Farewell to America
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
Despite my headline, this essay is not intended to be entirely pessimistic. Instead it is my effort to accept a reality that I think few people, including myself, have generally been able to process: The country we shall see after tomorrow’s election will not be the America as founded in 1776 and continued to prosper for the next quarter millennium.
The country can certainly be made great again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX proves it, time after time. The talent and creativity of free Americans is truly endless, and if Donald Trump wins it is very likely that energy will be unleashed again, in ways that no one can predict.
The country can certainly become free again. There is no law that prevents the elimination of bureaucracy and regulation, no matter how immortal government agencies appear to be. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 proves this. Though Russia has sadly retreated back to its top-down government-ruling ways, the country did wipe out almost all its bureaucracy in 1991, resulting in an exuberant restart that even today is nowhere near as oppressive as Soviet rule.
Should Donald Trump win, we should have every expectation that he will do the largest house-cleaning of the federal government ever. The benefits will be immeasurable, and magnificent.
What however will not change, even if Donald Trump wins resoundingly tomorrow, is the modern culture and political ethics that now exist. That modern culture is fundamentally different than the America that existed during the country’ s first 200 years, and it guarantees that America can never be the country it once was.
The kind of people Americans once all aspired to be
Emotions
First there is the emotional nature of modern culture. The America of the past was remarkable cool-headed and rational. Anyone who spends any time reading the writings of the past can see it. Anyone who watches any television or movies from before 1960 can see it as well. Americans all wished to be Perry Mason or Sherlock Holmes or Thomas Jefferson, thoughtful, intelligent, educated, rational, and entirely in favor of the rule of law and truth, no matter where it led.
Today we are a nation of children, often allowing emotions and outrage to determine our decision-making process instead of knowledge and considered rational thought. Few read books anymore. Instead, they scroll endlessly on their smart phones, watching short X clips that might provide some information but mostly act to simply massage one’s emotions.
You can garner this reality by one simple fact: We use the word “feel” in place of “thought” almost all the time. People almost never ask others “What do you think?” Instead, we ask each other “What do you feel?” And the answer always is, “I feel this,” or “I feel that.” It is feelings always.
Donald Trump himself epitomizes this change. He is unquestionably intelligent and thoughtful in his actions, but his approach to campaigning has always been emotional and aimed for the gut. His use of insulting nicknames against his opponents shows this. And the enthusiasm in which his supporters latch on reinforces the point.
Nor is Trump of course alone in this. The absurd accusation by the Democrats that Trump is Hitler and his supporters are fascists is equally demagogic and emotional and empty-headed. It is all feelings, with no substance.
Now, you can have a successful country based on feelings, but such a nation will not be as sophisticated or as reasoned. Nor will it have much to do with the very essence of the Enlightenment and the entire founding principles that created Western Civilization.
The first Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris
Religion and Family
Second, there is the disappearance in American society of religion and family. The America I grew up in the post-WWII era was the same America from the Pilgrim days. Men and women got married in order to raise children. Children were the centerpiece of everything everyone did. Divorce was so rare that in my youth I literally never knew any kid raised in a broken home.
Once again, this reality is very evident to anyone who spends any time reading or watching the literature or visual media of the past. It is amazing how often family and raising kids is central to the stories of movies and television. Men and women dated for the purpose of creating a family, not simply to have sex. Marriage existed to create a firm and solid environment for the children to come. And the adult view was to the future, not for themselves but for the children couples were bringing into the world.
Not so much today. In movies today men and women date to find a great and perfect partner, but the subject of marriage and children is rarely considered. In fact, it is sometimes intentionally left out, as if the word “marriage” is a curse word no one wants to hear.
Religion is also gone as a central part of much of American life. This was already changing in the 1950s, but before World War II almost all Americans made some form of the Judeo-Christian religion a part of their life, whether it be Judaism or Protestantism or Catholicism or any one of many Christian denominations. People went to church. They read the Bible. They considered the moral component very deeply in anything they did.
Once again, this fact becomes very evident if you watch movies from prior to 1950. The portrayal of religion is pervasive, and almost always positive. Religion was not considered perfect, but it was recognized as an important and essential tool for incorporating morality in every decision. Right and wrong mattered.
