The devil's own trick

Elizabeth Scalia writes that there is a

sense of everyone having their own pair of jackboots (one named “victimhood” and the other “righteousness”) and being all-too-willing to make a march on someone.

She is referring to Sarah Palin, who marched on Peggy Noonan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Washington D.C.

is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.

Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered. They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don't—and of course they can't, being Catholic, and nuns—they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw "Philomena," suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don't see the form as meaningless; they know it's not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.

This is the great political failure of Progressivism. They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting of conservative groups—all these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

They call it rage. But it feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you'd lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

Back to Elizabeth Scalia:

Apparently admitting even small errors has become a sign of weakness, something the “other side” might see and exploit, so we must be always right, and therefore never wrong

Fight for America, by all means. Engage, passionately, every day, if you like — observe, critique, organize, and even snark a bit, now and then. But don’t give up your humanity for her, because nations only last for as long as they last, and then they are gone. If, while fighting for this one, you become incapable of seeing the human person before you (who is equally beloved of the creator) you will have gained the world and lost your soul in the process.

Which is precisely what Christ Jesus warned against, and is the devil’s own trick. Every time.