Victor Davis Hanson has a wholly depressing piece in American Greatness (that’s your trigger warning) about how not-so-great America has become.
If you are prone to depression, skip it. Otherwise, it can be difficult to read but valuable in other ways, and nothing here has not been covered on our pages, just not as clearly (though some may challenge that) and aligned in one piece.
American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
He then explains the problems, their visible symptoms, and their cause – if one can be named. It is not uplifting, but if you are looking for a concentrated distillation of what ails us to ruminate on or share with others, I think you’ll find it here.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.
…
Postmodernism in our age is deadlier even than premodernism. Sexually explicit drag shows that allow the attendance of children 20 years ago would have been outlawed—by liberals worried over the trauma of the young watching performance-art simulated sex.
Now the children come last and the performers first—as ratified by the same liberals.
…
Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?
Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?
Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?
Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?
Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?
Lots of things are broken, and we would like to fix them if we can get past the idea that they are beyond fixing.
Donald Trump did some excellent work in the few years he had, and perhaps that is why the left has gone all out in his wake to undermine further the foundations such that perhaps they will be beyond repair.
I don’t think this is as bad off as we’ve ever been as a nation. The 60s were pretty nasty. Who can argue that the Civil War was not perhaps the darkest time? But that was a civil war and a different time, and like then, there is much work ahead to prevent another shooting war if one can be prevented.
The Middle Class let the elites rob them of their comfort the way you remove a toy from the arms of a sleeping child, but lately, it has been more a clumsy well-dressed oaf yanking a tablecloth out from under a fully set and served dining table. It’s all gone everywhere, there’s not much left that’s edible, and the catalyst has a sh!t-eating grin as they call you out as bad parents or racists (even if you’re not white).
Oh, and they’ve invited 20 million third-world foreigners for dessert, so you’d better get to work to pay for that.
