The Paradoxes and Consequences of Liberty and Prosperity
The age of the Golden Mean is long past.
How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
That stands as a metaphor for America’s decline.
Here’s another one: The soil in which the seeds of decline were to be planted was broken in the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The seeds were planted and nourished by “leaders”, “intellectuals”, and “activists” from TR’s time to the present. The poisonous crop burst blossomed brightly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, but it had not yet engulfed the land. It continued to spread slowly (and often unheeded) for several decades before racing across the land in recent years. Its poisonous vines are now strangling liberty and prosperity.
These are the paradoxes of liberty and prosperity: Without a moral foundation they lead to their own destruction.
If you value liberty, you do not countenance speech and actions that subvert it. If you value prosperity, you must be careful not to let it breed the kind of idleness (of mind and body) that gives rise to speech and actions that subvert liberty — and thus prosperity.
The Founders understood those things. They believed that the Constitution would preserve liberty and foster prosperity because they believed that Americans would remain religious and moral. They did not believe that Americans would undermine liberty by being soft on crime, by feeding masses (and elites) at the public trough (and at the expense of taxpayers), or by accommodating foreign aggression. They did not believe that Americans would countenance such things, nor that political leaders would suborn and join efforts to ostracize, suppress, and oppress those Americans who oppose such things.
The Founders, sadly, were wrong. The did not and could not foresee these events (and many more not mentioned):
A goodly fraction of Americans would spurn religion and become morally slack and complacent about the preservation of liberty.
Freedom of speech and assembly would be turned against liberty, to foster crime, lack of personal responsibility, and the accommodation of deadly enemies, within and without.
Firearms, always omnipresent in America for useful purposes, would become violent, murderous extensions of a growing tendency to toward psychological instability in a morally rootless populace.
Governments, political “elites”, and corporations would celebrate and reward (or fail to punish) persons based on the color of their skin (as long as it isn’t white or “yellow”)*, their pro-constitutional political views (which “exonerate” many whites), and their sex (preferably female or confused).
Abortion would become legal and support for abortion would be openly and boastfully proclaimed by political leaders and “elites”. Unborn human beings would be disposed of as inconveniences and treated like garbage.
Parents would lose control of the upbringing of their children, who might be cajoled into psychologically devastating treatments and surgeries by teachers and others under the rubric of “gender-affirming care”.
Women and girls would be forced to room with, shower with, and compete against males who “identify” as females (or “other”).
Intelligence and superior (non-athletic) skills would be denounced as unfair and “white supremacist” (with Asians counting as white).
Lawlessness and pathological deviancy would be rewarded (or not punished).
Leading politicians and “activists” would bay and howl for the confiscation of arms, under the rubric of “gun control”, when the underlying problem isn’t gun ownership by moral and mental depravity.
Political “leaders” would enable and allow a virtual invasion of the country, despite its negative consequences for the “little people” whom those “leaders” and other “elites” claim to champion.
The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo-science to force Americans into isolation, disrupt the economy, and burden the poorest Americans because of a virus that would have run its course naturally and less destructively than had it been combated scientifically.
The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo science to make Americans (especially poor Americans) poorer in an unnecessary and futile quest to “save the planet” from the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and other productive substances that the majority of the world’s populace will not refrain from using. (Regarding the state of science, see Maggie Kelly’s, “Professors Publish ‘Controversial’ Paper Defending Merit in Science”, The College Fix, May 2, 2023.)
Prosperity — a fruit of liberty — would foster the moral softness and the mental laxity that gives rise to addle-pated schemes such as those outlined above.
Vast numbers of Americans — having been indoctrinated in public schools, in left-dominated universities, and by the Democrat-allied media — would believe and subscribe to such schemes, which are made palatable by the application of double-speak labels to them (e.g., “defense of the homeland”, “combating misinformation”, “following the science”).
Government officials, including law-enforcement officers, would collude with and encourage the press and other purveyors of “information” to distort and suppress facts about much that is alluded to above, to discredit and hound a president (Trump) who opposed them, and to help elect and protect possibly the most corrupt president in America’s history (Biden) because it is through him that the left’s agenda is being implemented.
All of this (and more) would occur because almost-absolute power would accrue to the morally (and sometimes venally) corrupt politicians and their powerful enablers who advance and enforce such schemes.
Had the Founders foreseen what later generations of Americans would make of the liberty and prosperity bequeathed them, what might the Founders have done differently? It doesn’t matter. What matters now is what happens next.
In the best of possible worlds, there would be a voluntary return to something much closer to the America that the Founders envisioned. (Even a return to the post-New Deal 1940s and 1950s would do.) If such a return were in the cards, it would show up in the statements of political elites — chief among the being Democrats in government and their highly placed power-brokers, donors, and “intellectuals”.
