Summary: The purpose of the FM website was to help reignite the spirit of a nation grown cold. Begun in 2007, its 4600 posts discuss our challenges with an optimist’s perspective. The two core principles are that I will not lie to you, and I try to admit my mistakes. Now those principles require that I confess that I was wrong. We need a new perspective since I no longer believe we will reignite America’s spirit. A transition to a new era awaits us. This America will not survive it. Many people have been saying this. Some famous, like William Lind. Some in the comments. Since 2007 I have vehemently said they were wrong. I now believe they were right and I was wrong.
Driving into a stormy future.
The big picture
Sir John Sinclair, after the British defeat at Saratoga: “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined.”
Adam Smith: “Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Smith is correct. For example, countless people have sounded “Taps” for America during the past 243 years. But history is littered with societies that have been ruined, or (more relevantly) ruined themselves. Perhaps our time has come. We have to coolly assess our condition in order to plan for the future.
The good news is that, as Ben Wattenberg wrote in 1984, The Good News Is {that} the Bad News Is Wrong
Almost everybody today senses that America cruises down a road with storms ahead – and fears that we have passed the last exit. I believe that is an optimistic view. More likely, I believe, is that we have begun the end times for the Republic (perhaps even western civilization) in its current form. This post will sketch out this vision, tracing our problems to their several causes. Future posts will provide supporting details.
We are roaring down the rapids, a period of rapid social and technological evolution. Swirling around, crashing into rocks, gasping for breath. It is scary and disorienting, common and appropriate reactions seen when discussing current events these days.
Now for the bad news. Our trip flows on an “s” curve, like the course of the Niagara River. There are no longer any realistic odds of stopping the trip. The upper rapids look flat by comparison with what follows, but they do not feel flat as we roar down them. Soon we will hit the waterfall. As we plummet, we will look back to 2019 as the good old days. Then will come the terrifying lower rapids. Many things will break during this journey. Our society might drown.
A more precise diagnosis
Change tends to come, paraphrasing Hemingway, too slowly to easily notice – then too suddenly to stop. The refrain “the important things don’t change” is commonly said just as everything changes. Perhaps it is a psychological defense mechanism, like closing one’s eyes when jumping into the water.
My father’s death certificate has words that well apply to us today: “failure to thrive follow broad organ failure.” America is experience something similar: broad failure of its institutions. No matter how strong our society, cascading institutional failure can destroy it. De Tocqueville describes a similar situation in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
Among the first to die was the Department of State, castrated during the mad “Who Lost China” wars of the 1950s. Internal regeneration has repeatedly failed. There has been no externally-driven repairs because no administration has been willing to commit sufficient political capital to fixing it (because the benefits would flow to their successors). So Presidents shifted some of State’s functions to DoD, and built a clunky ineffective work-around to State in the National Security Council. This has destroyed the balance of our foreign relations between diplomacy and force. Trump has worked to wreck the remains of State, while funneling cash into our grossly over-swollen military machinery (details here).
This shows our government’s inability to heal from damage, an early sign of senescence in an organism or organization (infirmity from old age). Since then institution after institution has broken: schools, governments, corporations, the military, law enforcement, scientific institutions, etc. The stories of their decay dominate the news. I do not refer to the usual stories of malfeasance and incompetence, omnipresent in history. Heaven should not be our standard of comparison. Functioning is the key. Our military can’t win wars. Our police wage a mad war on drugs, looting citizens through civil asset forfeiture. Many of our grade schools can’t teach their students the three R’s. Science is gripped by the replication crisis, a rot whose dimensions are far larger than most believe. Professional associations abandon their standards and obligation to protect us. Our major corporations are dying (Boeing is the latest to crash). Congress will do anything except govern. The President is the tweeter-in-chief. The dominoes have toppled in slow-motion during the past few generations. They continue to fall.
Each institution’s decay acts like a popped rivet in a ship’s hull: It puts more pressure on the surrounding rivets. If the stress continues, a chain reaction begins and the hull disintegrates. Ignore the chatter about trivia on social media and in the news. Listen, and hear the rivets cracking in the structure of our society, like the roar of popcorn on a campfire.
The bad news
The backdrop for our crisis is the rapid rates of technological and social change, which have been accelerating for several centuries. Few of the individual changes are unique in history (e.g., nuclear warfare, the gender revolutions). But the number of changes, their magnitude, and the rate of change create a unique situation. This has led us into the Crazy Years.
“The Crazy Years: Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.”
— From Robert Heinlein’s timeline of his future history stories; first published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1940. This series was published as The Past through Tomorrow
. He predicted this for the 1960s. He was early, not wrong.
