. “Vote for ________ Party for the change you seek!”
However, the simple truth of the matter is that the “lesser of two evils” approach to voting has produced none of the changes they promised because regardless of which party wins, we the people still end up with evil. In reality, what we should be doing is heeding the words spoken by Rev. Charles Spugeon: “Of two evil, choose neither.”
When it comes to the MAGA cult, conservatism has been targeted as a greater evil to Donald Trump and his agenda. This began in 2018 during Trump’s first term when he joined Mitch McConnell — a “conservative” who decided during the Obama administration that the future of the Republican Party didn’t belong to conservatives and targeted them for elimination from the Party. Instead of conservatism, they latched on to the far-left ideology they pretended to oppose every election season.
And if we’ve learned anything from the Republican Party since that time, it’s that elections have nothing to do with any so-called differences between Republicans and Democrats because there is no difference between the two; which is why I often call on fellow conservatives to abandon party politics and return to the Constitution before America reaches the point where she never finds her heart and her God-given right to live in liberty.
Gary Barkalow (Founder of The Noble Heart) is an expert on how individuals can live the life they are created to live and how the keys to living that life are written on the human heart. In a blog post written in November 2012 entitled A Dangerous But Necessary Road, he shared the following thought:
I recently overheard a conversation between two men. One said, “The strong rule the weak. That’s how your God made the world.” The other responded, “God makes us strong only for a while, so that we can help each other.” To which the first man responded, “My God makes me strong so I can live my life.”
This conversation was in a movie I re-watched called “First Knight, the King Arthur and Camelot story.” The first and last man to be quoted was Malagant, the fallen knight from Arthur’s Round Table.
Malagant captured in a sentence the general belief of the era that we are living in – “My God makes me strong so I can live my life.” In a word this belief can be described as narcissism – and is defined as excessive self-admiration and self-centeredness. (Emphasis mine)
Though Barkalow is clearly addressing the heart of the individual, his words prompted me to consider this question: Is it possible that Americans have surrendered to the Republican/Democrat duopoly because they have lost heart and have become as narcissistic as the politicians in Washington they repeatedly vote for? The next part of Barkalow’s post answered this question:
Erwin McManus wrote in his book Stand Against the Wind, “When we are in love with ourselves, we are prone to listen only to what we want to hear. We become willing to trade insight for affirmation. We want to feel good about ourselves more than we want to become good.” (Emphasis mine)
Quite simply, Americans have fallen in love with themselves. They have wandered so far from their heart — a heart of God-given liberty — that they no longer desire to hear what they need to hear; only what they want to hear.
God didn’t give America the gift of liberty simply to provide a place for self-centered individuals to live their lives any way they choose. Instead, liberty was given to equip us to live as a nation filled with the desire and passion necessary to realize our calling to be the shining city upon a hill often spoken of often by Ronald Reagan but highlighted in his farewell address from the Oval Office on January 11, 1989. Here’s a snippet of that speech:
“And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be
city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”
As I make clear in my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, Republicans and Democrats have veered from the road that leads to liberty and have plummeted over the cliff of political self-centeredness. The guard rails erected by the Founding Fathers to them on that road — the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — have been destroyed under the misguided and selfish assumption that we are capable enough on our own to maneuver without them.
Going forward, America can get back on that road and find liberty again, but only if Republicans and Republicans in Washington acknowledge the damage they have done to the Constitution and admit the need for restoration. Liberty won’t be found by attempting to journey the same narrow road without the guard rails necessary to avoid the crashing cliffs.
In 2026 and beyond, America needs conservatives willing to work on the road crew to rebuild the guardrails and safeguards because that’s the only way to find liberty again; we won’t find it in Washington from the Republicans and Democrats who tore them down in the first place.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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