Today it is considered “weird” to be religious. And if you are secular you are supposed to consider religious people inferior, barbaric, and close-minded fools.
I am secular and don’t think any of those things, but I have also been part of the secular community my whole life, and have seen other secular people say these things routinely. And if I ever dare speak positive things about religion, I find myself condemned and ostracized as a weirdo, very quickly.
Blind politics in all things
Finally, there is the warping of our culture by politics. Once, politics was rarely introduced in everyday life. People ran their businesses, their families, their schools, and their day-to-day activities thinking only of the very basics of their own lives.
Today, politics enters into every single one of those tasks. You can’t do anything without considering the politics. Often you have to do things differently than you would have wanted, in order to address the politics of the situation.
Combined this obsessive focus on politics with the increased emotional nature of our culture, the result is a country where people are so consumed by politics that almost half the country strongly hates the other half — for political reasons — with little desire on either part to cross the bridge to defuse the situation.
I want to note that this hatred is not evenly distributed. My experience as a secular Jew working first in the film business, then as a college teacher, and finally as a science journalist — all communities that are largely dominated by those on the left — I have learned unequivocally that it is the left that hates the most and is the most close-minded. This one clip below from last week illustrates this fact most bluntly. Most commentators focused on the decision of Hugh Hewitt to walk off the broadcast and quit the Washington Post. My focus is different.
Hugh Hewitt goes full BEASTMODE on the Washington Post, which continues its epic partisan spiral. pic.twitter.com/os20z2IJly
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) November 1, 2024
When Hewitt notes the basic facts, that Bucks County had broken the law and was rightfully sued and the court ruled that “Trump was right,” Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of the Washington Post, has no interest in these facts. Instead he responds with indignation, “I don’t appreciate being lectured about reporting.” Yet everything he and Ruth Marcus, another associate editor at the Washinton Post, said about the actions of Trump and the Republican Party in Bucks county at the start of the clip was fundamentally wrong. They both bluntly claimed that Trump was using lawfare to interfere with the election in Pennsylvania, when the truth was the exact opposite.
In other words, these are propagandists, not journalists. But more to my point, they are also close-minded and filled with such hatred of Trump and Republicans that they no longer are interested in the truth. All that matters is that their side win, come hell or high water.
And Capehart represents one half of our nation today. American can never return to the free and open society of my youth and most of its history until these people change, and in my entire life, I have never seen any indication they have any interest in doing so. If anything, the close-mindedness and hatred has only increased with time.
And in this clip Capehart proves this fact, most embarrassingly.
Thus, even if Trump wins tomorrow his effort to reduce the administrative state and bring freedom back to America will surely be stymied by the half of our population represented by people like Capehart. They will have no interest in the truth or the best policy. All that will move them is their hatred of Trump.
And should Kamala Harris win? Not only will none of the positive changes I outlined above occur, but we can surely expect the close-minded left to aggressively move to cement its power. The nation will then surely descend further on the path to becoming a bankrupt and starving Venezuela, since leadership that is close-minded and focused on hate can never make good choices.
So farewell to America. What the future brings is hard to predict, but without question it will not be the good and grand nation I was born and raised in. It might become great again, but it will do so with a poison within it that will be dragging it down.
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Talk about a blackpill.
Hope this a typo:
“He is questionably intelligent”
Related:
WHATS PAST IS PROLOGUE?
“People tend to do today what they did yesterday. Kamala Harris and the Democrat party machine were and are self-confessed “radical”, “woke” and tend to endorse an extremist Socialist authoritarian U.N. / Globalist anti American model for America. An America where the government will actively turn your country into an open turnstile for multiple millions of illegal immigrants’ flooding the open borders to a welfare state country that will control through law what you can see, say, hear, buy, drive, fly and travel to, eat, drink and think. Talk about Fascism.”
“Think hard and choose wisely America, your choices as an American are far reaching and very consequential.”