This has produced disorientation and destabilization at all levels of America. Today it looks, in some ways, like Weimar Germany. Degeneracy is applauded (the film Cabaret
The Right has been captured by the 1%, with their libertarian “useful idiots” as shock troops. They bicker about utopian dreams, while the 1%’s servants build a new government better suited to their needs (destroying unions, snipping away at the social safety net, weakening regulations limiting pollution, expanding the security services and military, etc.). Much of this is opposed by the GOP’s supporters, who do not see their pockets being picked.
The Left has had another attack of the Jacobin infection, seeking to burn down society (seen as totally and terminally corrupt) and build a utopia world on its ashes – relying on untested dreams, and indifferent to facts. We have began the first rounds of denunciations and mob justice. Leftists seek to open the gates to an influx of people from failed states, believing (correctly) that this will further stress the system – and these migrants will become New Men and New Women in their dream society (and obediently follow their betters).
Mass delusions spread like wildfires through America. The 1990s hysteria about child abductions. The hysteria about Alar in 1989. The hysteria about satanic cults from roughly 1985 – 1995. Our elites learned to weaponize these fears. The Right warns of an imminent dollar collapse and hyperinflation and economic armageddon – with governmental bankruptcy coming soon. There is The Left warns that the world will end soon (per Cortez, in 12 years) from global warming. All are grossly exaggerated fears (Cortez’s prediction has no basis in reports by the IPCC and major climate agencies). Both Left and Right have large sections of the public terrified – and so malleable.
We’ve become tribes, seeing only tribal truths. Both sides clearly see the other’s madness, but each is locked into epistemic closure – hearing only themselves. Social cohesion is fading fast, as the Left and Right stoke the fires of hatred for their own gain. Another cycle of political violence is beginning. Social engineers on the Left and Right use us as lab rats in their social engineering experiments.
Watch society’s elites go bonkers
James Blish wrote Black Easter
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call …When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go …
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head …
Good news – or not
“Nietzsche believed that the wild costume ball of the passions was both the disadvantage and the advantage of late modernity.”
— Alan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind.
What can stop or cure such broad social collapse? The best-case scenario for us would see a savior – one of the rare creative giants that Nietzsche said shape societies and history – arise amidst the coming chaos and put America on a new path. But Nietzsche warned that both saviors and monsters live in the void. As the people of Weimar Germany learned.
“{Leadership is}, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. …Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. …Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler …the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader hoped for by Weber. …his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction.” {Ibid.}
Now, the worst news
“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder – and nearly always from the former ….”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History.
A cure is impossible without accurate diagnosis. I believe that the core problem is obvious: it’s us. We have the ultimate responsibility for the fate of the Republic. But we have decided to no longer bear the burden of self-government. Nobody cares about our excuses. See America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. It’s falling like Rome’s Republic.
On 4 July 2006 I wrote about the death of the American Constitution, a call to act before it became too late. Here is my most recent version. Today I believe that it is too late. Our choices are decay or disintegration (e.g., as often seen in Africa or Latin America) – or some form of autocracy by the Left or Right. It’s like going to prison in America. You see the gangs. Not joining makes you a victim. Do you join the Puerto Ricans, the Blacks, or the White Nationalists? Painful choices, all.
In human societies, the night is always coming. Unceasing effort, begun anew by each generation, keeps it at bay. Sometimes the dark is unusually powerful, and only extraordinary collective action can push it back.
The smart money bets against us. Big picture analysis like this is usually wrong. But not always in a good way.
About solutions
I have no ideas about solutions. That is perhaps the worst aspect of our situation. For example, I wrote that After 230 years, the Constitution needs fixing. Now I believe any tinkering would make it worse. Perhaps it does not matter. My 129 posts about paths to reform of American politics get the fewest hits of any subject. Apathy can be a fatal disease for a Republic.
Future posts will describe our situation and discuss ways to prepare for what seems likely to come. But the human soul has an inherent capacity for spiritual revival. If nothing else, we can always hope for better days.
For More Information
Ideas! See my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information, see my posts about Reforming America: steps to new politics, about forecasts, and especially these …
- The similar delusions of America’s Left and Right show our common culture – and weakness.
- Programs to reshape the American mind, run by the left and right.
- We are alone in the defense of the Republic.
- Who lies to us the most? Left or Right?
- The bad news about reforming America: time is our enemy.
- Delusions of the well-educated and intelligent on the Left and Right leave us nowhere to hide.
- Facts are the enemy of both Left and Right in our America.
- Left and Right use race as a way to divide America.
- Watch the Left and Right move against America.
- DEFCON 2: both Left and Right have turned against us.
- America abandons the ideals that made us great.
- Visions of America if the Left wins.
Somewhere ahead lies the domino in America that will not fall.
That last domino will determine the shape of what follows.
