Our children’s and grandchildren’s lives will be lived in the society we are making; should we look forward to their gratitude? America’s Founders earned gratitude; however imperfect their bequest, it draw aspiring multitudes from everywhere on on earth. But now we are rejecting their vision; it is time to consider how our descendants may feel about their inheritance.
Four maps explain the preeminence of the West and the hegemony of the United States: A map of the Renaissance, A map of the Reformation, A world corruption map and A map of English-speaking peoples. These maps show clearly that the Christian heirs of the Western Roman Empire rose from their lethargy into ambition and aspiration during their Renaissance, displaying interest in the larger world. The Reformation’s Protestants shook off corruption, praised ambition, and prospered. Those who spoke English gained primacy of the seas, spreading their language, law and culture around the world. In North America, they pushed the underdeveloped tribes out of the way and created the largest accumulation of people who have ever shared one language, laws and culture. The resulting economic explosion was fueled by ample resources and energized by the capitalism that developed naturally with a government limited by the principles installed by America’s 19th century liberal Founders.
Unreformed Europe and the rest of the world, hampered by diverse cultures, languages and greater corruption, have progressed more slowly in comparison. Inevitably, North America became the world’s preeminent economic power and immigration target. But it is a changing place.
Like human beings, human societies come and go; the process is human history. Americans have abandoned their Judeo-Christian beliefs and are both abandoning their 19th century political liberalism and in very human fashion, beginning to punish those who prefer to retain such things. Some are now enlisting government to accelerate the changes.
Governments are comfortable with uniformity and obedience, as American public schools well illustrate. Social conflict and rapid technological and economic progress are destabilizing and so, if you are a government, threatening. Authoritarian or democratic, all governments are invested in a desired status quo and will try to maintain it or at least, limit significant change. A group of Democratic and some Republican Congressfolk are currently showing that to President Trump.
With religion gone, social order can rely only upon government; that is leading it to adopt the new tools supplied by advancing technology for the control of populations as China illustrates. Increasing disorder reinforces that. U.S. travelers are already inspected, internet use and cell phones are snooped and facial recognition monitoring is appearing.
The inevitable offshore economic competition has raised the living standards of foreigners but it has simultaneously sent U.S. housewives to work and it continues to reduce the living standards for the high cost producers. That is shrinking the middle class and further destabilizing society. Government is enlisted and enhanced to quell the disturbances, something it can manage only by imposing stasis. That has begun via regulation.
Imposed stasis halts the turmoil but paralyzes progress and the production of wealth. Political goals replace economic ones, stifling the economy. Nonstandard thinking must be discouraged and punished, restricting progress. Wealth changes from an economic to a political reward. Those is now visible.
Throughout much of the world, politicians have overused government and private debt to cement their power and to bribe voters; U.S. citizens each owe about a quarter of a million dollars of their governmental debt. The 2008 U.S. financial collapse was papered over with fiat money; when the inevitable next such event arrives, the unaddressed damage carried forward from then will amplify whatever has accumulated since. The path back to economic reality will be long, painful and probably begin with the onset of the next significant recession .
Those conditions will loosen customary social behavioral bonds quickly; resulting disorder will have to be addressed with only increasingly totalitarian police power available to do so. The detention camps and domestic U.S. military command structure already provided by a far-seeing Congress may be needed. Regardless, the United States no longer fulfills the vision of its Founders and seems presently committed toward putting that vision even farther behind. This does however show one bright spot; it seems likely to reduce the clamor for admission at U.S. borders …
The Conservative Citizen 