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/what-s-past-is-prologue
Bonus:
YOUNG PEOPLE ALIGNED WITH TRUMP UNDERSTAND
“The young people who today are aligned with and strongly stand with D.J. Trump are the bright, optimistic and positive future of America and the world. ”
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/young-people-aligned-with-trump-understand
Patrick Underwood: I fixed this within minutes of posting. You were just too quick in reading. :)
I have hope that, if elected, Trump and his fellow Republicans can take a lesson from Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis.
His first election by a divided electorate had him winning by a very slim margin. Four years of good and practical policy and governance later, and he won his second election with a landslide.
We might not be able to convince everyone on the Left that the more conservative path is the better one, but we might be able to have many of those who are more open-minded follow along with us.
Trump must prevail, and the radical Democrats cannot allow him to prevail.
The battle, the stress the confrontation, the political warfare is what will keep the country strong.
All potentials exist.
Lawyers, Courts and Money!
Not giving up yet.. There are significant challenges to be sure, but the further we descend, the more eyes are opened. My feeling is it’s basically a “critical mass” problem. We need to get down to the point where enough citizens are negatively affected.. I think we’re close..
Here’s the good news: If Trump wins, Vance has an excellent chance at winning in ’28.
That means a conservative SCOTUS thru the next generation (assuming the inevitable leftward drift of formerly conservative Justices doesn’t get too severe).
No, it isn’t 1776 any more. Nor is it 1789, 1824 (when Andrew Jackson claimed that the Presidency had been stolen from him). It’s not 1861, nor 1865. There are many past events in the US that we’ve moved on from, and I’m happy with that.
As Thomas Jefferson once said, the man who reads only newspapers is less informed than the man who reads nothing at all. He probably said this after he lost a bitter public fight with Alexander Hamilton. But it’s a good lesson in how much to trust journalists.
minor edit in first paragraph after Religion and Family heading; “from the Pilgrim days”
Lawyers, Courts and Money!
It may yet be Lawyers, Courts, Money and guns.
Andi: Fixed. Thank you.
In 1776, you had to think for yourself when it came to day-to-day living. You had to make your own decisions, and seek the insight of others who nearly always were your social and economic peers and not some Souper Geniuses.
That changed when people moved from the farms – where they had to trust their own insights and common sense, and those of their agrarian peers, to protect themselves, physically and economically – to the factories, where those attributes were subordinated to a reverence for formal education and to rules-based “scientific management” by trained professionals.
And along with that, urban living encouraged them to become interdependent, then dependent, upon others – landlords, service providers, civic government – to solve the problems around them. To the degree that the immediate problems were resolved, this encouraged further trust in those entities (along with unions) to protect their interests.
The above way of thinking was encouraged by the elites of their day, as the organized application of intellect and science was accurately perceived as the paving machine for the road to the future … but we took this a step too far; we began to believe that the practitioners of intellect and science were the paving machine, worthy of our total trust: that they were capable of paving our way across any stretch of life that was in front of us ….
… and we were not worthy to compare their thinking against our own common sense.
This is what primed the pump for the expansion of government seen in the New Deal. An expansion that was reinforced by our victory in WWII; arguably the most successful application of government power in the face of adversity in our history, that in large part was built on our growth of industry and technological achievement. It was reinforced in the same manner, two decades later, by the successes of the civil rights movement and the space program.
All three of those victories have a common thread which facilitated their success: all were undertaken as part of efforts to preserve life and liberty (even the space program, which was significant to both defense and foreign policy) – i.e. the legitimate mission of government, producing outcomes that were universal and not individual-specific.
But we built upon the step-too-far we took during the New Deal, aided and abetted by the thirty years of American economic dominance after WWII as the rest of the developed world was literally rebuilding from the rubble. We got the idea that the same institutions that could defeat two global tyrannies, defeat Jim Crow, and put men on the moon could be trusted to solve ANY problem with its deep pockets and legions of “experts”, all perceived to be (but not actually) disconnected from the profit motive.
Even problems whose attributes vary greatly from individual-to-individual – personal finances, career/unemployment, health care, education. Problems that do not lend themselves to the limited perception of a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital.
