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What Will It Take to Unite Americans?
I think this can happen in only one possible way: we restore the Union under the same principles as it was originally founded. I’m going to describe some of my life experiences and processes that lead me to this conclusion.
I’m not what is called a scholar, historian, or philosopher, but I do have a quest for knowledge and understanding. Why? In order to live my life in a better way, I guess, would be one way of expressing that answer. I try to build my life around those things I deem right and true. I have been mostly happy with that approach. The political, economic, religious, and social culture in America has enabled that. The record of emigration to America and news accounts and other sources detailing conditions in other parts of the globe confirm that America offers the best opportunities for individuals to achieve their goals regardless of disadvantaged starting points.
So how did we get to where we are today, on the edge of losing America’s Constitutional Republic? I’m convinced a prominent factor is generational cultural changes that produce values outside the range of values set forth within the Judeo-Christian values in place at the founding. How does something like this happen? I’m going to express what I think plays a big part, maybe even the main cause.
After World War I, America had a brief period of limited prosperity for many followed by a decade of despair affecting most of the country. The first official Communist government arose after the revolution in Russia. Communists were very active in America during the period before World War II. Still, the open public activity of that movement was rebuffed strongly when the war was over. We entered the period of the Cold War with Communist regimes punctuated by warlike conflict without formal war declarations. Communist Party activity went underground.
But economic prosperity was continuously rising for America with some bumps along the way. The sixties produced the most noticeable political and cultural aberrations until what we have experienced recently. And what we have experienced over the last three decades seems to have resulted from the same socialists/political forces that were at work with the Communists in the thirties.
I recall always hearing warnings about what happens when things get too easy for people. Laziness, inattention, indulgence, and incompetence appear and the productivity of the people dissipates. Our industrial and technological advances have been able to offset much of that effect, but we have reached the limits. Must we now create a period of great despair to rekindle an aspiration for achievement and productivity in the mass of people?
I was born in the Great Depression and started life with nothing but family members who cared for me. So I have a personal experience with all things from then to now in America, including the transition from hard to easy. This has been a short recounting of some of that. I won’t be here, but the future vision weighs on me as I hope and pray that my posterity will have the opportunities for joy and productive lives that were gifted to me by an America I love.
How do we recover what is on the verge of being lost?
Published in Politics
Interesting that the answer to your question is in the news today. Canadian musician Grimes says Taylor Swift could unite the US if she were president, even though it’s ‘probably exceptionally unadvisable’.
I agree with you that a return to the founding principles would do a lot to bring unity. Currently there are two tiers of justice, which is tearing us apart. Even the appearance of unity after 9/11 didn’t last long.
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-John Adams
“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I hope that trouble that has come over our borders and what we are seeing beginning to happen in Europe also through the non-existent immigration system is not what it takes to unite the country. We’ve forgotten 9/11 already.
There’s no need to create a period of great despair. We’re living in one right now. Just look around!
I’d submit that the crisis is actually far deeper than most Ricochetti comprehend. America is committing suicide because the west in general is committing suicide. The west is committing suicide because it’s fundamentally bored with itself and has lost the will to live. We’ve seen and done everything by this point, so . . . why go on?
Yeah, I try to stay away from it with my family in Utah. I saw some of it in Phoenix and that’s part of the reason I returned to Utah. Not many places I would choose today. Create was a bad word choice and I’m sure you are seeing a lot more of the real America today.
The Leftist leaders want to do away with the US Constitution.
On top of that, the Left has totally corrupted the judicial system.
The fact that indictments can be handed out based on non-existent crimes is now in the headlines, due to both Donald Trump’s legal woes, and also Mike Lindell’s.
It is being said that Lindell’s pillow company is about to go under, due to the endless harassment wherein customers cannot phone in, text or email orders, and of course the massive amounts of cash that Lindell needs to stave off the lawsuits.
On top of that, since elections are now selections, we cannot rely on voting people out.
On top of that, you have an entire group of congressional people, judges, prominent attorneys, who should be serving We the People. But rather than doing that, they now must obey their handlers. Why? Because of Jeffrey Epstein.
People who are failing to make the connection between how Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right hand madam, was sentenced to twenty years for procuring sex trafficked underage girls for absolutely NO CUSTOMERS! without the judge wanting and demanding the list, and the fact that people like Trump and Lindell can be endlessly harassed over nothing, really need to start thinking about things that no one in our nation has ever had to think about before.
