Saturday, October 15, 2016

America as a Declining Civilization

Victor Davis Hanson has listed America’s problems. They are many and severe. They are made worse because we have been lulled into complacency by the sing-song rhetoric of our clever president. We no longer think about facing our problems. We push them aside and hope that they will solve themselves.

We have learned that audacity measures our ability to hope. Thus, we are are effectively doing nothing.

More precisely, Obama and his supporters are hoping that the bill does not come due until he has left the White House. Then, the nation’s great minds will implore us to indulge our reveries of the good old Obama days and to blame everything bad on Republicans.

It’s fair to call it decadent. It’s fair to say that most Americans are unwilling to accept that the problems are real.  Most Americans believe that the nation is as great as it was eight years ago. In that they are surely wrong.

Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. Many decades ago, in the early 1960s, I had the privilege to meet Max Lerner, author of what used to be considered an important historical work: America as a Civilization. At a time when America was great, Lerner noted that all great civilizations decline, that greatness is not forever.

To counter that view, Hanson suggests that civilizational decline is not organic and is not written in the movement of the World Spirit. Political leadership, coupled with cultural decline, with a loss of civil virtue will put an end to the greatest civilization. If we refuse to accept that we have problems and refuse to address them, we are surely headed for decline.

Hanson lists our most significant problems and points out that we do not have the will to see them clearly. Worse yet, our leaders do not have the political courage to face or to solve them.

He begins with the national debt. As you know, the Obama administration, with the able assistance of the Federal Reserve has ballooned the national debt. Thus, it has engineered something resembling an economic recovery. It is close enough to a recovery for the administration and its flunkies to sell it as a great success. The next administration will surely be charged with picking up the pieces when the bubble bursts.

Hanson explains:

Once simple and logical solutions to our fiscal and social problems are now seen as too radical even to discuss. Consider the $20-trillion national debt. Most Americans accept that current annual $500 billion budget deficits are not sustainable—but they also see them as less extreme than the recently more normal $1 trillion in annual red ink. Americans also accept that the Obama administration doubled the national debt on the expectation of permanent near-zero interest rates, which cannot continue. When interest rates return to more normal historical levels of 4-5% per annum, the costs of servicing the debt—along with unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlement costs—will begin to undermine the entire budget.

Obama has papered over the problem with policies that have created a bond market bubble and have kept the stock market afloat. They have done so while stifling economic growth:

The Obama administration has tried to reduce the budget by issuing defense cuts and tax hikes—but it has refused to touch entitlement spending, where the real gains could be made. The result is more debt, even as, paradoxically, our military was weakened, taxes rose, revenue increased, and economic growth remained anemic at well below 2% per annum.

And then there is the problem of immigration. The nation is absorbing large numbers of illegal immigrants from cultures whose values are different from ours. Some of these immigrants will assimilate. But, the larger the number the less likely it is that they will adopt American values. They are more likely to bring the pathologies of their host nations with them. It’s one thing to help Salvadorans adjust to America. It’s quite another for them to turn America into a larger version of El Salvador.

The Obama administration has been running an open borders policy. Hillary has proposed the same. She has even expressed her admiration for the queen of open borders, Germany’s Angela Merkel. It’s a formula for national decline.

In Hanson’s words:

No nation can remain stable when 10-20 million foreign nationals have crashed through what has become an open border and reside unlawfully in the United States—any more than a homeowner can have neighbors traipsing through and camping in his unfenced yard.

Ideologues believe that we can solve it all by bathing in a warm bath of tolerance. They want us to adopt a multicultural attitude wherein we accept all cultures, all customs, all mores, and all habits as equally valid. If that is true, why would anyone adopt the culture of a host country? But, if they do not want to adopt American customs why did they come here? Do they want to be parasites, hollowing out the culture from within?

Hanson writes:

Likewise, there are few multiracial societies of the past that have avoided descending into destructive ethnic chauvinism and tribalism once assimilation and integration were replaced by salad-bowl identity politics. Common words and phrases such as “illegal alien” or “deportation” are now considered taboo, while “sanctuary city” is a euphemism for a neo-Confederate nullification of federal immigration laws by renegade states and municipalities.

