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Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?
American Greatness ^ | 16 Apr, 2023 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 04/17/2023 5:50:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises.

Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode.

Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more?

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

Urban schools are not places of instruction anymore. That fact is accepted by teachers’ unions, whose operative principle seems to be that the more hopeless the idea of educating urban youth is understood to be, the less burdensome the workload, and the greater their hazardous duty pay.

Urban chain stores are closing down on the principle that if police cannot or will not stop consumer violence and theft, then consumers there should not have any store to buy anything, anyway. If there is no store, how can it be looted or shop-lifted?

The only mystery remaining is how long these Democrat-controlled, racially charged, and corrupt municipalities can sustain their budgets and pension commitments with increasingly declining revenue.

(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society
KEYWORDS: leftism; vdh; victordavishanson
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1 posted on 04/17/2023 5:50:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

It is the destruction of Western Civilization by the radical left. This is what they really want.


2 posted on 04/17/2023 5:51:32 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

Nope. We’re going to have to literally be staring in the abyss before people wake up.


3 posted on 04/17/2023 5:51:46 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: MtnClimber

You repent and start doing everything that made the country greate.
But liberals don’t want that. They’d rather have a country in decline so they can get social benefits on the backs of other people.
America will either repent or it will disappear as a nation. That’s one of God’s promises to nations.


4 posted on 04/17/2023 5:53:11 AM PDT by Jonty30 (How is grinning and bearing something a bad thing? They are grinning.)
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To: texas booster

VDH ping


5 posted on 04/17/2023 5:53:25 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

Yes, but we lack the courage to kill off the progressive enemies that have brought the war


6 posted on 04/17/2023 5:53:49 AM PDT by bert ( (KWE. NP. N.C. +12) Juneteenth is inequality day )
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To: dfwgator

I couldn’t agree more. The young people have been fully indoctrinated, and they want what is coming. They’ll change their minds when it is too late.


7 posted on 04/17/2023 5:54:42 AM PDT by GingisK
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To: dfwgator
We’re going to have to literally be staring in the abyss before people wake up.

By then the Left's "changes" will be the new normal. They are perfectionists when it comes to incremental change, true revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the "reactive" GOP keeps stumbling and bumbling and effectively accomplishes zero for the conservatives.

8 posted on 04/17/2023 5:56:07 AM PDT by 1Old Pro
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To: MtnClimber

I would argue that it wasn’t normal for Christians to ever be in power and the majority. The whole faith is built on rejecting the world and worldly things and being set apart and expecting persecution because of it.


9 posted on 04/17/2023 5:56:48 AM PDT by TexasFreeper2009
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To: MtnClimber

Ol’ Victor poses the question for the times. Has anyone considered the Deagel Report results? Remember a few years back when the report first noted a steep dive in world population, which left everyone scratching their heads? Here’s an update.
https://seemorerocks.is/a-new-look-at-deagels-depopulation-premonitions/


10 posted on 04/17/2023 6:01:18 AM PDT by iontheball
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To: TexasFreeper2009
I would argue that it wasn’t normal for Christians to ever be in power and the majority. The whole faith is built on rejecting the world and worldly things and being set apart and expecting persecution because of it.

I suspect most "Christians" are into some form of the "Prosperity Gospel" thing.

11 posted on 04/17/2023 6:01:21 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Jonty30
America will either repent or it will disappear as a nation. That’s one of God’s promises to nations.

Yep, American will be either Nineveh or Judah/Israel.

12 posted on 04/17/2023 6:04:08 AM PDT by ducttape45 (Proverbs 14:34, "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.")
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To: GingisK

Agree with you both. It is coming down—fast with the rats, slower with a conservative. Rome was the great lesson, and we are taking that path as well.


13 posted on 04/17/2023 6:04:31 AM PDT by SgtHooper (If you remember the 60's, YOU WEREN'T THERE!)
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To: bert
Unfortunately, this is a war of ideas and ideologies.

Freedom, reality and tough love in one corner. Imprisonment, slavery, and dictatorship (the Left) in the other.

You would think this would be an easy war to win, but the Left has done a masterful job of selling its lie (via indoctrination and brainwashing). Imprisonment and slavery are hidden behind a facade of free stuff, free drugs, free sex, free perversion...the freedom to do what feels good and freedom from the guilt of doing it.

The Left's appeal is "you can be a child forever...just give us the power."

The Right's appeal is, well, unappealing. Life and reality are tough. But, unfortunately, there is no workable alternative.

14 posted on 04/17/2023 6:10:04 AM PDT by RoosterRedux (Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”)
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To: MtnClimber

Yes, it’s the same seed that causes all of these things. The communists for many decades were funding and directing our native radicals to destroy this nation from within, and even though the Soviet Union collapsed, American leftists never deviated from the plan.

But even that’s a secondary cause, since the communists would never have gained any traction in the Western societies if we had not been on a centuries-long course of abandoning our faith in Christ.


15 posted on 04/17/2023 6:10:21 AM PDT by Boogieman
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To: MtnClimber

God’s promises are eternal :

◄ 2 Chronicles 7:14 ►

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.


16 posted on 04/17/2023 6:10:41 AM PDT by InkStone (ONLY returning to Faith in God, thru Jesus Yeshua, will save America)
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To: TexasFreeper2009
I would argue that it wasn’t normal for Christians to ever be in power and the majority. The whole faith is built on rejecting the world and worldly things and being set apart and expecting persecution because of it.

Exactly! If you think about it, these are exciting times for implementing Jesus' teaching to go ye therefore. It'll be tough, but the harvest is plentiful in times like these.

17 posted on 04/17/2023 6:10:51 AM PDT by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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To: MtnClimber

Can we do anything about the decline of America?

Absolutely, but it’s slow, boring and time-consuming,which no one wants to accept. You move, if not already there to a red area, doesn’t have to be a state, and you engage. Mayor, council, school board, sheriff, zoning Committee, etc. You make YOUR part of the country successful.

You disengage, as much as is possible, from institutions and companies that are working against your values.

People like that saying about the old man planting a tree that he won’t live to see. In practice, they find it boring and want something spectacular.

It took years to lose traditional America. It will take years to rebuild. Otherwise....


18 posted on 04/17/2023 6:10:58 AM PDT by americas.best.days... ( Donald John Trump has pulled the sword from the stone.)
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To: MtnClimber

“It is the destruction of Western Civilization by the radical left. This is what they really want.”

With the exception of a new Crusades or an American Revolution, the only thing we can do is organize locally and take back our schools, our election boards and other politically left activities.


19 posted on 04/17/2023 6:12:45 AM PDT by EQAndyBuzz (America is now Nazi Germany circa 1935. )
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To: MtnClimber

hole card (plural hole cards)

(poker, chiefly in the plural) A playing card, dealt face down, that the holder need not reveal until the showdown
(by extension) Something held in reserve, or concealed, until it is useful

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hole_card

A eucatastrophe is a sudden turn of events in a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible and probable doom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucatastrophe

The damsel in distress is a recurring narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has either been kidnapped or placed in general peril.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damsel_in_distress

Life imitates art.


20 posted on 04/17/2023 6:13:53 AM PDT by Ezekiel (🆘️ "Come fly with US". Ingenuity -- because the Son of David begins with Mars ♂️, aka every man)
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