The Implosion of America

Something interesting happened a while back, when a Japanese worker was accidentally exposed to radiation. He did not die immediately. He could still stand and talk and think, his bones were not broken. His basic structure was still intact. But his DNA had been destroyed. Since his cells could no longer divide and replicate, all his skin gradually fell off and could not be replaced. He was kept alive with skin transplants and transfusions. It took him 83 days to die.

Something similar happens, when the ideas that are the DNA of American institutions, are forgotten. The fear that whatever values inflated our way of life are gone is not new. I remember a long time ago, politicians lamenting “dry rot at the core of our democracy.” Or they would complain that “young people these days don’t appreciate the values that made our country great”. What is new and remarkable today, is the lack of anybody saying these things. There is nobody left to notice.

You will say “What do you mean? These MAGA people, the ones who the liberals call white nationalists, are all over the place!” That is exactly what I mean. They don’t think that anything is missing. They were born yesterday, and think they are it. Do you think American values declined and declined, to the point where all of a sudden everybody has them? No. The last ones disappeared, who even knew what they don’t have.

The most powerful reflections on the plight of man – his nature, and the forms of social organization in which it existed – took place in the 1700’s. America arose from a reflection on the different forms of government, republic and monarchy, and the various institutions that protected values such as religious freedom in different places in history. Another period of great reflection occurred around WWII and the Cold War, analyzing deeply the differences between central planning and capitalism, fascism and classical liberalism.

Out of these inquiries, and this competition between nations, emerged a set of ideas. The common man on the street did not necessarily remember the debate from which the ideas arose. But he had a sense of these ideas, so that he could loosely recognize and recite them, and act them out and defend them like morals. The average American had a set of beliefs, which we then had to defend against communists and such. The ideas were boiled down further in political campaign platforms, such as low taxes and regulation, economic freedom, small government, strong national defense.

As late as the 1990’s, Rush Limbaugh was a beacon of these ideas, sort of a time capsule sharing things he picked up from his parents and grandparents, what his father called “The Great Debate”. But even Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather I believe it was, at the end of his life, lamented that “The Great Debate” had ended. People no longer had this sense of the critical issues that got us where we were. And it is hard to explain, but I saw this myself in the strangest places.

I had a stepmother from South Bend, Indiana, who was a Catholic and a liberal and a Democrat and all that. She supported whatever big-government fix was going to end poverty. But she was old-school. When she spoke, the values that came out of her mouth sounded like something documented by Alexis de Tocqueville. She was more conservative – more a conduit for the traditional philosophy at the origin of our nation – than Republican politicians of the day.

Or one time I saw an old episode of “The Incredible Hulk”. This was a TV show, that had to be written by some big-city art-student liberal. And I will take a wild guess he did not like Reagan. But this guy was so steeped in some kind of traditional values, probably without even wanting to be or recognizing that he was, that the ideas and values couldn’t help but come out in his show. The 1970’s when the show started certainly rejected traditional values. But like the Meathead in “All In The Family” they still knew the values they were rejecting. Even Nancy Pelosi, the original villain of liberals, is familiar with the great debate, and can recite its ideas and speak its archaic language.

President Trump was old school, but he was not a very philosophical man. He recognized that Rush Limbaugh was selling something important, something that resonated with people, something that was valuable. And Trump was old enough to have that sort of subconscious and hard-to-describe sense of American values I talked about, which even Nancy Pelosi has, but younger politicians like Ron DeSantis don’t. But while Trump’s instincts were good, his programs to “Make America Great Again” were superficial. And in the end he gave into taking advice from younger people who did not have that sense he has. And he gave in to wanting to be popular and liked by the largest possible mob, which were crazy people who had no idea what he was talking about. Trump is great, but his best parts are not his most popular parts among Republicans.

I saw a rural sheriff put a headline on his website “God and Country”. But he is like a cargo cult. He knows what he wants. But just saying it won’t bring it, any more than the Japanese radiation victim could be cured with skin grafts. They know what they want, but they don’t know how to get it. The ideas, the technology of values that made the God and Country, are lost. If our last artifact is America the way cops remember it, we are screwed. It’s like if the design for airplanes were lost, and the only person who remembered what one looked like was a first-class passenger. His design would be all cushions. An America desiged by cops is all lying in court and shooting black people.

So what are these ideas, that somehow were lost, with our nation soon to follow? Economist Thomas Sowell attempted to characterize the ideas in two books, “A Conflict of Visions” and “The Vision of the Anointed”. Sowell said policy ideas arise from a set of underlying assumptions about how the world works. So that people who have the same sense of the world, will then agree across a variety of policies, from immigration to taxes. Sowell called the traditional or right-wing assumptions “the tragic vision” and left-wing is “the unconstrained vision”.

Sowell elucidates how the founding of our country, and the limitations of government, were rooted in an understanding of the tragedy of man. Sowell also went into great length about the shortcomings of government, and the general problems of civilization, in a book called “Knowledge and Decisions”. So you can read those books, and read the Federalist Papers, and get an understanding of the nature of why our founding ideas and values worked. But you can’t just read about it and get the nation back, any more than you can send “The Wealth Of Nations” to Congo and they will be rich. Reading about how a plant works is not going to give you a plant.

The words of intellectuals cannot swim and travel the minds of men, and the way people get this stuff is not from a book. Sowell can explain it to another economist, an intellectual. His larger audience includes people like playwright David Mamet, who gets it. But you can’t feed it to people out of a book written by a phd. And the faction of people who get it is vanishingly small, I haven’t seen any signs that anybody gets it, in a long time. Whatever phrases and examples normal people traditionally used, that transmitted this stuff from parent to child, and from neighbor to neighbor, have been lost. It is just not playing on Twitter.

The nation is like a patient. And you cannot transplant in from a book, the ideas that it is not reproducing itself organically. Or at least a person hasn’t come along who can inspire a recollection or a new incarnation of these ideas, like resuscitating a heart. So absent some kind of… I don’t know… An organism gets old, and it dies.