And yet, if you say anything against illegal immigration, you are a bigot. We are about to turn into Europe, overrun by aliens who refuse to assimilate but who are happy to abuse and molest local women. And who, of course, have mastered the art of going on the dole:

Illegal immigration, like the deficits, must cease, but stopping it would be too politically incorrect and painful even to ponder. The mess in Europe—millions of indigent and illegal immigrants who have fled their own failed states to become dependent on the largess of their generous adopted countries, but without any desire to embrace their hosts’ culture—is apparently America’s future.

Hanson sees America’s cultural decadence at play in its inner cities, and especially in its African-American communities. The rise of gangster culture, fully supported by our first African-American president, has helped produce a broken culture where manliness is defined in terms of criminal activity and where violence against women is celebrated in hip-hop. Those who traffic such images have been welcomed in the Obama White House. Effectively, our president has been underwriting this cultural aberration.

Hanson says:

The African-American community must, in the fashion of other ethnic communities in the United States, change its cultural norms around masculinity. It should define maleness in terms of a two-parent household and a father’s daily guidance and support of his own children. In a larger sense, the misogynist, anti-police, violent, and often racist lyrics of rap music should be as ostracized as Jim Crow-era stereotypes of blacks eventually were.

Rather than call upon black leaders to lead a cultural revolution against pathologies that are out of control, most liberal minded people would rather denounce anyone who points out the problem as racist. And blame it all on white privilege.

Strangely enough, saying that African-Americans are capable of transforming their communities, seeing them as responsible moral agents, is racist. Blaming it all on white privilege—making blacks dependent on whites—is considered to be enlightened and tolerant.

Hanson explains:

The cures for the maladies of the inner city are civic reengagement, honest talk, economic entrepreneurship, self-help, and self-reliance in the black community. Liberal elites who avoid the inner city and send their children to mostly white and Asian prep schools fear honest talk as intensely as they mouth off about racism.

Of course, the Obama administration has systematically retreated from world leadership. Thus, it has left a leadership vacuum that is being filled by other nations. Since it does not believe in the beneficial exercise of American power and influence, it has been able to maintain enough of an appearance of strength to shut down most debate.

The result could have been foreseen:

Under the Obama administration, the old postwar order led by the security guarantees of the United States abruptly ended—the vacuum filled by ascendant regional (and often nuclear) hegemons. Russia is expanding control, or at least influence, over the old Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. China carves out a new version of the old Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at the expense of the democracies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Iran is on the path to be the nuclear adjudicator of the Persian Gulf’s oil depot. Radical Islamic terrorism has made the Middle East a wasteland.

America’s “lead from behind” abdication is variously explained by financial weakness, anti-imperial politics, or simply exhaustion. But the result is not so ambiguous: to restore deterrence as it existed before 2009 could be in the short-term as hazardous and costly as the long-term consequences of appeasement are fatal.

To solve this problem America would need resolute leadership and it would have to pay a price. For now, Americans seem perfectly happy to whistle past the graveyard.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The mess in Europe—millions of indigent and illegal immigrants who have fled their own failed states to become dependent on the largess of their generous adopted countries, but without any desire to embrace their hosts’ culture—is apparently America’s future."

It's not about having or lacking the "desire", but about IQ of individual immigrants and, no less significant, average IQ of their ethnic group (the IQ of the group determines much of the mental features of all group's members, as it is the average mind that sets the milieu).

Your reluctance from naming IQ gives your whole reasoning a tinge of incomprehensibility.

Trigger Warning said...

IQ is an interesting concept. Binet invented the IQ to predict school success, and it does so imperfectly, but well enough to serve the education complex.

And there seems no doubt that IQ is largely inherited. But like a bean planted in the ground, the genetic potential for yield can be limited by exogenous factors.

I find it amusing to read the 21st century IQ arguments, because if they are correct, the future of humanity lies in the hands of Asians and Jews, not Europeans.

One of the great tragedies of the modern world is the aborting of thousands of brilliant babies. Measured IQ is a statistical metric, and the probability of a given individual having an IQ of 140+ (which is very high), is about one in 1000. When we abort, or allow to starve, 1,000,000 children, we lose - stastically speaking - 1000 potential "geniuses". With the caveat, of course, that true genius is far more complex than any psychometric test can measure.

