Posted on 07/23/2015 2:17:15 PM PDT by IChing
Entities have identities. To identify a nation, or anything else, is to define it. That is, it must have specific limits — one must be able to tell what it is, largely by ruling out what it is not, implicitly and explicitly. In the case of a country, there must be territorial boundaries. It also has have additional characteristics to distinguish it from other countries.
That’s where America went wrong, and dead-ended. In trying to be all things to all people everywhere around the globe (not so much a place, necessarily, but an idea, of limitless opportunity and diversity), we have dissolved ourselves right out of existence. Paradoxically, we’ve reached our limit on the timeline of history by not observing the limits which would allow us to continue as a nation.
It seems to the point where any person anywhere on the planet may be declared to be “in the true spirit of what it is to be an American,” while anyone else who might dare to question that claim is suspected of a hate-crime.
When everything is up for grabs, you do not have identity. You have an imaginary, formless jump-ball with no surface rubber or skin, a dry vapor, on a court with no boundaries in a game with no rules. Chaos.
We have elected leaders who see the very idea of border and interior immigration enforcement as either immorally oppressive, or an undesirable impediment to commerce and to generational transfer-payments (or all of the above), and so they refuse to enforce immigration law to the point where our territorial identity has about vanished.
These same leaders give speeches in foreign lands, proclaiming themselves foremost to be citizens of the world. The overall message is that national identity and integrity/sovereignty is something to be eschewed, in favor of a pan-global universalism wherein the United Nations is the governing body, and anyone holding out loyalties to a particular nation is a backward bigot.
Our eventual demise was baked into our founding documents from the beginning, really. The Enlightenment gave us: “…all men are created equal.” Nowadays, it’s all people (women too). Therefore, everyone on the planet has just as much right as anyone else to proclaim themselves citizens of wherever. The concept of American identity, then, becomes more and more meaningless, because if everyone everywhere has equal opportunity and identity, then comparatively no one really has any actual opportunity, nor any particular identity which can be verified. Why bother, then, with borders or distinct cultures?
In the early-stage Enlightenment decades during and after America’s founding, the men who made the rules still firmly believed in racial hierarchy and ethnic nationalism, despite their professed egalitarian ideals. For better or worse, all white men were ostensibly deemed to be created equal; black men were not really considered men, in the same way that a donkey is not a horse, even though the two share enough DNA to be able to produce offspring — which is a mule, not a horse. I’m just stating facts here, regarding history, biology, identity, and our founders’ beliefs.
My, how things have changed. Over time, equality and representative democracy mean everyone can vote, and just keep voting themselves more rights and more stuff, virtually to the point of “voting for a living.” Conservatives and progressives alike accept and cherish the stated ideal of the Declaration of Independence, and we’ve watched it all hurtle toward the obliteration of all boundaries and limits. Staggering debt means nothing, because it’s reached the point of being mathematically impossible to ever pay off. Responsibility? For chumps.
So we’re alive in the time of the unraveling of the national sweater our grandmothers knit to protect us from the elements. And we haven’t yet found it worthwhile to knit anything new to replace it — it’s like we’ve gone nudist colony, in the cultural sense. We’ve swallowed the Enlightenment idea that we won’t need a sweater to protect us from moral hazards, because after all, if everyone’s equal, everyone’s entitled to whatever territory and redistributed property, and so on.
It was a nice sweater while it lasted.
We do need new layers of skin and social fabric, to protect us and give us a distinguishable identity. On the infinitely broad timeline of history, it will emerge to be seen where and how the lines and layers are drawn, constructed, and defended, and what name we will give the new entity.
The emperor needs some clothes. Any ideas?
If you have the patience, this gets to the meat of it the further along you watch. He’s hilarious throughout, which helps. It doesn’t hurt to skip the introductory part, I don’t think, unless you want full context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-eAKnVGGBI
No, I'll stick with name calling. You're posting crap (We do need new layers of skin and social fabric, to protect us and give us a distinguishable identity) and trash talking the Constitution.
I repeat my obvious point. All we need, ever needed, and ever will need to restore America past this "blip" you speak of is a return to Constitutional Values.
Particularly, universal suffrage essentially guarantees that everything we held sacred via the Constitution can be and has been voted away into oblivion. There is no firewall against mob rule under universal suffrage. The founders had a firewall in place, but it didn’t last very many decades, because voting did happen to an extent from the start. Voting is the means of egalitarianism. Am I wrong?
I’m all ears if you’d like to explain how the founding documents are not a slow suicide pact. Seriously. Instead of knee-jerk hostility, please correct me, if you can offer any instruction. Perhaps you mean by repealing certain amendments? In that case, I’d say you’re making a bit of sense, even if the prospect of pulling that off is virtually impossible.
Btw, I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, his conclusions, just find the line of reasoning and illumination fascinating. It seems important to me that this stuff be earnestly discussed, instead of our usual default rabid defense of what may be untenable positions. It does seem we need a new strategy. What he says about monarchy is tough to accept, but maybe there’s a different and better way.
I’ve no time to listen to this fool bad mouth the Constitution and call our founding docs a slow suicide pact.
Jim, you’re a better Constitutional scholar than I am. Perhaps you can set him straight. Or just zot him.
Your call.
Bookmark
It was nice while it lasted. America is gone. What’s next? May the South rise again.
100% agreed. The only remedy for universal suffrage is to require UNANIMOUS adult consent for ANY action by government.
Yep, I know how hard that is.
Yep, I know how weak that would make the government.
Good. Governments are a root of evil in this world.
It was hard for me to accept, but after I read Lysander Spooner, I couldn't help but to agree with him-- and you. Those of you who haven't, read Spooner's "Constitution of No Authority". It's freely available-- Google it. The man predicted what happened in the 20th and 21st century (that the Constitution would not restrain government) back in the 1840's. Brilliant man.
Read some Lysander Spooner. It’s painful, but we must learn the lesson that the Constitution cannot restrain government. Any charter, no matter how perfect, cannot do that. Only the people themselves, through armed oversight, can restrain government. And we have steadfastly refused to do so.
What else can a conservative do since we are the only ones expendable in this whole charade?
Glad someone gets it, instead of attacking the messenger and blindly, belligerently repeating the same insanity over and over again, thinking things will be different if we just keep doing it. There has to be some better way. The neoreactionary approach presented by Paul Ramsey is intriguing, but problematic for the same reasons the Enlightenment came about in the first place, so it’s so important that we exhaustively hash all this out for the future. And find solutions.
I’ve heard of him over the years, may have even read some of his writing, but not sure if I have — definitely will check it out asap. Thanks.
And I agree: the "enlightenment" was a disaster.
Of course, there’s always that old saying being perhaps the only or best solution/truth we’ll ever realize, “democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others.”
Hmmm, so...governments and countries should be organized on the principle of...? Or no distinct countries, just Judeo-Christian theocracy? Or theocracy of which kind? You lost me.
America IS an idea, a story, an experiment, and not a region or a race; the problem is that we have in our comfort and complacency and pursuit of our own individual ends allowed a radical faction of people to organize and redefine the words.
Then it is not a nation. And its dissolution is not due merely to a radical faction, but to its egalitarian philosophical foundation. Notice that Marxists and Republicans share the same basic ideology, of equality and power to the people....watch the video I linked above.
Wow, I started reading it, so eye-opening....
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