Twilight in America?
As daily life in America continues to become unhinged, historians are increasingly questioning whether the once shining city upon a hill is on the verge of going the way of all great empires throughout history. Today, even rank-and-file folks talk openly about the demise of America. Common sense tells them that a country that allows the politicization of law enforcement, does more to protect people in faraway nations than it does to protect its own citizens, and takes a torch to its own certitudes is a country hellbent on suicide.
In a letter to John Taylor in 1814, John Adams wrote, “Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.” How can a democracy be more bloody than an aristocracy or monarchy? The short answer is that democracy destroys itself through an excess of democracy.
Robespierre claimed to believe in the principles of democracy, yet his French Revolution was arguably the bloodiest revolution in human history. Likewise, a democratic government made it possible for Adolf Hitler to come to power. And even Mao saw himself as a “democratic dictator.” Let’s face it, in the eyes of tyrants, democracy is whatever they say it is on any given day.
The newest artificial version of democracy is “woke democracy,” which touches every aspect of our lives. It includes such atrocities as glorification of abortion, legalization of crime, the disarming of law-abiding citizens, preferential treatment for non-citizens, blatantly fraudulent elections, promotion of sexual perversion, and persecution of parents who demand that their children to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic in school rather than “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
All these are affronts to the wellbeing and intelligence of the proletariat and have resulted in moral and political backlash that threatens the ruling class. Tucker Carlson has for years warned that such abuses could ultimately lead to revolution, and I agree with his assessment. But I also believe revolution is precisely what members of the ruling class want, because it would give them an excuse to use the power of the state to clamp down on the people they so fear. In that regard, January 6 was but a test run to see just how much ruling-class oppression the servant class is willing to accept.
From the Ming Dynasty to the Third Reich, from the Roman Empire to Tsarist Russia, empires have always plundered the working class, and the United States is no exception. Through centuries of experience, totalitarian plunder has become increasingly sophisticated and is now carried out by an incestuous cabal that includes elected officials, bureaucrats, multinational corporations, academia, and the media, to name just a handful of the most powerful participants.
In addition, athletes and entertainers are always elevated to elite status by the ruling class in exchange for providing bread and circus to the masses to divert attention from their loss of wealth and freedom. The NFL, for example, serves pretty much the same purpose as the gruesome Colosseum events did in Rome for hundreds of years.
Just a few of the myriad schemes the ruling class now uses to extract wealth from its subjects include endless war, reparations for “oppressed” groups, devaluation of the currency via deficit spending and money creation, open borders to change the makeup of the electorate, cancellation of student debt, and the mother of all wealth-transfer schemes, climate-change legislation whose real purpose is to enrich the well connected.
John Adams was prescient, because he recognized that the Achilles heel of democracy was that once a system for exploiting the common man is in place, the exploiters cannot resist the temptation to continually increase the amount of their exploitation. Elite organizations like the WTO, IMF, World Bank, WEF, and G8 have been set up for the express purpose of facilitating this end.
While the United States is often compared to ancient Rome, it is even more vulnerable to collapse than Rome was in the fifth century. The reason for this is that the barbarians who destroyed Rome were Germanic tribes who invaded from without, while the barbarians invading the United States are doing so from within. The new barbarians have infiltrated almost every aspect of American life and are accelerating the collapse of their own country.
The sixty-four-dollar question is, is America’s current decline just a temporary correction or is a total collapse near at hand? My normalcy bias wants to believe that wokism is nothing more than a fad, the 21st century version of the hippies’ countercultural movement of the sixties and seventies. But the one big difference between the two eras is that hippies rejected “the man,” while today’s wokesters embrace him, which has resulted in an all-powerful political alliance.
Thus, when all is said and done, the greatest obstacle to avoiding a total collapse of the American Empire is the lockstep self-discipline of the domestic barbarian crowd. Though they are clearly mentally unstable, they nevertheless are much more determined to get their way than are Republicans. That’s a big problem because, like it or not (and I don’t), Republicans are the only realistic option for those who believe America is worth saving.
We shouldn’t be surprise by our current dilemma, given that none other than Winston Churchill told us, in a speech before the U.S. Congress some 80 years ago, that “democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried.” In other words, democracy is great in theory, but because of the avarice and malevolence of those who are determined to rule the lives of others, it doesn’t work very well in actual practice.
That said, we should never forget that Churchill also advised us, “Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
Robert Ringer is an American icon whose unique insights into life have helped millions of readers worldwide. He is also the author of two New York Times #1 bestselling books, both of which have been listed by The New York Times among the 15 best-selling motivational books of all time.
From robertringer.com