A Reckoning for a Wrecked America

Victor Davis Hanson surveys the wreckage that America has become. America has undergone a great wreckoning, so Hanson now considers that it’s time for a reckoning.

He offers a somewhat optimistic take on how we can reverse our decline, or better, how we can rebuild and reconstruct the nation. But still, three years of Biden, following eight years of Obama, punctuated by four years where the radical left did everything in its power to ensure that Trump would not be able to reverse the Obama-engineered decline, is not going to be reversed by an election.

I suspect that we are beyond the point where we can simply revise and fix what is wrong.

Hanson suggests that we have, for quite some time, been running on fumes. We have been living off of past successes and have been paying down our credit line:

In some sense, the country for recent years has been cruising on the fumes from prior and likely better wiser generations and institutions. In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.

What does that mean? Among other things, it means that our enemies can attack us and our allies with perfect impunity. Our vaunted military no longer deters anyone from anything, perhaps because its leaders seem more concerned with diversity in the ranks than with becoming fearsome warriors:

In 2023, it became clear, to even the most loyal supporters of the Biden administration, that the U.S. has simply lost or indeed forfeited American deterrence abroad. Our enemies do not fear us; our friends do not trust us; and neutrals do not care either way.

Abroad the news is hardly encouraging:

Either adversaries will be so emboldened to start regional wars—an impotent Iran now brags it will block the entire Mediterranean—or a United States will be shocked into action and have to deter Iran, the Houthis, and Islamic terrorism, while dealing with an opportunistic China eager to annex Taiwan, and Russia determined to finish off Ukraine.

Will this induce the military to heal itself? Considering that this is Joe Biden’s military, and that it has been pursuing a woke DEI agenda, the answer is hardly self-evident.

Those challenges will force the military to staunch its recruitment hemorrhaging, rectify low morale, and rearm. Such rebooting in turn will require discarding the woke agenda, stopping the DEI proselytizing and virtue signaling, and returning to a meritocracy focused on military preparedness and battlefield efficacy.

The term “paper tiger” comes quickly to mind. Surely, Hanson is right to see that the military should focus on preparedness and efficacy. And yet, once you have broken the system, it takes time and effort to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Among the Biden administration’s more dubious and destructive achievements, we count the opening America’s border to international riff raff. It is the full realization of Obama’s citizen of the world nonsense. 

Since January 2021, the Biden administration has flagrantly and unapologetically dismantled federal immigration law. It destroyed the border as we once knew it. It has already greenlighted more than 8 million illegal entrants—with another quarter-million entering each month.

In fact, those who blew up the border can’t honestly even explain to the American people why they did so. Was it to ensure future (or even present) political constituents? Cheap labor? To ensure higher taxes to pay for more government services and to “spread the wealth?” Obeyance to the diversity/equity/inclusion lobbies? To make up for fleeing blue-state population?

Hanson continues:

In 2024, either the border will close, or the United States will suffer radical political realignments, sheer chaos in our major cities, protests from Americans furious over the complete flaunting of federal law by their own elected officials, and a likely impeachment of Joe Biden for deliberately forsaking his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States.”

Surely, no serious person argues for keeping the border opening. All sensible people want to close it, right now.

The problem is, now that we have allowed around ten million people to enter the nation illegally, what are we going to do about it? Politicians promise to deport them all, but what with the bureaucracy and the court system, that is easier said than done. You might well be optimistic about our ability to staunch the flow, but still, we are going to be spending a considerable amount of time and effort trying to figure out what to do with the new illegal migrants.

And then, we have recently had the unwelcome realization that the minds of America’s young people had gone over to the dark side. That is, when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred around 1200, America’s young people exposed an appalling level of anti-Semitism. Many of them sympathized openly with Hamas and wanted to expel Jews from Israel, the better to hand it all over to Hamas-- to a Hamas that did not build it.

As Hanson put it, American students no longer felt that they needed to hide their bigotry:

The October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and premodern massacring of nearly 1,200 Jews—and the virulent anti-Semitism that swept our elite campuses and big cities even before the October 27 Israeli Defense Forces’ retaliatory invasion of Gaza—was a wakeup call about the racialized hatred and anti-Semitism now endemic on the Left.

Campus protestors dropped the prior protestations that they were not anti-Semitic in their hatred of Israel. Instead, they now call out Jews by name. They disrupt their homes and businesses, regardless of their views on Zionism. Pro-Hamas protestors feel free to harass Jews, and with impunity and arrogance chant genocidal chants promising the destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.

More than a few bien-pensant liberals discovered that the hatred and vilification of Donald Trump was merely disguised anti-Semitism. Who was it who said that Trump was our first Jewish president?

Third, just as startling are the undisguised hatreds emanating from radical diversity/equity/inclusion students and faculty. As the declared oppressed, they too feel exempt from any charge that they are mouthing racist and anti-Semitic venom, as they conflate Israel with the now maligned stereotyped “white” people.

And naturally, America’s universities have replaced meritocracy with idiotocracy. As I wrote yesterday, America has, for the past decades, been handing out credentials to people who did not earn them and has been giving jobs to people who cannot do them. These policies have largely wrecked higher education in America:

Our top universities are facing a perfect storm. Declining pools of students, crushing student loan debt, spiraling tuition and room and board costs, administrative bloat, defecting donors, and the public’s distrust of such people being entrusted with their children’s higher education, will all soon lead to a general reexamination of the very need of these universities in the first place, at least as they are presently constituted.

Their racialist admissions, hiring, retention, and promotion protocols are destroying meritocracy. Their mediocre curricula, grade inflation, and campus polarization have convinced the public that they are no longer deserving of the many taxpayer indulgences that shield campuses from market realities—such as massive federal research grants and subsidies, tax-free billions of dollars in private donations, tax-free endowment income in the tens of billions of dollars, and taxpayer subsidized $2 trillion in student loans.

It took decades to create this mess. Perhaps we can make a start on correcting our errors, but, imagining that we will turn it around in less than decades feels unrealistic to me.

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