We have lost a lot because of 100 years of hard work by communists to dismantle America. The fix is to have a hardcore, all-hands anticommunist & pro-Americanism propaganda effort. We are coming up on our 250th anniversary, lets have 5 years and every government and every school teaching people to be anti-communist and pro-founders. If you live in a red state, ask your leaders to be like Florida and so “no” to DEI and “yes” to anti-communism.
Let’s see if we can get the GOP to unite behind Jordan, which is a fight between the American people and those that sit on the Appropriations committee about who controls country.
Ennui. Could be. I think lots of people in the West can’t be alone with themselves as they are. They ‘need’ to be part of some great and glorious cause. Their great grandfathers fought WW1. Their grandfathers saved the world from Fascism. Their fathers destroyed the USSR. What’s left for them? where is their great and glorious cause? Where is a dragon to slay?
China? That’s a nonstarter because their computers and phones come from there. The West itself!!! Destroy capitalism. Save the Planet. Free Trans people. No matter that it’s killing the golden goose. As long as we don’t have to be alone with ourselves to enjoy the successes of our forefathers.
I’m not sure our country was ever more united than it is now. After Pearl Harbor we were briefly united about prosecuting World War II, but there were also a lot of things that divided us. In the early days of the Republic people weren’t so committed to the United States that they wouldn’t go over to Spain and think about taking their land with them if possible. It was a concern of the founders, anyway. During the War of 1812 the New England states came close to seceding. In the 1790s there were rebellions in the western regions of some of the original states.
Thanks for this comment, it helps to think about what might distinguish the divide we are in today. I think very specifically we are more divided on the founding principles of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and why the War for Independence was fought. Many of our people have little or no knowledge of these.
I agree that we have always been divided but we were able to come together for the purpose of governing the Republic, regardless of how poorly that governing was conducted. But we rarely had gross misconduct in the government on a scale we see today without a reckoning period of redirection.
Maybe what has changed is the internet has given us a capability to uncover lies from any and all sources no matter how powerful. So the government, public media, and big corporate entities are revealed as never before so we are now in a war of truth against all the liars.
Perhaps we are in the process of that correction mode now, we’ll see.
I wonder if the US was actually close to losing it all during the Depression. A conscious rejection of socialism by the American center-left became the basis of a stable ideological spectrum that lasted a long time. People forget that Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy rose to prominence fighting the openly communist wing of Minnesota’s Democratic Farm Labor Party and that there was once a significant hawkish anti-communist faction in the Democratic Party (“Scoop” Jackson comes to mind) .
It was not the end of the world for one’s party to lose an election in that period because neither side was likely to stray beyond the spectrum. The inherent drift of government growth did not seem like a big deal to most because (a) the economy more than kept pace and (b) there was no reason to think that government power was likely ever to be misused in any serious or systematic way.
In addition, there was no great division on family values or public mores.
There was no serious challenge to Social Security by the right and no likelihood of proposals for state ownership of the economy or any other disruptive drama by the left. Policy debates remained within the established recognized spectrum.
The drift towards more government paralleled a drift away from the traditional mores that valued self-reliance and its requisite virtues, which virtues also enhanced mutual respect.
The pro-Hamas, trans-cherishing, eco-extremist, race-distorted younger generation is a threat less because of a kneejerk pre-disposition to statism and more because of defective personal formation that cannot handle the burdens of freedom.
In one of Heinlein’s short stories, the Martians obviously had a great civilization but now they mostly just sit around doing nothing. An earth person asks on of them Why? The response:
“My fathers have labored, and I am weary”
I’m convinced we are suffering a bad case of ignorance among many above-average intelligence people.
Ours don’t even know and understand enough to come up with that!
Speculative question, need responses.
Where do you think we would be politically today if we never had the internet? I know we probably would have missed a lot of economic growth.
I think the traditional media would have a whole lot more power than they do today…given their failure to use what influence they do have responsibly or fairly, this would not be a good thing.
Can we invoke the internet to get the younger generations educated on the things about America that have been distorted or missed altogether?
True.
And after the War of 1812, there was the very divisive nature of the Andrew Jackson presidency.
Jackson got about as much positive ink in the nation’s newspapers and broadsheets as Trump. (Which is to say scarcely a good word ever.)
