American Civilization in Decline

Michael Anton tells us that he has not quite reached the “abandon all hope” stage of thinking, but he is not very optimistic about America’s future. As you know, Anton was the author who wrote a screed under the name “Anonymous” in 2016. So his credentials as a man of the political right are unimpeachable. 

However fashionable it is for conservatives to believe that America, being a great country, will always and forever be a great country, the evidence points in another direction. 

In an essay called “Unprecedented” Anton tallies up the evidence, or, you might say, he presents an indictment of today’s American culture. Better yet, if you prefer, he offers up an anatomy of civilizational decline.

He begins, almost at random, with current immigration policy. Call it self-sabotage; call it suicidal. It is not a good thing. It is not just that we have brought in far too many immigrants; we have told them to retain their natal cultures, and not to assimilate. If America is an organized criminal conspiracy, designed to oppress them, why would they?

Be that as it may, no nation in recorded history has ever willingly opened its doors to millions of immigrants only to insist that they must never adapt to the traditional ways of their new country—indeed, insisting that they forever remain as foreign as the day they arrived. Similarly, no country in recorded history has ever welcomed millions with the message that their new country, along with its existing citizens, are inherently evil and out to get them.

Replacing white people. Such seems to be the current policy. One would like to say that it’s alarmist to think so, but how long will it take between flooding the nation with immigrants and seeing some members of Congress propose offering them all a pathway to citizenship?

When they write op-eds in TheNew York Times entitled “We Can Replace Them,” that’s a good thing and the phenomenon under discussion is absolutely right and just. When you notice and express the mildest wish not to be replaced, it’s a racist conspiracy theory that you are evil for even mentioning—your evil being further proof that you deserve to be replaced. They get to say it; you’re required not merely to pretend that you didn’t hear it but also to insist that they never said it. No majority stock in any nation has ever deliberately sought its own replacement, much less insisted that those who might have misgivings lie to themselves that it’s not happening.

It’s part of the current war against whiteness, against white supremacy and the like:

Many whites, apparently, believe they deserve to be replaced because their race makes them uniquely, and irredeemably, evil. While cultural self-loathing is hardly unknown to history, I know of none so explicitly race-based or widespread—or so eager to pursue self-abnegation all the way to the end.

Of course, it is being driven by white guilt, a cultural manifestation that has been metastasizing rapidly:

Examples can be found of a new elite rising to preeminence above an older one, which it then displaces with prejudice. But of a ruling class coming to despise its own (broadly speaking) ethnic group and seeking ways to rob their fellow co-ethnics of power, standing, and influence? I can’t think of any other such cases.

It gets worse:

But our elites also go much further. They seem determined to make the American population fat, weak, ugly, lethargic, drug-addled, screen-addicted, and hyper-sexualized, the men effeminate and the women masculine. Those last two actually barely scratch the surface of the agenda, which includes turning males into “females” and vice versa—or into any one of a potentially infinite number of “genders.”

Degeneracy in tyrants is of course as old as the hills, but prior despots had the “decency,” if one could call it that, to restrict their perversions to the satisfaction of their own private pleasures. To force degeneracy on the whole of society, with the explicit intent of bringing the rest us to our knees, literally and figuratively—that, I think, has never happened before.

As we have often noted, the educational system is leading the march into a cultural abyss:

Or, as the classics understood it, not merely to impart knowledge but also to form character.

In both respects, our system does the opposite. It teaches lies, attacks and suppresses truth, and encourages people to behave worse. It tells children to hate themselves (or their classmates) because of their race and to hate their country. It encourages boys to declare themselves girls, and vice versa. It badgers kids into professing themselves attracted to members of the same sex, or of all sixty-three sexes, regardless of, or despite, their natural inclination. It firehoses them with sexualized messaging and imagery, always taking care to decouple orgasmic self-indulgence from love and family.

We barely teach kids to read, write, or add anymore—indeed, the most “progressive” corners of the education system denounce such emphasis on standards and core knowledge as “white-supremacist.” There’s ample historical precedent for widespread illiteracy. But for teaching one’s own citizens self-hatred, degeneracy, and despondency—without teaching them to read and write?

And then there is the mania to erase the past, to tear down statues, to discredit those who founded the nation or who fought for its survival. It is unprecedented. Anton notes, sagely, that not even the most fervent and fanatical revolutionaries chose to erase the past:

Finally, there is the endless insistence that every new dawn must begin a fresh Year Zero; we must start continually anew. What was acceptable yesterday is anathema today and will be more so tomorrow. All that came before must be swept aside and destroyed with extreme prejudice, on a rolling basis.

The most ferocious revolutionaries of yesteryear didn’t do this. The Jacobins changed the calendar and guillotined a lot of nobles but otherwise allowed France to remain French. The Bolsheviks did not touch the Russian literary or concert canons; to the contrary, they celebrated both. Mao made an attempt to start over—until the more sensible Party bosses realized that the old man (and especially his wife) had lost their minds and were destroying China, sidelined him, and quietly put an end to the Cultural Revolution four years before formally declaring mission accomplished. The Ayatollah did not ban Nowruz or other cornerstones of Persian tradition beloved by the Iranian people, but which predated his puritanical version of Islam.

Our overlords, by contrast, insist on changing everything and will not stop until everything familiar is gone. 

The result is creeping dysfunction. Anton closes his indictment by listing our serial failures:

Our regime cannot, at present, unload a cargo ship, stock a store shelf, run a clean election, handle parental complaints at a school board meeting, pass a budget bill, treat a cold variant, keep order in the streets, defeat a third world country, or even evacuate said country cleanly. 

It is not easy to explain the rationale:

If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest—one is tempted to say only—beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?

Do they need therapy or are they the result of having had too much therapy?