What do Americans want? Apparently most of them do not want open borders or gun confiscation. They do not want taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners. They don’t want bans on fracking and plastic straws, nor electric vehicle mandates, nor reparations for slavery.

These are all positions that Kamala Harris recently supported. But now that she is trying to appeal to voters in a presidential election, she has abandoned them all and rebranded herself.

The new Harris is not a radical leftist but an average American: a gun owner who would shoot any intruder in her home, tough on border security, protective of fracking rights and America’s energy independence, a champion of the free market. She has dodged the question about reparations. And she laughs at the absurdity of taxpayers funding transgender surgery for illegals.

Vice President Harris’s transformation is more than just an insincere display by an opportunistic politician. It is a measure of just how unpopular the radical-leftist policies that her political class have been forcing on Americans really are.

Leftist leaders who have worked to, in Barack Obama’s words, “fundamentally transform America” have tried to mainstream a passel of truly abhorrent positions: limitless abortion, unrestricted immigration, support for even violent “racial justice,” bizarre men accessing women’s bathrooms, drag queens in public spaces, perverse pornographic materials for schoolkids, ever expanding government overreach into our private lives, economy-crushing regulations, clampdowns on free speech—the list goes on. Somehow this has increasingly become the Democratic Party line. And more and more Americans are waking up to just how extreme and ridiculous it is. Even lifelong Democrats are abandoning the party.

Is the backlash against leftist extremism signaling a return to conservatism in America?

A lot of people hope so, even believe so. But let’s be honest: You don’t have to be a right-winger to acknowledge that leftist elites have jumped the shark.

How conservative is America becoming, really?

Progressive: the New Conservative

In an effort to reach disenfranchised leftists, the Republican National Convention gave a prime-time speaking slot to a pro-abortion rapper. “My name is Amber Rose,” she told Republican delegates on July 16, sporting tattoos of her two boys’ names, Bash and Slash, across her forehead.

“I’m a model and entrepreneur …” she said. “I’m here tonight to tell you, no matter your political background, that the best chance we have to give our babies a better life is to elect Donald Trump, president of the United States. … I watched all the rallies and I started meeting so many of you, his red-hat-wearing supporters. I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people. This is where I belong.”

Rose has said she can support Trump because he is not “very conservative” after all, since he is “pro-choice.” Many Republicans were happy that a left-wing celebrity like Rose would endorse Trump over Harris. But her receiving a Republican convention prime-time speaking slot well illustrates just how much this party has changed.

There is a saying in America that it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. The Republican National Convention supplied ample proof of this truth.

Twenty years ago, Republicans were signing abortion bans into law and pushing for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as “the union of a man and a woman.” Today’s Republican Party has officially dropped its opposition to homosexual “marriage” and its decades-long push for a federal abortion ban. Their new policy platform is one of the greatest defeats conservatives have suffered at the hands of Republicans. These issues alienate people like Rose, so Donald Trump and party leaders abandoned them in a bid to gain more votes and expand support for more-pressing issues like closing the border and rebuilding the economy.

The 2024 Republican platform opposes late-term abortions and pledges to keep men out of women’s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex-change surgeries, and stop taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transitions. These are the moral fights Republicans are willing to pick today. That means they have already surrendered all the moral territory up to these bizarre, extremist positions.

To fight these evils, many Republicans have made common cause with transgenders like Bruce “Kaitlyn” Jenner, who also opposes men competing in women’s sports and sex-change operations for children. They want to prove that Democrats are so radical that even the “moderate” transgenders oppose them. But giving Jenner a platform on Fox News normalizes men dressing and acting like women—a position that, 20 years ago, only the most fringe, radical Democrats believed in. Today, even “Make America Great Again” Republicans will accept transgenders in their party as long as they don’t abuse children.

The media constantly portray pro-Trump Republicans as far-right extremists. This is delusional. Actually, the current Republican Party is not much different from the Democratic Party of 20 years ago. The whole of American society is accepting leftist views; Republicans are just moving a bit slower than Democrats.

The Culture War

While the political battles between Democrats and Republicans are as fierce and bitter as they have ever been, on many fronts the culture war in America has already been decided.

Bestselling author Mark Steyn has warned that a conservative government cannot exist in a leftist culture. “Liberals [meaning leftists] expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November—and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference,” Steyn wrote for the New York Post back in 2014, before Donald Trump entered politics. “Culture trumps politics—which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why 30 million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are ‘natural allies’ of the Republican Party.”

