The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.\u00a0 Within 150 years these seedlings had spread to become the basis of the most powerful, most productive nation ever to exist.\u00a0 By 1900 it had become a continental power that had harnessed great scientific and technological innovations to become a world power.\u00a0 By 2000 it was the global hegemon, with no other nation even daring to pretend parity with the United States of America.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later this country is much diminished.\u00a0 And almost none of the change has to do with military might or technological capability.\u00a0 We still have wonder weapons and a nuclear arsenal.\u00a0 We have the most advanced information technology systems including the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and data acquisition.<\/p>\n
What we have lost is our identity.\u00a0 The Left has been on a campaign to destroy the myth of America for the last seventy years and I think they\u2019ve been almost wholly successful.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I\u2019ll arbitrarily assign 1900 as the zenith of American civilization.\u00a0 This convenient date, more or less, starts the \u201cAmerican Century\u201d and the first decade was Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s presidency.\u00a0 I would say this was when American morale was at its highest point.\u00a0 We were respected and envied around the world and our self-regard was very high.\u00a0 And at the same time, we were still a very self-reliant place.\u00a0 People were expected to support themselves and government had no place in micro-managing our lives and finances.\u00a0 From our point of view there was no government safety net and poverty was only one economic panic away.\u00a0 But Americans depended on themselves to survive.<\/p>\n
And this was doable.\u00a0 America truly was the land of opportunity.\u00a0 Everywhere you looked there were great ventures building bridges, railroads, telephone systems, electrical infrastructure; all the systems needed for a modern civilization.\u00a0 There was work to do for anyone willing to do it.\u00a0 And we considered ourselves a moral people.\u00a0 We had police and courts that made sure that everyone lived according to the laws that each state enforced.\u00a0 And every man could be judged by a jury of his peers.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t perfect but it seemed like a reasonably fair system.\u00a0 And we had representative government.\u00a0 We got to vote for our presidents and congressional representatives.\u00a0 Well, not women.\u00a0 We were still sane back then and kept them in the home.\u00a0 That madness was still twenty years in the future.\u00a0 Funny how that innovation seems to track with the end of American greatness.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n
And most importantly, we hadn\u2019t gotten involved in a European War at all up to that point.\u00a0 Sure we slapped their hands if they interfered in the Western Hemisphere; Monroe Doctrine and all that.\u00a0 But we were smart enough not to stick our noses into European quagmires.\u00a0 We left that to the British.<\/p>\n
But now?\u00a0 Well, we\u2019re mired in conflicts all over the Middle East and even Ukraine.\u00a0 We rattle our sabers at China, Russia and Iran constantly.\u00a0 We meddle in the elections of half the planet, spending clandestine money to rig elections and decide what cultural values we will permit \u201cdemocracies\u201d to have.<\/p>\n
And we\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 These educators and politicians have labeled our society racist, sexist, bigoted and immoral.\u00a0 And worse still, a whole generation has been brainwashed into believing it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 This has single-handedly dropped the United States into the second tier of nations economically.\u00a0 And it has devastated the morale of the whole country.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So where do we go from here?\u00a0 If we looked for examples we have Rome.\u00a0 A great and proud people expanded under the leadership of wise rulers but then allowed foreign wars to turn their Republic into an Empire.\u00a0 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\u00a0 no pretense of an end to the forever wars.<\/p>\n
That looks very much like what we are seeing planned by the Left, only on a global scale.\u00a0 Now Trump is trying to reverse the picture.\u00a0 He is taking steps to deal with each of the problems; wars, outsourced manufacturing, global corporations, hordes of illegal immigrants and culture war.\u00a0 And we\u2019re even seeing some small progress from his efforts.<\/p>\n
But can he turn it around?\u00a0 When the Gracchi Brothers or Julius Caesar took the side of the plebians in Rome they were assassinated and the Empire rolled on.\u00a0 So we\u2019ve never seen this trend from Republic to Empire reversed.\u00a0 Of course I\u2019d like it to be so.\u00a0 The ends of Republics aren\u2019t fun times to witness firsthand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.\u00a0 Within 150 years these seedlings had spread<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[4310,276,16],"class_list":["post-32707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-trump","tag-global-american-empire","tag-rome","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n