Is America dead?
A Canadian immigrant to the U.S. named DR wrote to me last month about the condition of America:
You recently wrote, “Remember this, fellow citizens of the swiftly fading West, the West that will continue to fade unless we come to our senses and renounce our liberalism.”
Ten years ago I emigrated to the U.S. from Canada—actually from Montreal (Quebec) to Virginia. As an English-speaking Canadian, I wanted to leave behind the linguistic strait-jacket that Francophone Quebecers were imposing on all Canadian citizens living in Quebec.
As a Christian who very much believed in Western civilization, I expected to find in the U.S. a like-minded mentality. Instead I found the following:
1. A U.S. that has abandoned all vestige of the Christian faith. There in fact is an active war against any public display of Christian sentiment.
2. A U.S. that has become a second-rate economic power—abandoning its manufacturing base—to become a debtor nation with high government and trade deficits. The U.S. has become dependent on other nations supplying its instruments and tools with which to live.
3. A U.S. that has come to believe in whatever political mythology is prevalent in the media (e.g. Afro-Americans who assert as fact any and every concept of American oppression).
4. A U.S. that is falling so far behind other countries in education that its young people are by and large illiterate.
5. A U.S. that has given itself completely over to the hedonistic life-style such that every second utterance on television has sexual overtones and innuendo.
6. A U.S. that selects government officials based on swagger rather than intellectual achievement.
Why don’t you simply pronounce the United States of America dead and gone? What chance does the U.S. have to be restored to its pre-eminence? On what basis?
Through economics? Every major industry has out-sourced its work overseas. The U.S. no longer has any financial base for recovery.
Through religion? The U.S. is so badly fragmented that America’s civil religion is the acceptance of any and every religious instinct (from New Age meditation to Muslim conversion). There can never be again a spiritual revival here.
Through law? Our legal structure and its courts no longer has any firmly rooted set of concepts in history, constitutional law or transcendent principle.
Through education? The U.S. school system is a mockery. Every year the standards of success are lowered such that in international competition (e.g. mathematics or physics) American students rank near the bottom.
Through family? The U.S. leads the civilized world in divorces and broken families. The homosexual culture is redefining the basis of family and marriage.
Pray tell me, on what basis does America have a chance of staying America and continuing as a beacon of light in the world? On what basis?
Frankly as an ex-Canadian, who has seen Canada slipping into the morass of amorality and hoping that a new life in the U.S. would be different, I have been sorely disappointed. The U.S. is in actuality following Canada down the same road.
America is dying and there is no reversal. You may not do so, but I pronounce the U.S. of A … dead. The country you live in will become what Egypt became in the Old Testament for the Israelites of Jacob and Joseph—a nation of bondage, torment and death.
LA replies:
What you say in your eloquent letter is largely true and may be coming fully true. But it’s not the whole truth now. The extreme darkness we are in may force a birth of light, in reaction to the extremity of the darkness. That’s not a promise or a prediction, it’s a sense one has of the positive forces that are at work under the surface. Liberalism (not in the narrower sense of liberal versus conservative, but in the larger sense of the reigning ideology of our society) is destroying our civilization. But in doing so, it’s also destroying itself. If liberalism dies before it has destroyed our civilization, there may be hope for renewal or for some kind of survival and continuance of what we are.
It may be irrational of me, but I feel more hope than I did 15 or 20 years ago. That hope is based in part on the sense that liberalism is doomed.
DR replies:
Liberalism may be doomed as an ideology and become a spent force behind government but there are other factors at play here. Economically the U.S. has run up an indecent trade deficit because the U.S. no longer manufactures any of its own products. Financially the U.S. is at the mercy of foreign exchanges. Investors such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have been moving their funds into foreign currency.
When a nation no longer controls its own purse strings, it is at the mercy of foreign governments, banks and corporations. Where does the backbone to straighten up exist in the U.S. if its economic shoulders are drooping?
Once a nation’s family, economic and legal structures are broken, what firm foundation exists in the body for it to re-assert itself? I haven’t seen anything in the younger generations that suggests a revival of traditional principles in the U.S. is on the horizon. On the contrary, the younger generations have less talent and less will to accomplish what previous generations did. All they do is play around with their X-Boxes manufactured for them by Japan.
As far as I am concerned, the U.S. has become susceptible to any ideology and vulnerable to any immigration wave because it no longer has a “backbone” or a firm foundation in principle. In some respects liberalism has been the psychological AIDS crisis for the U.S.. AIDS deprives a body of its immune system and renders it incapable of fighting any virus (any “foreign invasion” unnatural to the body organs).
America’s physical “open borders” mentality was preceded by a psychological and cultural “open borders” mindset. This is what happened to the Roman empire—the doors were opened to any and every influence to the point that Rome collapsed in and on itself because there did not remain any solid focal point for the Roman identity. I suspect that America is going through the same implosion and I don’t see any remaining “muscle” in the body (through family, law, economics, education, etc) that can effectively raise itself to regain its former power and energy.
Liberalism may die but the residue left behind may be an amorphous, de-energized, fragmented society.
DR continues:
As an addendum to my previous reply, Lawrence, I fear that liberalism has moved from an ideology to an instinct insofar as Americans are concerned. Liberalism may die as a formal set of concepts but it has become ingrained in the American psyche as a set of sub-conscious attitudes.
Half of everything President George Bush Jr says comes from liberal instinct even though he is viewed as a “conservative” politician. In this sense liberalism has moved beyond a phenomenon that can be overtly analyzed and critically debated. It is now flowing in the American bloodstream “naturally” and informs every instinct we have.
To give an example, American society has now acquiesced to every single Black American attitude vis-a-vis the Afro-American experience in the US. One solid example—Spike Jones, a black film director who has uttered the most radical accusations against U.S. culture from a Black standpoint, is now seen in American Express television commercials. Where previously he was thought to be an extremist, he now joins the commercial mainstream (without having modified any of his attitudes). It goes without saying with most black celebrities in Hollywood that America has been and always will be racist (even though they may be making millions of dollars). Here is one liberal attitude that has permeated American consciousness such that there is no longer any debate about the black experience in the U.S. It is now an “acknowledged fact” tacitly (or silently) assented to by most Americans that the U.S. has been an overwhelmingly damaging experience for the Afro-American. And the Afro-American will use this mindless social assent as a tool with which to carve out his or her existence in the U.S. for the next few centuries. here is an instance of a liberal concept having turned into a social instinct beyond question.
Most conservative journalists or commentators that I have read over the past few years, betray some form of liberalism in their consciousness. They will concede to liberalism some key points and thus allow liberalism to continue in the mainstream. As an example, Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative is liberally motivated but no conservative commentator dares challenge this program. This is the conservative’s sop to the liberal, “We’re good folk at heart—here, take a look at our education initiatives as proof…”
LA replies:
You undertand it all very well. On the instinct issue, you sound like Irving Kristol about ten years ago, saying that liberalism is now brain dead, even as its heart continues to pump out blood to all our institutions. Bush’s disgusting embrace of the transnational leftist bureaaucratic tyranny of the EU is the latest example.
I’m sorry that your adopted country is such a disappointment to you. You do not sound at all like a typical Canadian. You sound like an American. That’s what drew you to become an American. But America has betrayed itself, and those who believe in it.
DR replies:
While institutionally the U.S. may disappoint me, I’ve decided to live here in a happier frame of mind by focusing on the local things around me, ie. home & family, church, neighbours, the countryside. These American things please my wife & me greatly. My biggest disappointment is to have found the U.S. moving culturally and politically in the same direction as Canada (which I found too liberal & too socialistic).
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 28, 2005 05:45 PM | Send