According to a recent Gallup poll on moral issues, U.S. adults are likelier than ever to see abortion, suicide and polygamy as morally acceptable. The latest polls indicate that 7 percent of Americans now identify as lesbian, homosexual, transgender or queer. This number has risen dramatically in recent years, especially among young people—a stunning success for sexual deviants who have been targeting children for years. Polls also show that a quarter of these Americans are Republican. So Donald Trump can potentially boost his share of the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election by 2 percent by dropping opposition to same-sex “marriage” from the Republican Party platform.

Unlike leftists, Trump is not endorsing same-sex “marriage” because he wants to fundamentally transform society. He has accepted that society has already been fundamentally transformed, so he is doing whatever he needs to do to remain popular enough to win reelection. In a democracy, the politics reflects the populace.

Donald Trump is popular because he has promised to protect America’s border, secure America’s elections, and revitalize America’s economy. He will also say enough about God to attract religious voters. But the Republican Party isn’t about to start trumpeting a message about biblical moral virtues. People simply do not want to hear it.

There is no longer a cultural battle in America between conservative and liberal. The field has shifted. Today’s fight is between the moral center left and the insane radical left.

Dangerous Agreement

Mute all the snarling political rhetoric and personal nastiness, and you can begin to see that in some fundamental ways, the Republican and Democrat party platforms have strange similarities. “Concerning the broad contours of public policy, there is a disturbing convergence,” George Will wrote after this summer’s rnc. “Programmatically, the parties are more aligned than they have been since the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower caused Republicans to accept the permanency of the New Deal’s legacy: a transfer-payment state (Social Security, soon to include Medicare and much more) and federal supervision of the economy. … Both parties favor significant expansions of government’s control of economic activity and the distribution of wealth. Both promise to leave unchanged the transfer-payment programs (Social Security, Medicare) that are plunging toward insolvency, and driving unsustainable national indebtedness” (Washington Post, July 18).

No politician would find success in America today by scaling back promises on entitlements and promoting fiscal conservativism. The astronomical national debt—already $35 trillion; climbing another $1 trillion every 100 days; on track to blow past $57 trillion in a decade—isn’t even being discussed.

America already pays over $2 billion in interest on this sum every day. Next year it could pay well over $1 trillion in interest alone. Compare that with the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2025 budget request of $849.8 billion. Historians warn that debt interest exceeding military spending is a death knell for empires.

Still, “the country’s fiscal trajectory merits only sporadic mentions by the major-party presidential nominees, let alone a serious plan to address it,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “Instead, the candidates are tripping over each other to make expensive promises to voters” (September 17). Most Americans admit the federal debt is too high, but nobody is willing to make any personal sacrifices to rectify this nation-destroying problem. And they always appreciate more benefits.

Now, consider how these cultural and economic troubles are linked.

One major reason the government is so deep in debt is that programs like Social Security, Medicare and a myriad of welfare policies aim to fulfill societal functions that used to be the duty of the family: caring for the sick, the aged and fatherless children. Family responsibility has been nationalized. This is economically unsustainable, and has brought many curses in its train.

Megabillionaire Elon Musk is one of the few prominent people warning that America’s debt is an existential threat. He has come out in full-throated support of Donald Trump, and Trump has pledged to place Musk at the head of a new Department of Governmental Efficiency. Surely any effort to reduce wasteful government spending would be a welcome step. Yet Musk completely avoids the cultural issues that have made the debt a problem in the first place.

Musk is a prime example of a left-of-center liberal abandoned by the radicalization of the Democratic Party. He plainly recognizes the evils of coercive transgenderism and leftist clampdowns on speech, but he is no cultural conservative.

This new hero of the right is so concerned about global population decline that he encourages people to have as many children as possible even if it means creating fatherless children through in-vitro fertilization. He has sired 12 children with three different women. He can well afford to care for these children financially, but he apparently forgets that half of all federal spending goes to these entitlement programs that could and should be handled by strong, stable families. Until America’s broken family structure is fixed, the nation will continue toward bankruptcy. But it seems Americans, both Democrat and Republican, have forfeited that battle permanently.

God’s View of America

Gerald Flurry, the Trumpet’s editor in chief, has shown that America today parallels ancient Israel during the eighth century b.c.under the reign of Jeroboam ii. In fact, that history, recorded in the section of the Bible called the former prophets, is a direct prophecy of our day, and Donald Trump is fulfilling the role of a modern-day Jeroboam. (This is all explained in Mr. Flurry’s free book America Under Attack. Request a free copy.)

