Great nations rise and fall. Anyone who takes for granted our country’s continued vitality is a fool.
As I see it, last night’s elections confirm my fear that the great American experiment in constitutional republicanism is in grave peril, if not doomed. I very much hope that I’m wrong, and I will continue to work to prevent my fear’s ever being realized, or at least to defer as long as possible the date of the grand and awful collapse, but the fundamentals look terrible.
As the Framers understood, self-government depends on a virtuous citizenry. Instead, we have a growing mass of citizens seemingly wedded to dependency on big-government spending that is economically unsustainable. We are depleting our moral capital at least as rapidly as we are depleting our financial capital: We have a collapsed marriage culture, with some 40% of births out-of-wedlock and all the attendant dysfunctions. Instead of working to rebuild a vibrant marriage culture, we’re radically redefining marriage in a way that permanently severs the critical link between marriage and procreation. And then there’s our degraded popular culture, our terrible schools, and so much more….