Last week I briefly touched upon the phenomenon of supposed stalwarts of conservatism and moral rectitude who have inexplicably thrown in with a candidate who holds views and exhibits behavior they’ve opposed their entire lives. As I’ve watched this spectacle unfold I’ve kept in mind the Gemara’s teaching that a telltale sign of the Ikvesa D’Meshicha the pre-Messianic era which gedolei olam have long said is upon us is that of ein lanu l’hishaein elah al Avinu Shebashamayim.

It will be a time in which all of the normal supports on which we tend to rely — and enable us to avoid having to place all our trust in He Who is the only true source of salvation — will be kicked out from under us. If we want to merit redemption we will need to be driven willy-nilly into His arms.

One can see the pieces of the ein lanu…elah endgame falling into place both in Eretz Yisrael and inAmerica. There it began withIsrael’s fall from its vaunted military invincibility and continued with its slow encirclement by vicious enemies. ThenIran announced plans to destroy it from afar andAmerica its most trusted ally rebuffedIsrael’s plea and made a deal with the enemy.

In theUnited States we’re just now emerging from an eight-year experience with political messianism. What began with Obama campaign rallies that were virtual revival meetings replete with fainting acolytes and with his acceptance speech in Denver before grandiose Greek columns is about to end as two terms of nearly unmitigated debacle both domestically and abroad.

He ran as in Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’s memorable phrase someone “standing above the country above the world he’s sort of God.” He was going to bring about “a nation healed. A world repaired. AnAmericathat believes again.” But precisely the opposite has come to pass on all counts.

Despite a disastrous first term that ought to have cured those stricken with messianic fervor it did not. Reporter Michael Hastings described a 2012 campaign press event this way: “Everyone myself included swooned… deeply obsessed with Obama….”

To make way for the Melech HaMashiach all the false redeemers have to be cleared out of the way. The last decade has been an exercise in revealing the messiah of the left to be a decidedly false one.

Do true believers in Mr. Obama remain after all these years? Sure there are many of them. The fact that Mrs. Clinton has a shot at winning the election is a testament to that. But that’s because G-d doesn’t dictate human responses He only provides opportunities. He gives people what they need in order to recognize the truth and then it’s up to them.

But besides all the people who haven’t learned the lessons of the last eight years there are also many who learned lessons but the wrong ones. Because they agreed so wholeheartedly with the sustained critiques leveled against Mr. Obama they assumed that those making them were sincere and that given the opportunity they would work to elect someone who is his diametric opposite.

How disillusioned and betrayed they ought to now feel as these same pundits and politicians go about embracing someone who is in very many ways not a diametric opposite but a mirror image of Barack Obama and then some. In an arrogance so exaggerated as to leave one slack-jawed; in the refusal to ever reconsider or admit mistakes abetted by perpetual puerile blame-shifting; in the trashing of American moral exceptionalism vis ? vis truly evil regimes; in the hunger for amassing unlimited executive power unhindered by that nuisance called the Constitution; in the extreme incuriousness to learn and understand and total absence of governing experience both inversely proportionate to an astonishing know-it-all-ism; in the perverse capacity for telling untruths publicly repeatedly and without shame; and in the deeply un-American authoritarianism of “I alone can fix it.” And yes in their shared wielding of political correctness as an attack weapon.

But doesn’t the conventional wisdom have it that it is precisely the electorate’s pent-up frustration over eight years of muzzling by an Obama-led regime of political correctness that has led them to embrace a Republican nominee willing to say anything about anyone?

Yes but what after all is political correctness? It is the presentation of a distorted view of reality while stifling all dissent to it. And so a better way to conceptualize what has occurred is this: The Republican nominee sized up regular Americans’ enormous entirely justified rage at being forced to sit and watch bound and gagged as it were as liberal elites pushed a version of reality in which a jihadi’s massacre of American soldiers while screaming “Allahu akbar” is a workplace violence incident; in which people are whatever gender they say they are with accompanying restroom privileges; in which the disproportionate arrest rates of blacks is racist. And the list goes on and on.

That rage has become the basis for an implicit bargain the nominee has made with his voters: I will rail uncontrollably at all the things you’ve hated these many years as you cheer me on and in exchange you will do just one thing for me — muzzle yourselves and everyone else too on one topic only: Me. No one may say anything about me that I adjudge “not nice ” which is to say everything no matter how mild and truthful. “He’s down in the polls”? Yes that too. Even when I say things for which you would severely censure your child or your employee you will muffle your outraged inner voice of conscience smile obsequiously and mutter something about how I’m just “ruffling feathers again” or “being me.”

All those who for so long saw various conservative spokesmen and leaders as kindred spirits were duped. But it’s not just the ostensible opinion makers. This election year should be a wake-up call too that those concerned with the levels of moral health and liberty in this country would be wise not to place undue reliance on the “conservative base” or the evangelical community.

In truth the widespread notion that the evangelical community went strongly for this nominee is not quite the case. Polling shows that the deeply religious consistently churchgoing segment of that movement largely rejected him as did the equally devout Mormons.

That rejection was a function not only of their religious and moral views but also of their connectedness to family church and community. The electoral data shows that the more alienated voters felt and the less affiliated with churches and civic groups the more they tended to cast their vote for him vulnerable to his Chavez-like “I I alone will protect fix etc.” paternalism.

It was instead the masses of self-described evangelicals without the unwavering religious commitment to back that title up who opted for him and spurned Ted Cruz as ideal a candidate a truly religious person could ever hope for. As for the so-called “conservative base ” National Review’s Kevin Williamson observes that the Republican nominee’s

movement contains a different kind of rightism which is found among people who are neither philosophically conservative nor temperamentally conservative but who are as a matter of cultural and social identity not so much with the Right as against the Left. These are the people who are moved by [his] denunciations of “political correctness” and railing against “elites” even as they embrace the full Roosevelt-Johnson welfare-entitlement state and clamor for an even more paternalistic government.

That the “conservative base” and “religious right” may turn out to have been illusions is of crucial importance for our community in regard to what ought to be the leading concern of every religious American: the mounting frontal assault on religious liberty now being abetted by politicians the courts and corporateAmerica. Maggie Gallagher notes that

social conservatives need to get serious about political engagement or we will lose our right to associate organize and keep our jobs…. With remarkably little fuss or attention from… the Right the Obama administration has redefined all gender-discrimination provisions throughout federal law to now include [same-gender] individuals thereby obviating the need to negotiate with Congress for religious-liberty protections as the price of passing new provisions related to [such individuals].

Gender issues are the civil rights struggle of our time we religious fanatics are the bigoted transgressors and accommodation or even tolerance of us would be immoral. Thus spake the Left.

And the new “Right”? Even when meeting with evangelical leaders in June the nominee studiously avoided addressing the issue of religious liberty save for the tangential issue of churches’ right to endorse candidates. His convention acceptance speech contained nary a trace of G-d or faith or liberty or any “values” issue (omitting any pro-life reference for the first time since Roe v. Wade). One much-celebrated speech derided the “fake culture wars” and was met with applause. The boos were reserved for another speaker’s call to vote one’s conscience.

Not for naught do longtime veterans of those very real culture wars like Ms. Gallagher and David French agree that the nominee “is going to throw social issues under the bus. Indeed he already has.” And with the capture of the Republican Party and a segment of the conservative movement (though thankfully not most of its best and brightest) now complete so has it.

The supports are falling the illusions bursting one by one. But are we paying attention? —