Each day, more people wake up to the fact that, “How can we save America?” is a pointless question. America is already a corpse. Many of us have finally noticed that it’s stopped twitching.
A better question is, “When did America die?”
Was it last year, when Trump signed the spending bill?
What about George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan, allegedly a response to 9/11, which kicked off US involvement in the Forever War?
Was it in 1998, when Bill Clinton was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate?
How about Reagan’s 1986 amnesty?
For that matter, what about the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965?
Or all the excesses of FDR’s imperial style presidency?
1920 was the year when American men inexplicably gave women the franchise.
What about Wilson involving America in World War I?
Was it in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th Amendment, which gave Congress the power to tax incomes without apportionment?
Many mark America’s time of death as 1861, when the Civil War killed the understanding of the United States as a voluntary union and facilitated her transformation into an international empire.
Was it in 1794, when the US government under the fledgling Constitution deployed an army against its own citizens, many of whom were Revolutionary War veterans–for protesting a tax similar to those they’d rebelled against Britain over?
Was it in 1789, when that same Constitution based not on eternal truth but on worldly compromise, took effect?
Taking a long view of history shows that America’s death was not a single, violent event. It was the work of slow poison corroding the national fabric over years, even centuries.
And the poison was baked into the cake from the start–at least from the start of the United States as a political entity.
Consider freedom of speech, which was devised by practitioners of Enlightenment realpolitik to hoodwink Christians into unilaterally disarming themselves.
What we’re seeing are the inevitable wages of Liberalism. A political system based on an attempt to replace absolute good with absolute freedom can last a while in a society with a largely homogeneous demographic, cultural, and religious makeup. We have not inhabited such a society for a while.
There is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together. Nor should we want to. Recreating America ca. 1955 would eventually land us right back in Clown World.
Providence will soon give us the chance to start again and avoid the mistakes of the past. We can build a new, sane order founded on immutable truth. But first enough of us must let go of the homeland where we grew up, and which is just as lost as Atlantis.
If we let go of the past, we can build a future where the rhythm of life harmonizes with human nature, where the state and the market exist to serve man, and where the common good is upheld.
The last black pill has turned out to be the ultimate white pill after all.
And a vital first step is not giving money to people who hate you!
You can trace the poison back even further.
America died when Luther nailed his theses to the church door.
America died when Pope and Patriarch excommunicated each other.
America died when Eve ate the apple.
But…
America was *born* when Jesus rose again on the third day.
America was *born* when he sent his apostles out to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
America was *born* when men sought refuge from the endless religious wars of Europe, aspiring only to live quiet lives, mind their own business, and work with their hands.
Etc. etc.
God's always about the business of making all things new, sowing seeds to overwinter and break out in the spring.
I have to disagree with you. The Resurrection is the motive power of the Church, born at Pentecost, and not of the American experiment, which is now an obvious failure. Our Lord did not come to preach ordered liberty and mutual tolerance, but repentance and the nearness of the Kingdom of God.
The thing I am loathe to verbalize, because it is painful to do so, but which I know to be true, is that, riffing on Dickens, "The Republic was dead to begin with." We might debate when it happened, but that simply prolongs the bargaining period. I gave an oath to it (as a civilian temp, not in uniformed service), and pledged allegiance to it, as my father did before me (as a military officer and DoD civilian), and his father before him (in two different branches of the service). My family, as a whole, on both sides, as given many years in the service of the Republic, at a time when it still seemed very much alive. But, the republic was dead to begin with. This thing is at best a revenant, at worst a pile of bones in a charnel house. It is time we got on with mourning whatever good was to be had in it.
I just left the Navy after eight years and I must agree with you wholeheartedly. Painful though it may be to admit that my service was pointlessly supporting a dead edifice rather than the Glorious Republic I originally (thought I) joined to serve.
