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Weekend Debate: Is America Toast?
So I keep picking up that vibe, here on Ricochet. We’re toast. We’ll never recover from the Obama Administration. Our best days are behind us. It’s all a long, slow, melancholy retreat. Resistance is futile. The Constitution is dead.
What do you think? Doomed? Or can we turn this thing around? If so, how–and how long will it take?
Published in General
We’re a little more up market. Think brioche, not toast.
A lot depends on who is elected in 2016. If it’s Hillary Clinton, it will indicate that the American people have decided that a senior citizen who has been deeply corrupt her entire life and is constitutionally unable to tell the truth is who we want to lead us. Yeah, in that case we’ve elected to jump into the toaster.
If someone else is elected, there is maybe a chance for a turnaround.
Even then, we are going to be discovering for decades how deeply injurious the Obama administration has been to the country.
I don’t believe we’re toast but we are definitely in a jam that we butter get out of.
We are going to be great. Energy costs are down. Innovation is accelerating. The only sizable issue is how to handle the aging and passing of boomers. We will find a way.
Exactly!
I’ll butter the toast –
In “Who Are We,” Samuel Huntington described the formative American character as the Protestant work ethic plus Jeffersonian self-sufficiency (to oversimplify). I think it is pretty clear that those virtues have all but disappeared from our culture and have been replaced with the belief that the solution to all problems – large and small – lies with the federal government. The idea that individuals ought to work things out between themselves as moral agents is gone. I don’t see how these virtues can be recovered, especially when a likely major catastrophe ensues (take you pick – a coronal mass ejection, economic/currency collapse, major terrorist attack, major war). Following such disruptions, I expect a demand for even greater authoritarian measures, totalitarian actually.
Yes, the entire west is doomed. Except for maybe Switzerland.
Let’s hear more from you. See, I’m sort of rooting for America. Being as it’s the only country I’ve got and all.
America has had worse Presidents and worse times. So, it may recover in time. It just will not be in my lifetime. Maybe not in our kids lifetimes. It is even possible that the US may have to fall apart completely either to civil or external wars before it finds its soul again and becomes what its promise is. Or maybe it will need to fail entirely and come back as some other entity.
Yes. Next question?
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Seriously, though, it’s not the Obama administration or what it’s done, however disastrous and damaging. It’s the culture, which is downstream of religion — the people and their understanding, or lack thereof, of God, good and evil, their relationships to the aforementioned, their identity as Americans and Westerners… Any people who would elect and re-elect this small “a” anti-Christ is terminal. Obama is the symptom.
We have been doomed since before we were born. A lot of the trends that are killing us precede the 20th century. Nothing is inevitable and there is always free will, I don’t see things turning around any time soon. In a time when places of higher learning have brought us the term “trigger warning”, I suspect our civilization more likely to curl up into the fetal position than to seriously confront its problems.
I say no. America has a lot of greatness left in her and when viewed at the state level there are a lot of encouraging trends out there. We must decentralize, that is the key in my opinion.
A former President and his wife, a former Secretary of State, have been shown to have accepted massive bribes from foreign tycoons and dictators. Bribery on a scale that it could be described as treasonous. Behavior so egregious that it might affect her political future.
A small circulation magazine publishes an account of a Wisconsin prosecutor running his own Gestapo in order to protect the interests of government employees. The story attracts notice for a couple of days.
The President, acting on his own authority, decides to add several million new citizens to the nations. The opposition party lodges a formal complaint, and then moves on.
I could continue but what is the point? If these events were happening in a country other than the U.S., what would your assessment be?
Would you say that the political future of that country was all rainbows and sunshine?
What does “doomed” mean?
Conservatives are usually right about the future, and usually wrong about the timetable.
I think it is still possible to win certain fights in a way that will secure important liberties for some years longer. And I don’t think you can ever win more than that anyway.
I care about liberty more than the money. In the end, it won’t matter that much whether I make more or less than my grandparents.
The fact that there are so few who even recognize the depth and extent of our problems.
Toast.
All the symptoms are in the headlines. Inside threats :Loss of freedom, selective prosecutions -in courts and in the media. Pathetic candidates. Corrupt politicians everywhere. Blatant disregard for the Constitution from both parties. Ever-growing power of government. Growing power of police and law enforcement with selective agendas. Open borders. Growing ignorance of voters. Unprecedented deficits and debt with a stagnant economy. Growing racial tension and polarity. Most of these issues ignored or dismissed as ‘nothing.
Outside threats: Radical Islamists, Russia, China, ISIS, Iran
This is true… and yet you could frame past periods of American history in that language too, and in the meanwhile millions of people lived free and prosperous lives.
That said, how’s France?
Rooting for America is distinct from objective assesments.
There may be Titans fans (that’s American football) who root for their team, but few would be so optimistic to predict they will make the playoffs this year.
