The only way out is: out

 

Bob Maistros thinks America has passed the point of no return.  Here’s the opening of his essay at American Greatness:

Victor Davis Hanson has recently pondered in back-to-back essays whether there is any way out of America’s previously “fast-tracked” and now accelerating decline. 

Meanwhile, Julie Kelly appears to see no way out of the “near-certainty” that a “D.C. grand jury . . . will indict Trump on multiple counts” in ways that will cause him to be treated “[n]ot as a former president but as a traitor.” 

Columnist Josh Hammer, addressing both Trump’s judicial travails and the broader “decadent civilizational morass,” insists in his own consecutive submissions that “sometimes, the only way out is through”—tit-for-tat action from the Right. 

The depressing reality? This time, with the progressive Left’s assault on America, in Hammer’s words, having far passed the “point of no return,” the only way out is: out.  . . .

Read the full essay here.  Not for the faint of heart.

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Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson asks what we’re all thinking:

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit.

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

To have a “border problem,” one must have a border. The United States has no southern border. . . .

VDH concludes his essay on a sad note:

Election night is a mere construct. It is mostly meaningless. Local, state, and federal election results are stalled and descend into days, weeks, and sometimes even months of bickering, counter charges of ballot tampering and fraud, ballot harvesting and curing, and a loss of confidence in the integrity of the final result. Debates mean little anymore, once a large portion of the electorate has already voted. No wonder deceased candidates can win. Gaffes are now determined by whether they occur before or after the majority of voters has cast their ballots. 

There should be a national uniform standard that allows states to set their ballot procedures—as long as they result in 70 percent of the electorate voting in person on election day. 

America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968—only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

Read the full column here.

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Fiddling America Away

 

So where are we now?  One of this blog's favorites, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), looks at the big picture, and his column “Fiddling America Away” at American Greatness is not encouraging.  He begins:

The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. 

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

And VDH concludes:

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.

VDH’s full column is here.

RELATED:  Just the News reports that “President Joe Biden promised that he would bring back the "good old days" in international relations, but instead Europe and much of the world seem to be leaving America behind to move forward to the China days.” 

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A Greek Tragedy & A Suggestion Box

 

Sundance is seeking suggestions from his readers;  in his own words, “Put your thoughts into the form of a vessel, willing to deliver in just about any way possible.  What do you want me to do?”  He provides thorough context and reasoning. 

In the comments section below his posting, I found reader Steve Brown who probably reflects the thoughts and perspectives of many readers:

I live and work in my Homeland, England. I speak for the very many people with whom I have spoken here when I say that the USA is now viewed by most as being like a Greek Tragedy. Your Leader is naught but a tragic comedian, propped up by unseen hands. Your overseas ventures are characterised by abject failure, your economy is such that it is endangering the rest of the world, but still the croaking voices of those who supposedly represent you continue to profess your assumed global leadership.

Those same people now, since the very recent indictment of Donald Trump, state that Trump is very possibly the only person capable of stopping the decline of the USA but also of possibly reinstating that nation as the premier world leader and even as the bastion of legal rights.

We overseas can only hope and pray for you all in the United States.

If you have a suggestion for Sundance, by all means go to his posting here.

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The Decline of Higher Education

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson goes through all sorts of “woke” reasons that colleges and universities are failing.  The full article (“Are Universities Doomed”) is at The Daily Signal here, but here’s his conclusion:

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

VDH could as well be describing the decline of western civilization itself.

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The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization

 

The great historian Victor Davis Hanson has another must-read:

. . . Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture. 

So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature. 

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright. 

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.  

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis. 

. . .

He concludes:

As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization. 

When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

Read the rest here at American Greatness. A Must Read.

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The Weaponization of Justice

 

Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics takes another look at the FBI: 

Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.

. . .

Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.

This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.

Essentially what the FBI was saying is “We know where you live, and we aren’t afraid to come for you.” They even rifled through Melania Trump’s closet, as if she might have been hiding top-secret documents in her hat box. When do we find out they also spent an hour sorting through her lingerie?

This is sickening, no matter how much MSNBC and the Washington Post want you to think you can still trust the FBI. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over again, and I must be a Democrat.

Read the full column here.

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What if the “civil” war turns hot?

Kurt Schlicter asks the unspeakable question. His column at Townhall begins:

Are We Looking At Another Civil War?

Consider the logic of the left and it’s no wonder that many people are considering the unspeakable – whether America will devolve into actual violent conflict. . . . The most important question related to the long decline of America at the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and terminally foolish ruling caste that controls our major institutions is whether we can pull out of this tailspin without bloodshed.

I sure hope so, but the risk is real and we need to confront it.

The logic of the left accepts political violence. . . .

So, while the chance of civil conflict is low, violence is not only possible but it has been used by the left as a means of making political change in America in the past. And the evidence is that the left remains ideologically open to using violence in the future to achieve its goals.

But what would a civil conflict look like if, heaven forbid, it ever came to pass again? . . .

And Mr. Schlicter outlines some scenarios.  Read the full column here.

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