Those statements would have to come when there is not an election at hand, which is when leftists often start making moderate noises so as to lull independents and even some nominal Republicans into voting for them. (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are masters of hypocrisy.) But aside from a few lonely voices (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.), it is unlikely that the Democrat Party will actually reject the leftist dogmas that have sundered the nation and are threatening to impoverish it.
Might rejection come when enough “minority” voters and women have had enough of “enlightened” policies and their economic and social consequences? Old habits are hard to break, and it would take a major turnaround in voting habits to yield the kind of wholesale rejection of Democrats that would drive them from power, let alone cause them to change their spots.
I don’t mean something like the turnaround in the House of Representatives following the elections of 1994 and 2010 (GOP gains of 12 and 15 percent). I mean something like the turnaround of 1930-1932 (total Democrat gains of 91 percent). In the wake of that turnaround, Democrats went on to control the House for the next 60 years (except for post-World War II reaction of two years).
But the mass rejection of the GOP in 1930 and 1932 was a consequence of an economic upheaval, the Great Depression, that hit vast numbers of Americans and hit them suddenly and hard where it hurts: in the pocketbook. The policies that are now engulfing the land, onerous as they may be, are insidious by comparison — and are practically ignored or touted as “good things” by most media (including “entertainment” media).
Moreover, “woke” America is the laughing-stock of its enemies. And too weak to stare them down. The growing unwillingness and inability of America’s “leaders” to deter and fight enemies** really doesn’t matter to those enemies. In the end, the will to resist aggression and to accede to the wishes of aggressors depends on the will of the populace to stand together against aggression. That will, in turn, depends on broad (if not unanimous) allegiance to the survival and success of the nation.
There is no longer such an allegiance. The left hates what America long was, and will not relent until that America is destroyed. The right hates what America is rapidly becoming at the hands of the left. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I used to believe that an event that threatened the lives and livelihoods of all Americans would re-unite them. I no longer believe that.
I now believe that a national divorce — a negotiated partition of the nation — is a dire necessity. (Its precursor, a concerted secession, is legal under the Constitution.) It would allow a large fraction of Americans, perhaps half of them, to break free of the economic and social oppressions that emanate from Washington. It would also allow those same Americans to defend themselves against invaders from the south and overseas enemies instead of wasting their treasure on the left’s destructive agenda.
Absent a national divorce, everyone will go down with a sinking ship. Across the land there will be declining material comfort, rising criminality, rampant social acrimony, the suppression of views that threaten the grip of the ruling class, the oppression of persons who express those views, and a fascistic arrangement between politicians and favored corporations — those that subscribe to the quasi-religion of “climate change” and the “wokeness” that propels schemes that put skin color, sex (or lack of it), and other personal characteristics above truth, above merit, and above the rule of law.
My apologies to readers who have seen my many other posts that deal with the subjects of this one. I had to get this off my chest. I will now move on to other subjects.
* Proponents of anti-white discrimination might feel justified because some Founders held slaves, and slavery certainly played a key role in anti-black discrimination — some of it state-enforced. But if racial discrimination is wrong, why should today’s whites be victimized when none of them holds slaves and almost none of them derives any benefit from slave-holding in the distant past. “White privilege” and “white supremacy” are mere slogans that are meant to draw attention away from the fact that, on average, whites do better than blacks because whites are more intelligent than blacks.
** The so-called proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a costly and inconsequential sideshow. See, for example, this, this, and this.
For much more, browse “Blog History and Index of Posts”, especially the posts listed under America Divided; Economics and Economists; Liberty, Rights, and the Constitution; Politics, Politicians, and Government in Action; Science, Pseudoscience, and the Tools of Science; and War, Peace, and the Tools of Strategy.
Here’s a minuscule but noteworthy sample of recent posts and articles by other writers that bear on the theme of this post:
Mark Hyman, “‘Woke’ Defined”, The American Spectator, April 15, 2023
Victor Davis Hanson, “Can We Do Anything about America’s Decline?”, American Greatness, April 18, 2023
Kevin Slack, “American Despotism”, American Greatness, May 6, 2023
Dov Fischer, “The Whole Thing Stinks — And Now the Trump Farce”, The American Spectator, May 10, 2023
J.B. Shurk, “'The Official Truth': The End of Free Speech That Will End America”, Gatestone Institute, May 28, 2023
Trouble is, the National Divorce would run down the middle of most states. The Central Valley of California, where my wife is from, is much more conservative than the college town in the Southeast near where I grew up.