The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total. (Note: this was written the day after the election. The final results indicate that Romney exceeded McCain’s total by less than one million votes, while Obama received almost four million votes fewer than he did in 2008 – the first time in history that a president won a second term with fewer votes than he scored in his first victory. RSP)

But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired.

The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.

Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.

That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. Said another way, too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants to squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken.

Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. How could he do and say all these things ? See Churchill, above.

One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required and does not solve any discernible problem – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?

Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.

Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life.

It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.

A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.

The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.

One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.

For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.

Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.

But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.

The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.

Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions.

If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.

Even among the non-minority group under 30, all I see is a desire to live the “life of Julia”.

Very few with that old American desire for individual freedom and bold success.

The scum that runs the democratic party have, along with the press, painted the GOP & whites as evil incarnate, and it’s has worked. Through demogrphic replacement & lies the conservative movemenent in the States is dead....and it ain’t coming back in any real way.

I have passed on my Irish citizenship to my kids. If they need to get out of here in 20 or 30 years they can. I’m not going anywhere. I’m retiring way up in northern New England so I’ll miss some or most of the stuff that’s going to happen in the cities. But my job as a dad is to see that my kids are safe....and giving them this “out” was my way of giving them a chance to raise their children in a safe place.

I refuse to accept the premise of the title: “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.”

Where I live, the people are made of sterner stuff than compose the lilly liver guts of the various RINOs, surrender monkeys and French white-flag wavers.

For those who have surrendered, I have no use for you.

“I agree with most of this. America is indeed a center-left nation...”

Really? How about you explain how 26 states are controlled by conservatives and patriots, while the rats only control 11 states. In many states, not a single rat holds a state-wide office. They were thrown out in the 2010 election.

I consider myself to be one of the luckiest people alive because I am elderly and, with a family history of short longevity, I am unlikely to be around when the SHTF. I was around to enjoy America as it once was and that gives me solace.

Last year I cast my last ballot, too. It is obvious that they clearly outnumber us and will continue to do so.

I see from your post that I am among those for whom you have no use. Too bad, but one must face the situation realistically. I applaud your optimism, though. I wish that I felt the same but I can’t.

For now, like I said, we will win some & lose some, this will be an uneven decline; but we will lose more & more because the demographics are working against us. We are losing Florida & Ohio. We are losing VA. If amnesty passes this fall 50 million people from the third world will be flooding the States in the next 20 years....how’s that crowd going to vote ? What part of we are being REPLACED don’t you get ?

“I see from your post that I am among those for whom you have no use.”

Instead of branding yourself useless, join our state-sponsored militia here in SC.

Our 1st and 2nd SC militia were formed in 1775 by Colonel Moultrie. The militia set up at Sullivan Island to bar the British fleet from taking Charleston. In July, 1776, the state militia pounded the British fleet with 8 and 10 pound cannon, inflicting nearly 300 casualties.

Don’t underestimate your value, OldPossum.

You haven’t answered the question, LongWay.

How is it that conservatives and patriots control 26 states, while rats only control 11 states?

Your wishful thinking that demographics work against us is not backed up by a single fact from you. You sound like propaganda from the GOPe or the Washington Post.

Try again, but this time offer something better than “demographics are working against us.”

Pointing out demographic reality does not make one a coward. Does not make one unpatriotic. Does not make one unwilling to fight. There’s a lot going on here that is forming a “perfect storm” making possible an American collapse.

The first is demographics: we are being replaced as a people. There is no question about that. look at the voting demographics of California....that kind of voting is coming to a state near you soon.

The second is the Amerian press: they are by & large lying scum. They have, along with the democratic party, made demons out of the GOP & whites. It’s worked. We have lost the Asian vote, of all things, because they don’t want the taint of what “they think” the GOP is.

The third is the GOP itself: A collection of fools & right/liberals. They offer nothing.

To sum it up: you can’t win elections in the USA long-term if you keep importing tens of millions of poo people from the third world....they will vote to take what you got.

I don’t have to offer you anything but demographics, even though I did in my last post. Explain the voting of California which was once a republican state ? You’re the one that better face reality. When you REPLACE a people....like is being done now in the United States through MASSIVE third world immigration those people who vote like us (and I suspect we vote & think a lot alike) no longer count...like in California.

We won in 2010, no kidding, though we could not even win the senate. And we are going to win some more here & there, I’ve said as much, but over time we are going to lose everything due to being outnumbered by the takers.

I’m sorry, but your rant has not explained why conservatives and patriots control 26 states.

I keep asking you the question about how that’s possible, and you continue to ignore the question, while yakking about cowardice, demons, patriotism, and the “perfect storm”

Until you can focus and answer my question, I’ll assume that you’ve lost your mind.

Go get some sleep and try again tomorrow.

I’ve explained how the USA is losing the demographic war long term. I’ve said the press & the democratic party have made demons out of the GOP. I’ve explained that we wil win some & lose some, but we are on the losing side of the immigration qustion. You’re good at name calling when the arguement is not going your way....I’ll give you that.

I’m a Virginian, sergeantdave.

As I said, I think it’s great that and others think that we can turn this around, but the demographics shout “no”!

You just don’t like the answers cause they expose your third-rate thinking. Here’s a clue on why the your so-called patriots control 26 states. Cause most of those rural state don’t have a lot of third world immigration, and when they get it they will go left like VA going is right now. Like California went. Like Florida is going. Don’t tell me I can’t use dempgraphics to explain America’s collapse. The “tiping point” of demograpics has been talked about for years...and now it’s coming on fast. It’s a valid measure of what is happening.

“As I said, I think it’s great that and others think that we can turn this around, but the demographics shout “no”!”

Samuel Adams answers you:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty,
the tranquility of servitude
better than the animating contest of freedom,
go home from us in peace.
We ask not your counsels or your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

Mr. Adams’ words do not apply to me. If fighting breaks out I intend to join the ranks of those who believe in freedom. But if it doesn’t, and the noose continues to be tightened and the people at large decide to not contest the matter, there is nothing I—or you, that matter—can do.

All I can say is that I’m glad that I chose to not reproduce. I would hate to think of my children growing up in a dictatorship. I’m old and that softens the blow to me.

That’s my position and I really have nothing more to say.

I don’t care if you’re 99 years-old. I want patriots like you on our side, and screw demographics. Most of the demographics spewed out by our leftist media and fascist government are BS.

Where I live, more baseball fields and playgrounds are being built than basketball courts and soccer fields.

“But if it doesn’t, and the noose continues to be tightened and the people at large decide to not contest the matter, there is nothing I—or you, that matter—can do.”

That is such a defeatist attitude. My constitutional sheriff has a battalion of deputies ready to move into action. Do you honestly believe that a mob of 70 IQ, 400 lb. homeland security slobs with glocks can take on 100 million Americans with rifles?

Please view this video:

The Decline and Fall of the US and the Dollar !

It is easy as pie. Our dollar has been debased by the Federal Reserve and its totally corrupt money policies. Right now we are about $ 167 Trillion in the hole and lying 0's corrupt war against Syria will cause gasoline to go to about $ 8 a gallon and cost even more $$$$ Trillions; and ruin what is left of our lousy, phony economy and probably totally BANKRUPT the US. And maybe start WWIII.

LOL !

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