Do you ever find yourself wondering what America’s Founding Fathers would think of their America in 2019?
I find myself wondering if, frankly, The Constitution over which they tortured themselves has much relevancy today. And if it doesn’t, why do we spend so much energy defending it, or shredding it? Maybe it’s no longer of much use. It was written as a reaction to the subjugation of the New World Colonists to England. It was a new idea. The people, the citizens, would no longer be subjects of or owe fealty to a foreign power, or a lord or king or to a tyrannical government of its own. And for a couple of centuries it was a guide for a nation which grew to become the most powerful nation in Mankind’s long history. It worked remarkably well because its government was, at least in theory, of the people, by the people and for the people. But “the people” have become the problem.
They say all good things come to an end. In all generalities lies some truth.
Before America’s Civil War, French diplomat, political scientist and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
More recently, Maggie Thatcher put it a bit more succinctly: The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
And so, here we are, a bit more than that 200 years into The Great Experiment. America has expended an ocean of its most precious blood, sweat and tears, building this nation. But among many there is great dissatisfaction with the results. The irony is that today’s dissatisfaction is to be found primarily among those who have benefited most from the least amount of effort! The young simply want what they want, and want it now. They no longer seem to believe they can stand on their own two feet, work hard, and get what they want on their own. One senses they have no desire to embrace America’s traditional moral sentiment: get ahead by working hard and being good.
Perhaps it’s not their fault. It’s how our culture has evolved. Who wants to work hard when you can “get by” on your wits?
Americans can’t get enough of puppies, kittens and kiddies. We coddle them. Spoil them rotten. Combine that with the craftiness of spoiled brats in getting what they want, and tradition and responsibility fly right out the window.
So we now have a raft of young politicians tossing caution and even the slightest hint of fiscal practicality to the wind, openly promising free college, free health care, free abortions and whatever else they can think of to generate attention and votes. A kind of new age melange of socialism, capitalism, progressivism, globalism and democracy.
Perhaps we should think of it as Neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism where the Left attempts to impose not so much class division by wealth – poor versus rich – but now by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, faith and any other way they can invent to divide us. But the division is not simply to put us in neat little boxes, it’s intended to turn one box against another.
Our Constitution was not created to handle this kind of problem. It was assumed at the start that America would never be over-populated. That we would always need more people. It would never have occurred to the Founders that their invention would ever be populated by close to 350,000,000 people, many of whom are not citizens but who receive many of the same benefits, and in many cases more, than its citizens. I suspect they would be horrified to see thousands of homeless people living in squalor, many of them veterans. They would be horrified by the drug-infested tent cities. Their Constitution was not created to deal with this. This was a thing of Roman demise.
This generation’s anxiety-driven need to be inclusive has overwhelmed their common sense, assuming they had some in the first place. They demand inclusiveness for every division and subdivision of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and deviancy except...except...for traditional white Americans. Those whose progenitors created the freedoms we take for granted, those who fought to maintain these very freedoms today’s generations enjoy, and now abuse.
What would the Founders think about free college where the young are sent to be indoctrinated in anti-traditional American sentiment? And beyond college? After indoctrination, why would a graduate feel any debt to the country which he grew up in, and now despises? Will he develop a desire to serve his country in some positive way? Embark on a useful career? Start a good family? Buy a house and become a useful member of a community?
More likely many will gravitate to becoming political activists. Or anti-facist fascists. Or members of the army of so-called journalists — which is pretty much the same as political activism — very few of whom seem to be contributing anything positive beyond partisan politics. Does America really need another journalist? Purveyors of trivia and sowers of dissent? Does America need one more lawyer? Working like mice to chew loopholes in The Constitution. Or doll-faced tv talking heads carping with that perpetually adolescent voice they all seem to have adopted?
Almost predictably, America’s wonderful Constitution has become the very instrument of its demise. The freedoms which the Constitution guarantees have enabled our greatest institutions to be infiltrated by the very enemy of that Constitution. Leftists and their obsession with Marxism have virtually taken over America’s legal system, institutions of learning, medical, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, entertainment, journalism, publishing, and daily chip away at our manufacturing, technological, agricultural, defense, transportation and even sports industries.
Virtually every potential failure of The Great Experiment can be traced to the simple fact that there are now far too many who have no underpinning of or love for traditional American values. It is as alien to aliens as aliens are to America’s laws.
Our politicians have failed the nation. Law, applied unequally as it is now, has failed the nation. Today’s culture, without morals, has failed to lift our spirits. The Great Experiment is not exactly turning out great except for a small number of the mega-wealthy. A handful of the mega-wealthy wielding their power over the rest of our 350,000,000 citizens isn’t what the Founders hoped for in this Great Experiment, is it?
By opening our borders and treasury to millions upon millions of immigrants from countries whose cultures are incompatible with traditional America, we now have a nation so divided, with a plethora of industries devoted to further the divide, that we have passed the point of any hope for assimilation. We hear a lot of blather about “bringing us all together.” Claptrap. It’s clear the more we talk, the wider grows the gap.
Tocqueville warned that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny by pushing the noble goal of equality to a radical degree. Is this not exactly what we are experiencing now? Tearing down statues. Renaming places. Labeling anyone who disagrees with the new tyrants as racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and a plethora of other Marxist-inspired epithets.
If despotism were to take root in a modern democracy, opined Tocqueville, it could be a much more pernicious version than the oppression which existed under Roman emperors or tyrants of the past, who could only exert oppressive influence on a relatively small cluster of people at a time. In contrast, despotism under democracy could see "a multitude of men", uniformly alike, equal, "constantly circling for petty pleasures", uncaring about their less fortunate fellow citizens, with the few benefiting under the will of a powerful state which would exert an immense protective power. In this, Tocqueville anticipated Hitler, Mau, Stalin et al.
Must America’s traditionalists simply accept the idea that we’ve had our 200 years, and allow our nation to continue it’s descent into whatever chaos follows the failure of a democracy? I do not believe Americans are ready for that. What to do, what to do?
No one knows a simple, quick or painless ways to change the course, or revitalize an experiment of this size and complexity. But some experiments are simply failures — not worthy of continuing. Our three branches of government are constantly at war... not just with each other but within each. After a couple of hundred years, perhaps it’s time to invent a new and better form of governing. Before the dictators leave us no options.