That thirty years of economic dominance acted as a buffer that allowed us to indulge the above fallacies with little/no damage for years. Millions came to believe that they had a right to work the same job the same way in the same place for a lifetime, because their employers could be turned into cash cows and social-services surrogates by bureaucratic fiat and (in some cases) union pressure. And if they weren’t able to get a job, others would be there so they could “get by” enough that they didn’t take the initiative to “get ahead”.
We went a long way in “breeding out” the idea that the individual MUST be the primary decision-maker over the aspects of living that directly affect them, and that they must take the initiative to implement those decisions … and instead we could just go to work and/or school and/or the aid office, and others would plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
The Right, instead of disabusing this fallacy at its fundamental level, deferred to the “experts” themselves; they didn’t ignore the problems, but they only paid lip service to them in their own lack of confidence in their own common sense, affinity for political expedience, and/or their own elitist views of their “commoner” neighbors. They kicked the can down the road – even as things were coming apart, which has been happening since the end of that thirty-year economic dominance where today’s generations learned all the wrong lessons.
This is why politics and emotion became such outsized influences upon us – we keep repeating the mistake the nation of Israel made in I Samuel 8:20, and seek political hero after political hero to “be a king over us, so that we also may be like all the nations, and our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
The way out, as I see it, will end up with us reclaiming the individual responsibility and authority that we had in 1776.
https://thenayborhood.substack.com/p/cutting-to-the-chase
Will our neighbors even perceive that is the way out, much less make the effort and take the risk to head for that exit?
That will determine whether this grand experiment continues, or ends in decline to a new Dark Age.
I think Trump overlooked a bombshell talking point when he failed to say “Remember, if we absolutely wipe out Kamala, we can look forward to Obama shutting his yap and going away!!”
Murray Rothbard
The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire:
1870 to WW-2
Lecture 12: “The Great Cooperation”
https://youtu.be/VIaOuSt13v0
1:29:41
“Public housing, planned cities, government power plants, and coerced unionism were all part of the great cooperation between corporations and government through WWI and WWII. Statistics came into being. Cartels were created to manage many industries, e.g. railroads and food. Unions were pro-war forces. Fascism was considered great. Civil liberties were dropped. Coolidge continued as a Morgan man. Milton Friedman proposed the withholding tax in WWII.”
There is much I like about Trump, but I have little confidence he would serve as a good president. I know his first term was overall pretty good. I think he is too old now. Look at his campaign. No policy proposals. Nothing on the deficit. Nothing on health care spending.
Regarding Kamala, I do not see how she can do great harm to freedom of speech. On that claim, I think Elon is off his rocker. Very likely the Senate goes republican. That would block whatever she would do which was worse than Biden.
The country is going to hit the wall concerning its finances at some point. England and France are having to impose government spending cuts now. I want the democrats to have to deal with reducing the deficit in the US. With Trump as President democrats would unleash Antifa to wreck havoc when spending cuts impact their constituents. Having a democrat as president actually enables/forces the federal government to do what is necessary.
Bob-
America hasn’t been 1776 America in a long time.
In many ways, that is actually an improvement.
Every generation thinks the current world is worse than it once was. I suppose that is part of the human condition and means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I suspect nothing significant will happen tomorrow.
Mike A: I find it continually amazing how modern Americans won’t believe the words of those who specialize in some things. I am a historian. I have literally read almost all the original materials written by those who lived prior to 1700, and probably have read almost everything of importance written by the Founding Fathers. I am very aware that America in the 20th century was not 1776.
What must be understood is how remarkably alike the cultures of both were however, up until the end of World War II. Remarkable alike. You don’t have to believe me, but I have come to that conclusion have a lifetime of research into the histories of the times.
Then again, I can understand your doubts. However, if you read my work regularly you know I am reasonably reliable and accurate. And do you really think I am that naive about the difference between 1776 and the 20th century?
Steve …
No policy proposals?
A return to energy independence, with the effects it had in his first term upon both our economy and world peace vs. the effects when Biden reversed that policy?
