Fun Times to Witness Firsthand

The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.  Within 150 years these seedlings had spread to become the basis of the most powerful, most productive nation ever to exist.  By 1900 it had become a continental power that had harnessed great scientific and technological innovations to become a world power.  By 2000 it was the global hegemon, with no other nation even daring to pretend parity with the United States of America.

Twenty-five years later this country is much diminished.  And almost none of the change has to do with military might or technological capability.  We still have wonder weapons and a nuclear arsenal.  We have the most advanced information technology systems including the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and data acquisition.

What we have lost is our identity.  The Left has been on a campaign to destroy the myth of America for the last seventy years and I think they’ve been almost wholly successful.  Because it is this myth that provided us with the power that allowed us to perform all the miracles we have seen over the last century and more of our civilizational highpoint.  I’ll arbitrarily assign 1900 as the zenith of American civilization.  This convenient date, more or less, starts the “American Century” and the first decade was Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.  I would say this was when American morale was at its highest point.  We were respected and envied around the world and our self-regard was very high.  And at the same time, we were still a very self-reliant place.  People were expected to support themselves and government had no place in micro-managing our lives and finances.  From our point of view there was no government safety net and poverty was only one economic panic away.  But Americans depended on themselves to survive.

And this was doable.  America truly was the land of opportunity.  Everywhere you looked there were great ventures building bridges, railroads, telephone systems, electrical infrastructure; all the systems needed for a modern civilization.  There was work to do for anyone willing to do it.  And we considered ourselves a moral people.  We had police and courts that made sure that everyone lived according to the laws that each state enforced.  And every man could be judged by a jury of his peers.  It wasn’t perfect but it seemed like a reasonably fair system.  And we had representative government.  We got to vote for our presidents and congressional representatives.  Well, not women.  We were still sane back then and kept them in the home.  That madness was still twenty years in the future.  Funny how that innovation seems to track with the end of American greatness.  Oh well.

And most importantly, we hadn’t gotten involved in a European War at all up to that point.  Sure we slapped their hands if they interfered in the Western Hemisphere; Monroe Doctrine and all that.  But we were smart enough not to stick our noses into European quagmires.  We left that to the British.

But now?  Well, we’re mired in conflicts all over the Middle East and even Ukraine.  We rattle our sabers at China, Russia and Iran constantly.  We meddle in the elections of half the planet, spending clandestine money to rig elections and decide what cultural values we will permit “democracies” to have.

And we’ve allowed the education of our children to undermine the belief in the fairness and morality of American laws and institutions that have stood us in good stead for over two hundred years.  These educators and politicians have labeled our society racist, sexist, bigoted and immoral.  And worse still, a whole generation has been brainwashed into believing it’s true.

They’ve also empowered the leading corporations to outsource almost all the manufacturing jobs that formerly supported a thriving middle class to foreign shores where labor prices are impossibly low.  This has single-handedly dropped the United States into the second tier of nations economically.  And it has devastated the morale of the whole country.  And now the Left has tried to finish off the middle class by flooding the country with tens of millions of third-world refugees to compete for the few jobs that are left at the lowest wage imaginable.

So where do we go from here?  If we looked for examples we have Rome.  A great and proud people expanded under the leadership of wise rulers but then allowed foreign wars to turn their Republic into an Empire.  And that Empire turned its back on the small farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic and turned to slave labor to enrich the senatorial class and changed the army into a profession with  no pretense of an end to the forever wars.

That looks very much like what we are seeing planned by the Left, only on a global scale.  Now Trump is trying to reverse the picture.  He is taking steps to deal with each of the problems; wars, outsourced manufacturing, global corporations, hordes of illegal immigrants and culture war.  And we’re even seeing some small progress from his efforts.

But can he turn it around?  When the Gracchi Brothers or Julius Caesar took the side of the plebians in Rome they were assassinated and the Empire rolled on.  So we’ve never seen this trend from Republic to Empire reversed.  Of course I’d like it to be so.  The ends of Republics aren’t fun times to witness firsthand.