Jackson clearly understood that the main reason for the US Revolutionary War came about because of England’s Currency Act.
This Act stipulated that only British currency could now be used, not the locally printed currency used in the colonies.
This meant that for every transaction in which the Brit’s currency was used, money had been printed up and then interest on that currency creation would inflate the “value” of said pounds sterling.
Our first war against the British was due to this feature of life under British control.
So then we won the war. But that matter did not go away.
But 1805 the matter was the main topic discussed by British bankers, and so of course everyone in The Parliament.
Out of this discussion came the notion that a second war against the “rebellious colonists” could easily be waged and won. So then in 1812, that second war was initiated.
For a while it looked like this was a conflict that the Brits would win. Parts of Washington DC went down in flames.
But our nation’s homespun military again fought valiantly and persevered.
What a plucky group of people made up our nation at that time.
However, American school children of more modern ages never ever learned about the Brit’s central banking system’s attempts to enslave Americans. Why? Because we are now once again under a central banking system, possibly still under the thumb of The City Of London.
This has been the case ever since the weasely attempts to install a “Federal Reserve” succeeded in Dec 1913. (While almost all of Congress was off on the Christmas holidays.)
But Pres Andrew Jackson understood all the ramifications of a central banking system. (If only Pres Wilsom had held some of Jackson’s insights.) Pres John F Kennedy also understood the banking situation, hence his exec action and exec order regarding the money supply.
Trump understood this as well. I have no idea if he undertook any actions to do anything about it though.
You got it! Trump did some things to move us in the right direction and now this fight is why we have no Speaker.
We need to focus more on world history. People, even educated people think that Native-Americans and African did nothing but pick flowers and go on vision quests. They are unaware that slavery, bigotry and poverty were the constant norm for everyone throughout human civilization.
If you don’t know that basic reality, it is easy to take everything else for granted.
One thing that is different now is that government controls so much more of the economy and therefore more of life in general. That magnifies the effect of our internal differences.
A common enemy usually unites people.
Who would that be? Who would be my enemy that the Left would not cheer on? And who would be an enemy of the Left that I would not cheer on?
Stop teaching kids that America is an awful place.
Teach proper civics.
Federalism
I had not checked on what Paul Craig Roberts has to say lately. Here is his view on today’s Republican Party leadership fight:
The Republicans Will Not Help Us
Crowd source it?
Clearly, the answer is a bi-partisan consensus.
Yes your observation is so very important for people to understand.
When a huge proportion of American citizens work inside government agencies, be the jobs at the Fed, state, county or city level, they have no respect for people who are self employed.
They make $52 bucks an hour. So why shouldn’t “every honest business person” be willing to pay at least 15? Even to someone with no job experience? After all, money comes to the good government employees regardless if the economy is good or bad, if their job is redundant several times over, etc.
There is no longer the concept of reality among many of those government employees.
They get paid, regardless if they fulfill their agency’s mission statement or not. They aren’t required to use critical thinking – so you have the top fire fighting official in Oakland Cal decide to step down at the height of fire season, handing his job over to an inexperienced DEI candidate. Just a few days later, part of the city of Oakland burned to the ground.
I’d have loved to have seen that senior fire fighting exec have to fork over some of his generous pension to those in Oakland who lost their loved ones. Any thinking person gets that it was required of him to wait it out till the first rain came along, which it did 12 days after the conflagration. If this had been the private sector, he’d have faced lawsuits galore.
What Will It Take to Unite Americans?
Hunger.
It may not work, but I don’t see anything else that will. Except severe deprivation making anyone rethink their social justice (diverse, inclusive, DIE, ESG, identitarian, decolonialist, pansexual, anti-patriarchal) lunacy and the priorities of life.
I’ve always thought about a simple line from “V”. The girl is swooning over butter for her bread, asking where he got it, and saying that she hadn’t had it since she was a kid.
In 1940, just before World War II, the population of the U.S. was 40% of what it is today.
After World War II, the U.S. stayed fairly united up until around 1965, and during that time, was the most prosperous country in the world.
Then the rest of the world, devastated by World War II, caught up, and started competing with us econ0mically again.
That period was unprecedented in U.S. history. We weren’t that united before, and we haven’t been since.
And we’re too large, population wise, to unite like we did in late 1941.