It became increasingly clear to me that ours is a de facto empire and that our infinite wars only serve to further imperial interests overseas (painted over with a thin veneer of "defense"). That and that the Officers who are supposed to be men of character leading men into battle are by and large now a bunch of PC self-serving degenerate imbeciles and women, who would crumple the moment a real war kicked off. I couldn't leave fast enough when the scales fell off my eyes.
I fear I did not express myself clearly enough. Please forgive me. America is certainly not the Kingdom of God. Neither was Rome after Constantine, nor Merry Olde England. All three have, at times, been mistaken as such.
The Kingdom of God is always working itself out, unfolding in time through the work of the Church in the world. Hospitals, internal combustion engines, and the Common Law are particular goods that emerge from this unfolding work.
Each good still has its flaws, tainted by Original Sin.
America is another one of those goods, "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
As much as Death reigns in America, it is like us, dead in our transgressions, just as when a hospital performs an abortion, or a reckless motorist kills a pedestrian, or a jury sentences an innocent man to death. Creation is subjected to futility. No good thing can escape.
As much as Christ reigns in America, it is like us: made alive together with Christ. This is the same saving grace that gives us, in time, penicillin, enough food to feed the world, and an unusually free yet just society.
Lewis expressed this best (as usual) when in That Hideous Strength he described England as having two natures, Logres (under Christ) and Britain (under Death). In the States, let's call them (arbitrarily) America (under Christ) and Columbia (under Death).
So yes, as Columbia, "the Republic was dead to begin with." America (like Logres) has only just begun to live.
@Travis,
Thank you for your service. It's a cliche, but I'll risk it. My grandfather spent a few years in the Navy in the late 40s and early 50s, before making a career of the Air Force. Since then our family has developed a preference for the Army and USAF, though we do have a handful of Sailors and Marines as well.
I think the malady you mention infects all branches of the service. The Pacific Fleet seems to be having a bad few years, but the Army and the Air Force don't seem to be weathering the storm any better. The "echelons above reality" (as my father calls them) have spent so much time and money socially engineering the armed forces they have been hollowed out. One might blame some of this on a brain-drain during the Obama years, but I think it goes further back. The student radicals who abused the troops returning from Vietnam rose to positions of influence and power and then did their level best to lose the Cold War culturally, even as we were winning it militarily. The men of our families placed their lives on the line in various phases of that war. Both my grandfather and my father-in-law came back from Vietnam rather the worse for wear. It is bitter to reflect that their sacrifices may have been wasted.
A Reader, I think that is a good point, the social engineering began long before Obama, though it accelerated a terrifying degree under him and his leftist troglodytes.
The frustrating and horrid thing is that every conflict since WWII (but particularly Vietnam and beyond) has seen America's sons and (increasingly, pointlessly, stupidly) daughters sent into meat grinders around the world to fight vaguely defined conflicts with vague objectives with no intent to ever end the killing. I believe this is a product of the fact that having a large standing army and an immensely powerful navy makes foreign adventurism irresistible to the politicians who are happy to send other, better men's sons to die. Sure would be a shame for all those shiny missiles and tanks to not turn human beings into paste!
It seems like a vicious circle, because while projecting military might is a hard temptation to resist, so is the effort of maintaining it. The costs of a hyper-power's military are a recipe for pork-barrel spending, fiscal madness, and a literal license to print money. Since we gave up on isolationism during the Wilson Administration, and re-abandoned it under than scoundrel FDR, we have fought war after war after war to "make the world safe for democracy," but that's a merry-go-round we can't get off until inertia throws us. I'd say we're in mid-air now, with a very rough landing in store. The progressive's work is never done, so it stands to reason we never knew what constituted victory. Or, if we did, we lacked the moral courage to describe it to ourselves and make a frank assessment of whether such a victory was desirable.
We have spent most of the last twenty years on a secular crusade among medieval barbarians who need Christ, not democracy. We might have done better if His Holiness St John Paul II had declared a literal crusade to defend the Eastern Catholic Churches in Iraq and to destroy the Ba'athists of Iraq and the Taliban of Afghanistan, with the explicit mandate to convert the pagan tribes of those two countries to Christ and to defend their native Christian populations from Mahometan persecution.
