Quote: America has been transformed. The culture has become sordid, family life is in disarray, whole swaths of the country lie in economic and social ruins, state and municipal governments are facing bankruptcy, the schools are a disgrace, and the university has lost its way. We have failed in many ways to meet Benjamin Franklin’s challenge: we have not kept the republic.
Comment:
I do not recommend the book review I’ve taken that quotation from. Those sentences alone seem to me apt and worth quoting. I provide this URL only to give the source of the quotation.
The book being reviewed is obviously not worth reading, but the reviewer rightly points out why - it’s author mistakenly conflates the Classical Liberalism of the Founders with Progressivism/ Leftism.
He rightly concludes that “Liberalism hasn’t failed, it is being destroyed” - by Leftism.
The poison of Marxist ideology that Leftists have been injecting into our culture and institutions for the past century is what has destroyed our Republic - not the profound genius of our Founders.
In the last chapter of his 1964 book “Suicide of the West,” James Burnham (a conservative atheist, although by this time he was writing very positively about religion) characterises “liberalism” - that is, left-liberalism - as an ideology which is popular because it comforts people in the face of Western civilisation’s decline, reinterpreting its destruction as progress. I think there is something to this analysis. It also implies a vicious circle wherein more leftism creates more decline, creating more demand for leftism. My optimistic spin on this is that it suggests an opposite loop could be begun: a strong conservative leader in a Western country could reverse the decline, thereby also lessening demand for leftism. Therefore, while the quote is right so far as it goes, its phrasing seems a little too final to me.
That’s tough to assess. I’m not very familiar with British history, but Trump’s failure in this regard obviously had much to do with failing to secure re-election (by countering Democrats’ manipulations aimed at “shaping the battlefield” of the 2020 election ahead of time, and by being less inflammatory and unlikable) - that’s part of my reasoning for rooting for DeSantis this time around. The only solution I see is to build durable majorities, which means going really hard on widely popular policies (e.g., parents’ rights), not all of which will be “conservative” in some narrowly partisan sense (DeSantis can point to policies like his support for restoration of the Everglades - Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Historic Executive Order Continuing Commitment to Stewardship of Florida’s Natural Resources).
The other important facet to this, I think, is the following.
Ultimately, conservatives will always face an uphill battle if the “deep state” institutions and intellectual elites are against them. This calls for energetically cleaning house in government agencies (as Trump failed to do) and somehow standing against the left-wing capture of universities (for instance, by defunding ESG there, or leveraging the accreditation system, as DeSantis has suggested). At a more grassroots level, think tanks (AEI, the Heritage Foundation, etc.) can provide intellectual alternatives, as could, potentially, projects like UATX (https://www.uaustin.org/). A major “white pill” is the idea that the intellectual elites need not always lean left. Nowadays, I believe they lean “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” (though mostly, in practice, left-wing), but there is no inevitable reason why they could not just as well be full-on conservative. Michael Woodley of Menie and Curtis Dunkel write that “high IQ individuals are overwhelmingly leftist (i.e. egalitarian) in modern post-materialist Western countries (but not in materialist ones, such as Australia in the 1970s or modern day Brazil)” (Beyond the Cultural Mediation Hypothesis: A reply to Dutton (2013) - ScienceDirect) Woodley of Menie even originally proposed that this was because clever people are better at adapting their views to what is socially acceptable, so “[h]igh intelligence individuals only advocate leftism in cultures that are predominantly leftist in orientation.” If true, this is even better, since it suggests that a cultural shift to the right (e.g., through the construction of a stable Republican majority) could be automatically mirrored among the intellectual elites. The paper I just linked doesn’t fully endorse this second part of Woodley’s original argument, but the point that conservatism could be (re-)established as “the smart man’s ideology” remains. However, that may require dropping the casual folksiness of a Trump or Bush Jr…
If I understand correctly, Thatcher already got some of this done to some extent, as her governance was perceived as so beneficent that the whole British culture shifted right to such an extent that even the Labour Party felt compelled to adapt through “New Labour.” However, again, I am no expert on British history.
I suspect that there is no going back. Even if Trump is re-elected. He can make life better and safer for Americans, but not resurrect the constitutional Republic. It is lost. The rich and glorious culture of the West is being cancelled. What will replace it? Artificial intelligence? Borg-like beings half human half machine without individuality?
Thr culture belongs to vulgar, ugly, obscene, ruinous Leftism.
Quote:
Even when Democrats lose elections, the hegemony of liberalism [Leftism, “Progressivism”] goes virtually unchallenged. In truth, even in the political realm, liberalism has racked up victory after victory. With Obamacare’s passage, endless debt ceiling raises, open borders, and Democratic dominance in the White House with a brief four-year hiatus during Trump’s presidency (nevertheless the bureaucracy remained populated by true believers, and attacks by the permanent government greatly limited his effectiveness), liberalism’s triumphal status is impossible to deny. Outside of a few setbacks—and even then, it’s only a matter of years until its most fanatical objectives are achieved—without any coordinated effort, liberalism will continue its supremacy over American life for the foreseeable future.
Trans ideology is being taught to kindergarteners; a parasitic, deeply embedded wokeness is flowering in our institutions; and public trust is in free fall as the media push breathtaking propaganda that must be admired for its audacity. Liberalism can tout cultural conquests on virtually every front except guns. Yet, apparently near-complete domination isn’t enough—or at least the wins aren’t coming at the pace liberals desire.As our institutions continue to shove deviancy and degeneracy into our faces, the meaningful question is: Will the Right pledge to fundamentally transform the country? Unless a dramatic realignment takes place—unless Americans as a people reassert their sovereignty and discover the morality that must be present for republican government to have success—the sinews of civil society will snap.
