Posted on 04/21/2018 5:19:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
I was interviewed by a mainstream media reporter yesterday. I thought he wanted to talk tech issues, but we actually spent almost the entire conversation discussing the feeling that many conservatives have that America has gone off the tracks and is headed toward dissolution or alternately, a civil war one day. Obviously, this would be a terrible thing and ironically, twenty years ago, it would have been laughable. Today, the joke isn’t so funny because we are a deeply unhealthy society with a dysfunctional government and for all our money, success and storied history, we seem to be on an increasingly dangerous trajectory.
1) A Post-Constitutional Era: Liberals don’t believe in the Constitution. Typically they deny this, but that’s exactly what a “living” Constitution means. You make it up as you go along. The Founders foresaw the instability and danger that would be created by this approach, which is why they wanted us to be a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Unfortunately, America has in many ways already become a post-constitutional democracy and we’re one liberal judge away from abandoning the Constitution altogether. Once we get to that point, America just becomes the representation of that old saying, “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.” Of course people are not lambs and when large numbers of them believe they aren’t being treated fairly, they do have the option of getting away from the wolves.
2) Tribalism: The “you only have to listen to people you already agree with” nature of social media has dramatically ramped up the level of tribalism in the United States. The Right has gotten much more tribal since Donald Trump rose to prominence and the Left has taken tribalism into hyper-drive. Increasingly, liberals treat a range of opinion between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton as legitimate while everyone else is viewed as a white supremacist Nazi primitive that must be driven down into the gutter for society to move forward. This makes any sort of dialogue or cooperation nearly impossible. When every issue is a zero sum war where one tribe must win or lose, a lot of people quite understandably ask, “What do we gain by staying allied to this other tribe?”
3) Federal Government Too Powerful: Federalism is a safety valve on the American pressure cooker. As long as people in San Francisco can, for the most part, live the way they want to live while the people in rural North Carolina can, for the most part, live the way they want to live, it’s much easier for everyone to get along. When people are unnecessarily forced to live under rules they find abhorrent because the federal government has become an octopus that has inserted its tentacles into every minute crevice of American life, it creates discontent on a wide scale. If most Americans wanted to live like people in San Francisco, they’d live in San Francisco.
4) Moral Decline: As Samuel Adams once noted, “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”
A large number of Americans HAVE LOST their principles, manners and virtue and it shows through from the sort of politicians they elect, to their rudeness online, to the sort of shallow hedonism and fame whoring they find appealing. Americans are increasingly becoming a soft and decadent people which is problematic because the challenges may change, but we can be certain that Americans will face future challenges every bit as difficult as the ones past generations had to tackle. This is frightening because if you look at the “principles, manners and virtue” of Americans today, they don’t seem capable of dealing with monumental events like the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Depression or World War II. Most people in their twenties probably couldn’t tell you why all those events were such challenges in the first place. When America faces a challenge bigger than we can handle because of ineffective politicians and our “amusing ourselves to death” population, there are no guarantees our republic will survive.
5) The Debt: America is a freight train heading toward a cliff, but because we’re not moving toward the edge at lightning speed, no one seems all that concerned. However, the fact of the matter is that a reckoning is coming. At some point, probably within the next decade or two, we will face a debt-driven economic collapse; borrowed money will stop flowing into the United States and Medicare/Social Security as we know it will fall apart because we will not have the money to pay it. If and when we get to that point, all bets are off because if regions of the country see an advantage to splitting off from the United States at that point, they will do it.
6) Lack Of A Shared Culture: There has never been a time when American culture was more fragmented than it is today. By that, I mean that there are legions of people with millions of fans or followers on the Internet that the vast majority of Americans have never heard of in their lives. We don’t have that shared love of anybody or for that matter, anything. Conservatives and liberals disagree on economics (capitalist/socialist), religion (friendly to Christianity/hostile to Christianity), the Constitution (support/believe in a living Constitution i.e. no Constitution), etc., on and on. The average conservative and the average liberal disagree on 95% of the issues and in the few limited cases where they do look at things the same, they won’t support a proposal by the other out of sheer tribalism. Over the long haul, there has be something more to hold a country together than, “We wear Nikes, like pop music and play golf.”
7) Gun Grabbing: Liberals have fallen in love with the idea of ignoring the 2nd Amendment and confiscating all firearms. The logistics of doing this in a nation with hundreds of millions of guns (many of which are off the books) when many police departments and tens of millions of Americans would not cooperate is seldom discussed. Another thing that seldom seems brought up is that large numbers of conservatives would see this as a prelude to the government’s use of force against the citizenry. When it is discussed on the Left, there seems to be an assumption that lone resisters might get into firefights with dozens of police or soldiers, as opposed to ganging up with other formerly law-abiding Americans to waylay gun confiscators, politicians and anti-gun activists at THEIR HOMES in guerrilla actions that would be silently applauded and supported by hundreds of millions of Americans concerned about their freedom. Confiscating guns is a dangerous and stupid idea that could in and of itself end our republic if a serious attempt were ever made to implement it.