Before Jeroboam ii’s rule, Israel was in terrible straits, bitter affliction. But God took pity and reversed the situation, and He did so through this king. Under Jeroboam, Israel enjoyed a period of unparalleled prosperity. The kingdom’s borders spread, enemies retreated, trade flourished, and the population grew. Jeroboam “restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel …” (2 Kings 14:25). Archaeological evidence has confirmed the accuracy of this biblical account.

The financial and physical wealth Jeroboam ii oversaw is astounding. Yet the spiritual condition of the kingdom was appalling. God didn’t bless Israel because of the people’s righteousness or the king’s righteousness; in fact, Jeroboam “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” (verse 24). The material wealth was a total inversion of the kingdom’s spiritual state.

The Prophet Amos, who wrote in that period, revealed that the nation’s success made people prideful and overconfident. Cultish, idolatrous practices abounded (e.g. Amos 5:21-27). The rich exploited the poor and glutted themselves on their luxuries (Amos 6:1-6). The prophets Hosea and Joel also condemned the materialism and self-indulgence of that time.

No, it was not for any repentance or religious awakening that God showed such mercy on the nation—but because it was so close to its end! God did not want to see the name of Israel blotted out (2 Kings 14:26).

How aptly prophetic of America today. In God’s view, we are a sinful nation. The materialism, selfishness and greed, the casualness about lying and deceit, the acceptance of corruption, the sickness in our families, the surrender to promiscuity, homosexuality and transgenderism, the indifferent spirit of “whatever suits you, just leave my kids alone,” the infatuation with darkness and perversion—these are sins for which God is deeply mournful and angry. These sins invite curses.

Other prophecies foretell a time of terrible curses on America—and we are already living through the early stages of those curses (sidebar, page 6). The prophecy of 2 Kings shows that, amid these curses, God will give America a temporary resurgence. But it is clear that this is not because of Jeroboam’s righteousness or the nation’s righteousness—but in spite of their wickedness.

What Should You Do?

What was once considered conservative is now extreme, and what was progressive is now thought to be center right. Looking squarely at these facts, one thing is clear: You cannot use society’s standards as your measuring tool. Those standards are constantly and rapidly shifting. And if you want to feel good about yourself, there are plenty of deviants to compare yourself with.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.”

The marvelous solution God offers is in His enduring Word, which spells out His unchanging standard. Keep your eyes fixed on that. Measure yourself against that. Strive to live by that, and expect to have to work hard to resist the current sweeping the rest of the world past you.

The curses you are witnessing in America and the world are more than the effects of rebellion against God, they are the prophesied consequences leading to the end of this age, and the prophesied signs of a godly new era that will begin when Jesus Christ returns to Earth to govern it directly. God has spelled out in prophecy what we can expect in these days. As you watch His forecasts coming to pass before your eyes, recognize His hand—and use that as a motivator. God has gone to extraordinary lengths to prophesy and then to bring these prophecies about. This is meant to lead us to Him. We cannot simply move on. God wants you to take action.

What action, exactly? A lot of Americans, frustrated and angry at the damage the radical left has done to the country, are turning to this modern-day Jeroboam ii in hopes that he can reverse the decline and save the country. Actually God says He will save the country, temporarily, through this man. The fact that Donald Trump is still standing, after all the verbal, administrative, personal, legal and physical attacks on him have failed, is stunning proof that God is going to make good on His promise.

But you must see plainly exactly what is happening. America is not on the verge of a religious awakening. The Republican Party is not going to turn the tide. God is going to save America, temporarily, through Jeroboam.

The whole reason God is doing this is to give us one last chance to learn a crucial lesson. He does not want you to invest your hope in a man or a political party but in Him. He does not want you seeking salvation through the political process but through spiritual repentance and renewal.

Looking at His perfect standard, comparing yourself to the goodness of God and of Jesus Christ, you will begin to see the evil in your own heart. Focus on God’s standard, and the goodness of God will lead you to repentance (Romans 2:4).

And then, look at where you are hearing God’s voice from. Where is the truth of these prophecies coming from? Who is teaching you the truth by which to measure yourself? The world is full of enticements. Actually trusting God requires testing the spirits and avoiding deception. Satan muddies the waters. All these alternatives—which is the one that God Himself is behind?

Heed God’s warning, and listen to His voice. Recognize in these events the hard, plain truth: There is no hope in man. Put your hope and trust in God.