There is no better work on IQ than Herrnstein and Murray's magisterial volume, The Bell Curve. I suggest you read it.

Sam L. said...

"Most Americans believe that the nation is as great as it was eight years ago." Where did that come from? I'd say that not less than 99.44% of Trump voters (a number we won't know until Nov 10) disagree with that statement.

" But, if they do not want to adopt American customs why did they come here? Do they want to be parasites, hollowing out the culture from within?" Damned right they do.

"And yet, if you say anything against illegal immigration, you are a bigot." We'll certainly be called one. After all, we've always been at war with East Asia.

"Hanson sees America’s cultural decadence at play in its inner cities, and especially in its African-American communities." He's not alone in this.

"The cures for the maladies of the inner city are civic reengagement, honest talk, economic entrepreneurship, self-help, and self-reliance in the black community. Liberal elites who avoid the inner city and send their children to mostly white and Asian prep schools fear honest talk as intensely as they mouth off about racism." Leftists are the worst racists, as evidenced by what they've done to blacks.

"To solve this problem America would need resolute leadership and it would have to pay a price. For now, Americans seem perfectly happy to whistle past the graveyard." True, for Hillary voters. Trump voters will disagree.

Trigger Warning said...

Hanson is absolutely correct. As other commenters here may know, I have been an advocate for accelerating the decline. Americans, in the aggregate, richly deserve what the cabal of racketeers affiliated with the psychopathic Clinton crime family will deliver.

But I have had a change of heart. The combined efforts of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (an American hero) served to shed light on the evil hiding behind the curtain. That was useful. But the real change for me occurred watching a campaign video talking about Americans like me; a West Virginia born hunter, fisherman, hiker, camper, Christian, and patriotic American.

I'm now for Trump. Perhaps he cannot reverse the rot, but Hillary Clinton will not. I'll take my chances.

Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/cYWSmVn6qSM

Trigger Warning said...

By the way, I thought this was simply delightful!

"The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia..."
--- NBC 10/14/16

Oooooh! Covert! :-D

What a pack of simpletons.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

"Hanson sees America’s cultural decadence at play in its inner cities, and especially in its African-American communities."

I would describe it as an multi-generational learned adaptation as black families have disintegrated since the early 1960s. Blacks seem to accept their lawless, fatherless, homicidal, ignorant, entitlement culture. Those who don't get out as soon as they can.

Urban America is not decadence. It's squalor. As Theodore Dalrymple describes it in his book about the underclass: "life at the bottom," it is a learned adaptation of values. It gives poverty a hopeless permanence, with government as Santa Claus, filling a sad, bottomless well of need. Whatchuwant?

Come to Detroit, venture beyond downtown and see the neighborhoods. This is the future the Democrat Party is gunning for.

AesopFan said...

TW: "Covert - I do not think that word means what they think it means."
http://libertyunyielding.com/2016/10/14/great-news-cia-preps-cyber-strike-russia-focuses-finance-data/

There’s no keeping up with this stuff anymore. Or, if there is, it’s wildly worse than a weary world may have thought it had reason to expect. If Obama were trying to detonate a huge global-trust bomb, he couldn’t be approaching it more effectively.

On Tuesday, LU published a headline from Politico in our Web Crawler, featuring an announcement from White House spokesman Josh Earnest that the Obama administration was contemplating a “proportional” response to Russia’s hacking of U.S. computer systems. ...

At the time, I noted — yes, it was I in that case — that Earnest’s remark was one of the dumbest announcements ever made.

It hasn’t taken long for a dumber one yet to emerge. “U.S. intelligence officials,” we are told, have informed NBC News that the CIA is putting together a cyber-strike on Russia. ... This isn’t a hoax.

...
I guess there may be some Millennials out there who need to have it explained to them that this, if it’s an honest statement of intent, is surreally imbecilic. The question with notifying Russia in advance that you’re going to cyber-attack Russian systems isn’t whether you’ll lose surprise. It’s whether you’ll lose deniability, and preserve some measure of doubt as to where Russia needs to retaliate if this previewed attack actually comes off.