“…unless Americans as a people assert their sovereignty…” But we have!!! We have voted 3 times to “make America great again”, in landslides.
We got Trump in '16 (by luck, the Left didn’t rig it quite well enough) and then in '20 and '22.
But by then the Left had perfected their game, and stole both of them. And will again in '24.
The idea that the voting public isn’t doing enough is insulting, when each time we do our part and vote, our vote is stolen.
Quote:
We tend to trust the assessments of the professionals in our lives, assuming that their judgment is independent, their information is factually correct and their advice well-founded.
But evidence pouring in from across the country calls those assumptions into question. The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.
Take the medical profession for example.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most medical professionals declared the mRNA “vaccines” safe, despite widespread (and admittedly understandable) ignorance about both the disease and the development of the shots themselves; even after the number of healthy young people developing myocarditis and pericarditis and collapsing was too frequent to be ignored; even after coroners and medical examiners began describing the presence of inexplicable clot-like formations in the bodies of individuals who had “died suddenly.” Many physicians were afraid to prescribe readily available drugs for patients with the virus or were afraid to admit what most of them knew from the beginning: that neither masks nor lockdowns would prevent the spread of the virus, and that both would likely be detrimental to the well-being and education of children. Their reservations were not because the scientific evidence was unclear, but because of political pressure to adhere to the preferred “narrative.”
The current transgender obsession is even worse. Physicians now deny the implications of chromosomal biology, ignore the presence of mental or emotional illness in youth identifying as transgender, prescribe puberty blockers to and even surgically mutilate minors — this despite whistleblowers across this country and others revealing how little preliminary evaluation is being done before such life-altering medical decisions are made, much less the long-term implications of those decisions. Few [doctors] want to cross swords with the activists driving the national conversation.
Educators are also losing the confidence of the public. Parents across the country are aghast, discovering that schools are teaching absurd and inappropriate gender ideology to their grade schoolers, and that frankly pornographic materials have been inserted into their children’s school libraries and curricula. (How pornographic? In multiple instances, complaining parents have been told they cannot read the materials into the records of school board meetings.) Schools have policies encouraging “gender transition” of students and hiding it from students’ parents and families. And the response of the Biden administration has been to consider investigating irate parents as possible “domestic terrorists.”
Public opinion of the legal profession has dipped even lower in light of recent revelations that the FBI and Department of Justice launched a yearslong, multimillion-dollar investigation of former President Donald Trump on the basis of allegations they knew were false and politically motivated. At the state level, the public sees “bail reform” laws in cities like New York and Milwaukee put criminals back on the streets where they are free to prey on innocent, law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile in California, retail theft is rampant and rarely prosecuted, while business owners are fleeing.
And the media? Whether broadcast, print or social, they’re notorious for their preference for “activism” over inquiry and truth. Whenever there is a preferred left-wing narrative, whether it is on climate change, the corruption of the Biden family, COVID-19 or “systemic racism,” editors are unwilling or afraid to publish alternate opinions — and even block publication of the truth.
The “polarization of America” is a running complaint. But so much of our current conflict is attributable to the collapse of the public’s trust in the institutions that support our civilization, and the professionals who control those institutions. This could be remedied if our professions replaced false compassion, activism and self-indulgent moral relativism with a renewed commitment to courage, truth and objective standards. Without them, it will not only be the public’s trust that collapses, but American society itself.
Comment:
A good article. But -
“American society” is, as the writer says, “polarized”. If wide division is a “collapse”, it has already happened.
The polarization is caused by the leftists who are injecting extremely absurd, stupid, and poisonous ideas into society. It’s never a “conversation”.
They declare it and demand submission to it.
A quote by Ayn Rand I came across recently - “it is the educational establishment (training students to believe reason is impotent) that has created this national disaster…these ideas are destroying the world…”
This morning I listed to a speech by David Horowitz in Colorado from 2 May 2023, where he objects to the continued use of the word “liberal” in referring to the contemporary American left. I think his point is solid, so we should quit using that euphemism and call them what they are. I haven’t used the word liberal in that context for many years now. The speech was in part to promote his latest book, from early January, The Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be The Last.
In the speech, he also comments on the weak wills and losing positions of Colorado Republicans. at 49:12 He says Heidi Ganahl lost the Colorado governor election because of her rigid anti-abortion stand (exceptions only for rape, incest, health of the mother* “or fetus”) - at 50:30 David says “The Republican Party is not a church” - at 50:42, “You just can’t come out with such extreme views unless you want to lose elections”
*This is of course the position on exceptions supported by many religious conservatives who insist that a conceptus is a fully human being in the eyes of God and the rights that He has bestowed. But it’s always stuck me as so obviously hypocritical or contradictory (and unphilosophical), to allow those exceptions for rape or incest under their premises of divinely granted rights. I could understand their exception for health of the mother (though that could be interpreted very broadly by pro-abortion advocates), but Heidi Ganahl threw in the ridiculous extension “health of the fetus”. “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, health of the mother and health of the fetus.”
One question: If the fetus is inevitably going to mean a child born to suffer pain and disability incurably, wouldn’t it be best to abort it? The right moral choice?
“One question: … The right moral choice?” I agree with you. As in the case of my cousin’s grandchild, born with serious handicaps (missing half an arm and an entire leg) very possibly as a result of his mother’s covid vaccination. But the fundamentalist Lutheran family considered him “God’s child”. I mentioned Ganahl’s quote about “health of the fetus” because it seemed like a strange way of putting it, but also because it’s inconsistent with the “God’s child” way of thinking. But by that standard, why wouldn’t a child conceived from rape or incest also be God’s child? I agree with Horowitz’s position that the Republicans need to fashion a position on abortion more in line with a national consensus, which seems to be something like allowance during the first 91 days of pregnancy.
