Our senior associate editor, who closely monitors American Thinker, sent a link to a somber, but properly understood, not defeatist analysis of the American culture today.
Titled, Facing Up to the Enormity of Our Problem, by Daren Jonescu, Its purpose is to set forth an analysis of what champions of a freedom loving constitutional republic, reflecting traditional western culture, are up against. The article engendered many insightful comments from readers and those should be considered as well. The excerpts we have provided are provocative in isolation and should not be presumed to capture all that is important in the article. Via DLH:
On November 6, 2012, . . . a basically virtuous minority fought to preserve the cause of 1776 — life, liberty and property — against a basically immoral, merciless mob and its conscienceless, power-hungry puppet masters, while a basically amoral, self-obsessed mass of bloodless, happy-pilled pod people sat on its collective hands and, bored of watching America die, changed the channel to watch American Idol instead. The war this time is not the final escalation of an intractable intellectual dispute. Rather, this time the war is between reason and irrationality themselves, virtue and vice themselves. There is no common spiritual ground to guarantee resolution and reunion after the dust settles. . .
(George) Washington spoke truly: a democratic form of government, republican or otherwise, is only as virtuous as the citizens who form it. Institutions of liberty, equality, and mutual respect cannot be sustained in, let alone re-imposed upon, a society that has generally forsaken every single virtue named in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and has in turn filled the soul’s moral void with hatred, envy, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust, and collectivism’s unique license to pillage, namely its presupposition that individual men — that is, other men — do not really exist.
The entire moral and intellectual structure of the West has rotted out from within, over the course of generations. Winning elections is still valuable — as is choosing the most principled candidates. (The two are not contradictory goals, contrary to the delusions of the entrenched political establishment.) But winning elections, even with good candidates, cannot solve the West’s existential crisis. The divide this time is not tempered with a measure of long-developed moral common ground. Two fundamentally opposed views of life are represented, and the side of reason and decency is by far the outnumbered force.
My take, in part, is that “it is about the culture stupid.” The idea that sociocultural issues can be abandoned “call a truce on them” is folly. Social and cultural problems drive the enormity of our economic problems. The economy is overburdened because of them and will be impossible to set right without concomitant appreciation of that from political leadership. We have to engage the body politic on all fronts the next two years. We need to engender a reformation and reclaim American ideals. Enough may still be receptive in their heart of hearts that America can still be saved. The compelling consistent messages necessary to achieve this must be soundly developed, internalized by political leadership at all levels, and echoed everywhere. R Mall