The Australian perspective on Vietnam is rather different to the USA. Just throwing that in there. But the top comment is correct. Every polity is already dead. Yet the peoples and the faith have survived all of it.
wreckage, curious, what is the Australian perspective?
@Wreckage,
I've never heard the Australian perspective on Vietnam. Would you mind elaborating, if it would not be too far OT?
Basically it's geographical. Vietnam was a world away from you guys, but just about in our backyard, strategically speaking. Of course there's no consensus, even less so as the Australian cultural memory of Vietnam gets replaced with the American cultural memory.
Our military didn't suffer the same demoralization or the issues with conscripts that yours did.
You can love something and admit it's gone. I love Ireland. Ireland is dead. As is the South.
CS Lewis remarked on that in "A Grief Observed," as I recall. Admitting that a beloved person, or thing, has gone beyond reach and mourning it properly is part and parcel of loving it. I cannot properly love family, friends, or even beloved pets, if I will not admit they are dead and do them the honor of letting go.
Lewis's wisdom continues to shine long after his death. We sorely need men of his fortitude today.
Trying to save America in the sense most people mean, i.e. rolling the degeneration back to the 80s or the 50s, is just another nostalgia trap.
The only way out is through–taking a long, hard, honest look at our past mistakes and starting again with a firm resolution to avoid them in the future.
Consider freedom of speech, which was devised by practitioners of Enlightenment realpolitik to hoodwink Christians into unilaterally disarming themselves.
Perhaps someone here knows better than me, but if I understand correctly, the prohibition on regulating speech and religion originally applied only to the federal government. The several states were free to pass whatever laws they liked in that sphere. It was only in the late 19th/early 20th century that these restrictions were applied to state governments as well.
If I have this right, this is a radically different picture than what we have today. Of course, I've not made a formal study of the issue, so maybe I have everything wrong.
Many of the 13 colonies had established state churches well after the Constitution's ratification.
At some point, but I can't remember which court or case, someone decided the 14th Amendment meant the limits placed on the Federal govt by the Bill of Rights applied to the States as when. The name of that doctrine is incorporation, though I wonder whether calling principles of governance doctrines is not itself an indicator or symptom of a deeper problem.
The 14th Amendment is what people point to, although it doesn't say what people seem to think it does. Of course, the Supreme Court is happy to support them in their delusion. It basically says that the states can't interfere with the privileges and immunities of the people, but whether or not a state has an established church has nothing to do with any personal privilege or immunity.
You can read Ulysses S Grant on the need to get rid of parochial schooling and any religion in any government (it was what he was pushing for in the run up to the 14th Amendment, although it doesn't seem to have taken the form he wanted it to). There were actually some quotes making the social media rounds after a recent batch of Supreme Court decisions, disturbingly "spontaneously" (e.g. it was obviously a majorly astroturfed thing). Or look into the Blaine amendments.
It was all over once the Fed was established. President Wilson snuck in the Federal Reserve Act on midnight before Christmas Eve, 1913. I know pointing to one event misses the point of your blog post, but the problems we're seeing today (such as fake news) snowballed from that event.
America was a Free Masonic experiment. So was the French Revolution. I bet Communism is too. What we are really morning is the degeneracy this Masonism/Satanism has done to the various Nations/Peoples/Tribes/Races of Europe, particularly Western Europe.
It’s said that God eventually takes away what we abuse. We abuse our traditions, our cultures, our history, our values, even our faith and our very lives. We are degenerates in many categories compared to our ancestors and predecessors. We abuse our very vitality with unChristian living…are we really surprised God will take even that away too after suffering so much of our abuse against His gifts?
I morn the loss of our version of Numenor and Numenorians. But we can’t go back, all we can do is try to rebuild to something as glorious, and perhaps if God wills it and we are faithful, something even greater.