I began blogging more than twenty years ago because I had come to understand that too many Americans — under the influence and control of sophists, demagogues, and self-aggrandizers — had veered away from America’s legal and moral founding principles. Those Americans seem to have become hell-bent on becoming slaves of the state. I had hoped that by adding my voice to the chorus of resistance to statism — especially its leftist variety — I might help to quell and even reverse its advance. I cling to that hope.
Statism – control by the central government of economic and social intercourse — is nothing new in America. It has been around, in limited and then pervasive forms, since the founding of the Republic. But statism has become more virulent with the advent of its latest manifestation: state-sponsored and state-enforced wokeness.
The woke and their state sponsors – using methods like those of Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao – deploy perverted versions of history and science in the service of yet another delusional utopia. Among its characteristics — in addition to a long-standing and self-defeating (leftist) urge for economic leveling — is the denial of deep-seated biological and cultural differences in strength, physical skills, intelligence, emotional tendencies, and proneness to criminality among various “oppressed” groups, with the result that inferiority is allowed to flourish at the expense of everyone but members of those groups.
Those who dare call attention to such differences, act prudently on those differences in their personal and business lives, or openly protest the privileges accorded the “oppressed” do so at the risk of life, liberty, and fortune – whether at the hands of the state or at the hands of the vicious purveyors of wokeness who enjoy the state’s protection.
The cumulative effect of statism – imposed by legislative, executive, and judicial decrees — has been to limit the freedom of private, cooperating parties and to invest decision-making in arrogant politicians and their appointees and apparatchiks – known otherwise as “our democracy”. The economic cost of statism, which I have elsewhere estimated, is astronomical and mounting daily. The social cost of statism is the prevailing chasm of social division, which is as deep as it was in the Civil War.
Statists abhor the kind of gradual, time-tested change that occurs naturally among persons who live under a minimal state – one that is limited to the defense of life, liberty, and property from predators foreign and domestic. Statists want their utopia, and they want it yesterday — economic and social costs be damned. The resemblance between statism (especially its leftist manifestations) and adolescent rebellion is more than coincidental. both arise from anti-historical, anti-scientific, emotion-driven roots.
The bad news is that statism is inevitable in a polity that is morally and culturally diverse. Strong bonds of morality and culture enable a people to fend for themselves under the guardianship of a minimal, night-watchman state. When those bonds are weakened by moral and cultural diversity, the gates are flung open to those who seek the power to dictate the terms of social and economic intercourse; to those who believe in, rationalize, and clamor for such dictation; and to those who seek privileges from the powerful.
As John Adams put it in an address to the Massachusetts militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Just so. Moral and cultural diversity – and degeneracy — are now rampant in America; for example:
- There is the withdrawal of the state from the enforcement of traditional moral codes. This has been going on for decades; the rise of the “Soros DAs” is merely a blatant manifestation of the trend. If the trend had a beginning it was the concerted movement to abolish the death penalty. A less spectacular but arguably more influential change was the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce, which fostered the breakup of families and the departure of fathers from the lives of children. Abortion is an abomination disguised as a “right” by the Supreme Court; the virulent reaction to the recission of that “right” attests to America’s moral decline.
- A second, closely-related development is “freedom from religion”, which has resulted in the state-condoned (and often state-sponsored) spewing of filth into the minds of children and adolescents. Along with the filth comes, naturally, a disdain for “old fashioned” strictures on behavior which served as guardrails against destructive personal and interpersonal acts, and which instilled the kind of the kind of self-discipline that is now so obviously lacking in huge swaths of the populace. From that lack of self-discipline has grown not only a disdain for traditional morality but moral laxity of the kind that has no place for religion, marriage, familial responsibility, self-reliance, and hard work.
- The flood of illegal immigrants who were invited by the Biden administration to invade America is a moral and cultural scandal. Unfortunately, most Americans – especially leftists – don’t even think of it that way. First, the Biden administration’s actions blatantly flouted the law, which is an evil in itself and an impeachable violation of Biden’s oath of office. (The failure to impeach and convict Biden, for that and other things, is another moral scandal.) Second, the Biden administration encouraged illegal immigration despite its obviously dire consequences for American citizens, especially those living near the southern border; for example, violent criminality, importation of illegal and dangerous drugs, and the denial of government services to Americans for the benefit of illegal immigrants (or higher taxes on citizens to accommodate illegal immigrants). Third, the flood of illegal immigrants meant a sudden – government-imposed — shift in the cultural composition of the country. Whether that is a good or bad thing is irrelevant here. Government shouldn’t be in the business of social engineering. (Side note: The Biden administration did that in spades – not only through illegal immigration, but also through censorship and by such things as promoting transgenderism, denigrating religion, pushing racial “equity” and thereby favoring mediocrity over merit.)
There was, for about 125 years, an America that resembled the one in which the Constitution was born. Then came the “Progressive Era” of the late 1800s and early 1900s, during which the constitutional boundaries on the power of the central government were breached. The rest is history — and contemporary news.
Alongside the onset of the imperial government there came moral degeneration, such as that summarized above. This is no coincidence, inasmuch as the growth of the central government has meant the repudiation of personal responsibility, the weakening of the institutions of civil society, and insulation from many of the consequences of carelessness, impulsiveness, and criminality.
The genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back into the bottle. The moral and cultural America for which the Constitution was written is long gone and will not return.
But, paradoxically, the power of the state can be turned against the forces that have used its power to weaken America economically and to poison it morally and culturally. Firm control of the state’s apparatus gives the controlling party the power to reorder the state’s priorities. Unlike weak-kneed “conservatives” of the never-Trump variety, Donald Trump seems to understand that principle, and seems to relish the opportunity to act upon it
Trump has been and will be called a fascist, a Nazi, a dictator, and many other uncomplimentary names for striving to rescue America from the abyss of left-statism. I say Godspeed to him.
Politics and Prosperity 