Trade policy, negotiated from a position of strength, based on those who profit here, produce and employ here … and/or their access to our markets is contingent upon our access to theirs? Not to mention contingent upon whether a nation is using profits made here to fund their totalitarian expansionism (i.e. China)?
A return to a more secure border, instead of a wide-open border as well as the use of apps like CBP One and the abuse of temporary-protected status to bypass the legal-immigration process?
More regulatory reform, including the possibility of ending the roadblock-construction of the Department of Education?
All of the above acting to mitigate the deficit, through economic growth and/or reducing the need for government spending?
And let’s talk about the policies that a Trump admin WON’T engage in:
Investigating parents for standing up and dissenting from the physically-dangerous (at many levels) trans agenda at school board meetings … and those attending traditional Latin Mass, simply because they fit some bureaucrat’s stereotype of a “threat”. A Trump admin will stand with both, against the theocrats of the Church of Woke and their cancel culture.
They won’t be inclined to put others on a terror watch list for no good reason, like they did with Tulsi Gabbard. Or slow-walk launch authorizations Elon Musk needs to maintain the development of Starship.
They will be less inclined to process-as-punishment legal action, or jailing political opponents outright.
A Democrat-controlled Executive Branch can and has done a lot of damage to civil liberties, along with their volunteer censors in social media, before the Senate gets up and put its boots on. And they will not do a dang thing about the deficits, until they – and the rest of us – are overtaken by events that will be the consequence of their Field of Dreams if-we-mandate-it-it-will-come mindset that has driven all this spending.
There is a reason Trump has not been the deficit hawk we both want – he can’t do it alone; Congress has to cooperate. He is not going to expend political capital to lead them to the waters of fiscal prudence, until he knows they will drink it. He has plenty more areas to expend that capital where he can make a difference, as we saw in his first term.
Mike a … while societal conditions have improved in many ways since 1776, we have forgotten the fundamental value of the self-evident truths our founding citizens declared then. I described how we departed from them, up-thread.
That departure has changed the curve of actual progress in recent years, from a climb to a descent … heading towards the stagnation of European social “democracy” that is more accurately described as social technocracy, and is now descending to a level of self-righteousness that threatens freedom-of-speech and erodes the intellectual honesty that we depend upon to innovate and solve problems. A glide-path to intergenerational decline.
Those self-evident truths are what I consider to be the only sustainable social contract. We talk much about their value, but little about WHY they work as that social contract:
> When strictly respected, they set limits upon our government operatives in their ability to reach into our lives – to “first, do no harm” as Hippocrates put it. They no longer have the carte blanche they do today to impose any law/regulation/tax they see as furthering their ever-changing definition of the “common good”, simply because they are elected and are assumed to embody the whole “consent of the governed” … the fundamental fallacy of what is called Our Democracy™.
> They also limit the task set that we must expect our government operatives to perform, to those relative few, one-size-fits-all tasks that directly pertain to securing our rights – and with our oversight, keeps them focused upon that objective instead of thinking they have that carte blanche. That task set is within the limitations of government’s human operatives to effectively and efficiently manage, as opposed to their attempts to solve all things for all people.
They neutralize identity politics, reducing all of it to a simple question: is an individual being denied their unalienable rights – or not?
> They maintain respect for all spiritual worldviews that are compatible with them, instead of giving one faith (that happens to see its gods in their mirrors) exclusive access to our institutions for its spread.
> And strict allegiance to them maximizes the amount of distributed intellect applied to our problem-solving processes – engaging millions of people with common sense and proximity-informed insight that a “little intellectual elite in a far-off capital” CAN’T possess – by incentivizing the responsible exercise of individual initiative instead of expecting government to solve one’s problems FOR them and therefore submitting to its operatives.
Return to the respect for those self-evident truths from 1776, is essential if we are to avoid intergenerational decline. They have a lot more meaning to today than “nothing”.
The NY governor and attorney general have just declared they will fight against the Trump administration on everything and for any reason. They are prepared to take him to court for the next four years.
Steve
They ,the left, are now calling for regulating digital platforms to keep them from spreading misinformation.
Who defines misinformation?
Will we be removing all those ancient alien shows and bigfoot books?
Is religion misinformation?