All you have to do is ban the federal government from doing anything more than maintaining the military, the money supply, and raising the revenues to pay for them.
What’s happening now is that the left wants to change the USA into a socialist/quasi communist country without a bloody revolution. They think they can cheat, lie, steal, finesse and slough their way to political victory without out violence.
We are not sheep. IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN THAT WAY
Compare an America where the federal government controls the volume of your flush toilet, what vegetation you may ingest while using the commerce clause to regulate any transaction down to the level, per Justice Clarence Thomas, of a church supper ... compare that to America of as recently as a century ago, and the march to socialism becomes obviousl.
In other words, do what mom used to say - ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’.
Ping for later...
Many millennials lose interest in leftist causes when they realize they have a dim economic future; young white male libs in particular realize they are surrounded by “liberals” who see no role for white men in the future.
Once these kids tire of lacking their own vehicles or homes, they grow up.
Tom...
Dick and
Harry.
No future debt collapse, Andrew Gause says the economic misery can go on forever, you pauper.
If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.
Nobody really seems to care that millions and millions in campaign money is spent to convince the swayable to vote one way or the other, and we still haven’t broken 65% eligible voter turnout in 108 years. That is pretty amazing to me.
Supposedly the dumbest 10% of voters, the ones that vote one way and then another and can’t usually give a reason that follows any sort of logical explanation, are the ones that decide elections. Supposedly all campaign money is meant to sway the swing voters, at least after the primary process.
Something else amazing: Supposedly the dumbest 10% of eligible voters who manage to vote decide elections, whether or not a pub or dem wins. It could be a good result, or a bad one, but in any case the idiots decided.
Freegards
Reasons 4 and 6 seem to be closely related (the Left’s internal frame of mind). From that flows their desire to dominate everyone else (Reasons 1 and 3). Reasons 5 and 7 flow from that, and Reason 2 exacerbates the other reasons. It is Progressives’ sinful inflated ego and arrogance (distinct from the Founding Fathers’ cultural perspective) that drives the rest of their madness and will to power.
Coffin Rock...
XLNT.
BUMP!!
Tom...
Will Comply.
Dick...
Will Resist.
Harry...
Will Target the Aggressors.
Let me ask you something. If a state secedes and becomes an independent country then why would the people of that new country revolt or riot? What would cause the sectarian violence? What would they be rebelling against? Everything is the same except the governor is now president.
“Sunset at black rock” or similar...
Duncan posted the link.
I said WWII, and then had the slow dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc second.
That's for Western culture.
Just for reference - there are 40 sitting Democrat congress-slime who couldn't see that Rapin Bill Clinton's obstruction of justice was actual obstruction of justice.
Yet 100% of those political slimeballs will do a 180 on obstruction charges against President Trump.
Shucks Chumer actually got THREE bites at that apple - as a congressman, as a member of the House judiciary committee, and then as a newly elected US senator.
He did the Three Monkeys - hear no obstruction, see no obstruction, speak no obstruction.
Go long Louisville sluggers...
It was 1993 when I asked the teachers why they didn’t think of WWII.
The map of the entire world changed as a consequence.
The USSR rose, the communists took over China and drove the nationalists to Taiwan, England had to give up most of it’s empire and was destroyed as a world power.
France stupidly tried to reclaim it’s territory in Indochina.
The communist viet minh fought the Japanese in French Indochina and morphed into the viet cong after Truman let Russia have influence in the north. Korea was likewise split between communist and democratic nations.
As a consequence of WWII the USA became the only power strong enough to stand against the USSR which led to the Cold War.
That doesn’t even mention the atomic bombs and other advances in science influenced by the war.
We agree that WWII was the defining event of the 20th century.
Outside of my marriage and children’s births, the day the people started streaming across the Berlin wall and taking sledge hammers to it was one of the happiest days of my life.
I remember being at the 7UP distributor in Richmond, VA making a delivery.
The tv was on in the office and it was on every channel.
We could hear the Germans yelling something but couldn’t make it out.
The shipping supervisor had been raised in Hungary, escaped, became a US citizen, served in Vietnam and had worked for 7UP for years. He told us it was Tor Auf meaning “open the damned gate”.
I never will forget the look on his face...angelic.
Only downside was GHW Bush was in office and not Reagan.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
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