Quo Vadis America?
Guest Writer
The United States has come to match Livy’s remark about ancient Rome, that she could not endure her vices or their remedies. We are teetering on the edge of disaster on several fronts. We should think seriously about the abyss that awaits us, identify the cause of our distress, and consider if our country can be saved
The economy has entered a downward trend whose basic features, a vanishing manufacturing industry and a stagnant financial sector, will not be reversed for a long time. This sad situation is topped by a national debt of $12 trillion actually owed and another $48 trillion in promised future social payments. The federal government will eventually have to choose between printing money and widespread social unrest in all classes of society. If past performance is any guide, the federal government will choose to print money. Paul O’Neil, a former Secretary of the Treasury, asks, “[W]ho will keep lending us money . . . Nations around the world . . . are going to have better places to invest their money than the United States because the currencies will be more sound than ours and the inflation rates will be lower.”
American standards of living will plummet when foreign investors and governments begin to stop the bleeding by unloading their increasingly-devalued stores of dollars. To put this in personal terms, a salary that a ten-year alumnus of Wabash graduate would find comfortable today will, in the future, barely meet the cost of housing and feeding his family. An endowment of $250 million will, in that future time, be sufficient to run the college for two or three years.
Our economic distress will be compounded by the rise of aggressive foreign powers such as China, India, and a resurgent Russia, eager to expand their influence and secure access to vital resources. Each these powers will find ready-made constituencies among nations who have been offended or thwarted by fifty years of America’s dilettante imperialism. In older, wiser days American presidents cautioned us against foreign entanglements, and proclaimed that America was the friend of liberty everywhere but the guarantor only of her own liberty. For the past century the United States has ignored this counsel in favor of a Kafka-esque foreign policy that combined praise of human rights with ham-handed gunboat diplomacy and irresponsible attempts at social engineering. NATO has grown into a massive entanglement that commits the United States to fight for the forests of Estonia and the wheat fields of Albania. America’s grandiose vision of its role in the world may come to an abrupt end by sufficient challenges to the continued existence of Israel and the independence of Taiwan.
America’s inability to overcome these evils is not strengthened by the curse of America’s suicidal popular culture, which consists largely of witless entertainers praising the pursuit of self-satisfaction. The derangement produced by the endless river of bathos is ironically demonstrated by the widespread outrage at bonuses for officers of tax-subsidized financial companies. The outrage comes from people who give herd-like adoration to sports corporations and their employees, whose lavish incomes are no less subsidized by public debt and taxes. The ridiculous ideas by which we somehow distinguish millionaire insurance executives from millionaire third basemen will not help us rebuild our prosperity, or even self-sufficiency.
As part of this trend one must include our educational institutions, which are increasingly simple extensions of the entertainment industry. From kindergarten to the liberal arts, lessons are divided into short segments capable of being digested by young men and women trained to pay attention between commercials. The expensive mania surrounding high-school athletics is an echo, and preparation, for the economic and emotional mania that supports the major sports corporations. Television shows and movies are used to teach in every subject because lazy teachers won’t (and can’t) challenge their students’ appetite for prepackaged opinions and spectacle. The political results are best illustrated by a middle-aged president who lands on an aircraft carrier like the fighter jocks in the shoot-em-up films his constituents watch. A spasm of national unease over our “edutainment” industry was quickly cauterized by an agreement to forego education altogether in favor of the ability to repeat information and opinions on standardized tests. Like the lemmings, no child was to be left behind.
The result of this deterioration has been the destruction of one culture and its replacement by a wasteland of crude, ignorant boors. There was much to deprecate about America’s lost culture. But that culture’s low crime rate was not caused by racism. Its safe schools were not produced by sexism. Its appreciation of thrift and hard work was not promoted by evil businessmen. Its tenacity, persistence and cheerful modesty were not made by anti-Semitism. While modern men and women are better for their disdain of bigotry, they are much worse for having lost the good that lived in between the evil. Compared to that lost culture, there are no modern standards of behavior, codes of common courtesy that enable men and women to aptly express appreciation, respect and community in their everyday lives. Even the clothes people wear seem intended to express their disregard for themselves and others. Look at a Norman Rockwell painting and, saccharine connotations aside, you see the way people dressed in the old culture. Today, the attitude toward public life is best represented by an obese individual wearing shorts, a tank-top and bath sandals during Sunday services.
What is to be done? The ancient Scriptural guide to virtue provides the first step. We must act as though we have faith, and act as though America were wholesome and strong, as though we were wholesome and strong. We must recover or deepen our Christian religious faith. We must do this personally and publicly, without fear or false guilt. This will mean struggle against all the powers who, for whatever motive, wish us to believe that we have no meaning without the approved messages of modern culture. One such message is that being a Christian means offending non-Christians. I am not offended when a minister and an imam pray, one after the other, at a public meeting, invoking God as Allah and Christ. Let our community be melded by our respective faiths, and our common life will last as long as we believe. Follow the false god of “tolerant” and “non-offensive” censoring of religion in favor of a secular ideology that can withhold from one and give to the other, and the resulting sense of community will only paper over the resulting animosity and mutual alienation.
Second, we must abandon the illusion that there are two political parties, one of which can be reliably counted on to pursue the common good. Both parties want to dictate, at a national level, the limits of all life, to socialize risk and privatize profit, and to borrow our money in order pay for the privilege. Their mismanagement of the country’s affairs has built a house of cards, ready to collapse into unimaginable national poverty and helplessness. Their only solutions have been to lead us from conflict to war, from debt to penury, from independence to servitude. New political parties, pledged to follow the Constitution, or to radically amend it, are required to properly order the republic. Only these parties can, at least in their youth, govern without regard to the exploiting forces of legal plunder to which Republicans and Democrats have been committed for decades.
As Livy said, we cannot endure our vices or their remedies. So we must die or find new remedies. America can be saved. America should be saved. We only need to will it.
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