It’s in pretty good shape, all things considered. ISIS didn’t blow anything up today. Weekend’s still young, but so far so good.
We could have asked ourselves this question at virtually any time in our history and answered that, yes, we are doomed. By the Civil War, by the Great Depression, by the Nazis, by nuclear war with the Russians, by stagflation, by Islamic terrorism, by unchecked immigration, by the end of religion, by Japanese economic domination, by the population explosion, by climate change, you name it.
Life today is much better than it was when I was a kid growing up in the 1950s. There is a lot less racism. There is a lot more prosperity. Medical care actually helps more than it harms patients. There is no longer a military draft. We are actually less worried about the imminent end of the world now than we were then. The culture is much more crass, but it is also much freer than it was. Women have more opportunities. Electronics.
But nothing is etched in stone. We must educate our children, something we are hardly doing now. We must elect much smarter people, not just people who sound smart. We must rid ourselves of the Harry Reids and Al Sharptons and even the Barack Obamas who have caused so much harm to our politics. This is all possible. But it won’t happen by itself. We must work hard to do it. Partly this means putting aside notions of the perfect conservative and supporting the most conservative candidates who can get elected.
Look at Japan’s social problems, and then assume we will show them how to do those problems right. I mean really commit to them.
I’d even settle for people who sound smart, wouldn’t you?
Are you sure?
How about an interesting parlor game? Think of the worst political scandal of any previous Administration and see if a corresponding scandal of the Obama Administration either matches or surpasses it.
Examples:
Watergate/ the IRS under Lerner
Iran-contra/ Fast & Furious
Teapot Dome/ Solyndra et. al,
XYZ Affair/ Clinton Global Iniative
You can actually do this for every major scandal in American history.
And yet it has had no negative consequences whatsoever.
I have a sunny disposition. I figure, things are so bad, America will either bounce back or we will have a civil war in twenty or thirty years. I’m betting we’ll bounce back.
The declinists will find themselves in interesting company.
The future is always the question to which we ourselves are the answer.
Will we be toast? could still go either way.
Growing up, I always played sports. Some of those teams were good, with a couple championships, but some of those teams weren’t very good, and a couple of them were awful. Whether I had confidence in our chances of winning always depended on what I thought of the team.
We don’t have a good team right now. We have talent, certainly. But the coaching stinks. Not only are they bad strategists at game time, what they’re teaching just isn’t true. Their approach to playing the game isn’t what prompted us to achieve the success we’ve achieved in the past.
And it isn’t just the coaching. A lot of the players don’t have the dedication a good team needs. We have a lot of showboaters who want the praise without doing the hard work.
No the game isn’t over, but this team stinks right now.
I do think it’s bad…but I don’t think it’s toast. We’ve survived worse. We’re just stuck in the midst of this and so it seems worse to us…I think.
Meanwhile, when I get discouraged about it, I back off the bad news and increase the good news for a few days.
As to how we fix this mess, why not go back to what worked before? Western governments drove social and economic development with tight labor markets (usually via immigration restrictions) and high savings for centuries. Tocqueville even wrote about this:
Substitute “low-paid migrant worker” for “slave” and you have a pretty good description of what ails America today. Think of this passage whenever someone makes the case that unskilled immigration makes native-born Americans wealthier.
I am so sick of the “woe is me” of Americans… Jonah Goldberg likes to point out that there is no slippery slope. So let’s stop acting like it.
We have had much worse times. Independence, Civil War, two World Wars (or three, depending). This crisis of confidence will pass. This administration’s days are literally numbered. Get out and vote. Get someone who probably isn’t going to vote off their duff and buy them lunch so they’ll vote too. Sheesh. Remember what Jay Nordlinger says, we get the government we deserve. Too many people stayed home and didn’t vote for Romney.
As for the future:
Look at the energy surplus no one expected.
Look at the technology no one knew they wanted.
Look at the “disruptive” methods of acquiring services that did not exist 7 years ago (Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Fiverr).
What each of these mini-revolutions have shown is that power is in the hands of the individuals. This is teaching new generations they don’t need to look to some central authority for their needs, just look at your phone to see who is offering their services at a reasonable fee. Liberty is all around us, but perhaps GenX’ers and older just don’t see it.
The “blue model” of doing things is archaic; it will not survive the passing of the baby boom generation.
What will come next will take people with vision and hope. Remember: Morning is coming in America.
I’m 39. The second half of my life will be lived in a country a little shabbier than the first half was, but it will not be disastrous. After this current wave of immigrants assimilates, and the baby boomers die off, most of our big problems will settle down. Worldwide, population will peak out at 9 billion people or so in the middle of this century, and after that, things will be nice, and nicer, for a very long time.
I actually clicked on this. Bill Ayers says America is in decline (to him, a good thing) Others say it’s in decline (a bad thing) and this is supposed to mean something valid? This is a point?
Yes, we are definitely in decline.