...
To recap (see the NBC News report), we’ve told the Russians (a) that we’re planning a cyber-attack on them, and (b) exactly where to look for it. We’ve publicly outed our intention, so anything that happens — or anything the Russians merely claim happens — can be laid at our door.

And by the way, the attack is to be focused on documentation from the finance sector, including Russian oligarchs’ overseas banking connections, so as to embarrass Putin and his cronies.

Nothing explosive about that. Nothing that could jeopardize the foundation of fiduciary trust underlying all of legitimate global banking.

Remember, we’re not talking here about pursuing forensic leads to achieve an objective we might have under U.S. law. We have capabilities to probe the banking system for that purpose — and constitutional and other legal protections for the rights of banks, investors, and account-holders, ...
But the Obama administration is sending the CIA out to hack foreign financial information, in order to achieve a political effect. And telling the target about it in advance.

Obama doesn’t even have to actually do this. Just talking about it is immensely destabilizing.

This is either insane, or dastardly. I’m leaning toward insane. But the effect may be dastardly anyway. At this incredible juncture in history, I wouldn’t presume to make the adjective call ..

Trigger Warning said...

Tip o' th' hat: excellent analysis.

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: Hanson sees America’s cultural decadence at play in its inner cities, and especially in its African-American communities. The rise of gangster culture, fully supported by our first African-American president, has helped produce a broken culture where manliness is defined in terms of criminal activity and where violence against women is celebrated in hip-hop.

Certainly Donald Trump's crude versions of manliness pale in crudity to what's expressed in hip-hop lyrics. And surely equally true, "its just talk" is a lie whether you're a celebrity or a wannabe hip-hop star. And both surely see many women who are willing to throw themselves at wealthy, powerful men, in some strange fantasy.

I wonder when Donald Trump wins the presidential election, what will he do, since he knows he's the only one who can fix everything, like Chicago? He's asked blacks "What do you have to lose?"

Donald Trump said in his Art of the Deal to "Think Big", and yet how many years does he have left? He needs to act quick. And maybe order naturally assert itself when a strong man comes in and informs police the right to shoot first against all gangster culture? Surely that's the way to clean things up fast, and not waste $30,000 per year to keep young gangsters in prison. Why not empty all the prisons now of violent offenders with a new capital punishment executive order. Thinks how fast prison budgets could be slashed, and redirected to community improvement?

The president of the Philippines is in fact following this very approach to drug crime. And once all the corrupt young men are shot and killed for trying to follow easy money, surely, that'll be the deterrent the rest. And he'll find honest jobs for them, and they'll be able to raise families on those jobs.

And the big problem with the Left is they're willing to let absentee fathers off the hook, and let welfare mothers raise fatherless children. Surely Donald Trump can correct this too. Perhaps we need to make fathering children outside of marriage also a capital crime, although the sentence can be commuted if the father immediately marries the mother, and they stay married for life. And of course affairs will have to also be stoned, its in the bible after all.

Wait, wasn't Donald Trump part of that degenerate world too? But no, no more, he's a family man now, a reformed Christian, and now that he's done sinning, he's going to clean up the rest of us, so he can save Western Culture from our corruption and decline.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Ares Olympus @October 15, 2016 at 5:17 PM:

I'm so glad you're here to enlighten us, Ares. Always.

Anonymous said...

I read "How Democracies Perish" by J. Francois Revel in 84.

Still relevant. But. History shows that democracies are inherently unstable, brief, infrequent.

They revert to Despotism, or Oligarchy, or Kings/Emperors/Aristocracies. Or Czars. Or fall apart from within.

Rome was a sorta Demo. until it got wealthy. Caesars arose.

USA was the first Democracy (D. Republic, if you will) since. The Founder were pessimistic long term.

We nearly shattered in the 1860s. Paid rivers of blood (and 850,000 young men) to save it.

I love America and all it represents. I put my life in its service. I hope it endures. But I'm pessimistic too. -- Rich Lara

Anonymous said...


Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Mussolini and Hitler. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.



http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8788