Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

[Ptarmigan]

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/17/can-we-do-anything-about-americas-decline/

Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode.

Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more?

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

America has been in decline. It has gotten worse since COVID pandemic. Wokeness has further led to decline and alienated America's allies.

Abroad, our allies and neutrals are distancing themselves from America—France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Turkey, South Korea—on the Ukraine War, China, the dollar as the global currency, and our popular culture.

Why? Our increasingly former friends conclude it is now dangerous to ally openly with the United States and for a variety of reasons:

1) They see the once indomitable United States as weak—as a possible liability rather than an asset. After China’s balloon surveillances, the Afghanistan flight, the inability to achieve strategic victory after intervening in Iraq and Libya, the current embarrassing Pentagon leak, the Anchorage mini-summit, the woke obsessions in the U.S. military, and the inability to ensure its military is well-staffed, apolitical, and equipped with the world’s most plentiful and cutting-edge weaponry, allies assume that the United States will not necessarily win any intervention it undertakes but may well drag them down with it.

2) The United States may suddenly turn on an ally, demonize it, and refuse to meet with its leaders, as Biden gratuitously maligned Saudi Arabia and Israel.

3) America asks allies to join its cause of the day regardless of whether it is in those nations’ own interest. So South Korea, Japan, India, or Egypt do not believe boycotting Russian oil or openly selling Ukraine weapons is necessarily in their interests.

4) Our woke revolution is so volatile, irrational, and unpredictable that allies never know when they will be accused of being homophobic, transphobic, racist, or sexist and treated accordingly—or whether the United States will be eternally crippled by internal woke dissension and civil unrest.

5) The allies do not believe the United States can keep secrets, especially after the latest leak. From the Dobbs draft leak and the Comey leak of a confidential conversation with President Trump to the Vindman-Ciaramella-Schiff impeachment psychodrama leaks to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, leakers and “whistleblowers” feel there are few consequences to leaking classified information (unless it is embarrassing to leftist administrations), or indeed leaking to the media to overturn institutions and presidencies.

The treatment is more feared.

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Our elected leaders know we must, but never even attempt to, cut spending, reduce the size of the federal government radically, simplify the tax code and reduce taxes, deregulate, recalibrate Medicare and Social Security, develop our mineral, gas, and oil resources, and require labor participation for able-bodied entitlement recipients.

Never have Americans spent more on K-12 and higher education and never have they received less in return. The education industry is woke and nonmeritocratic. Research is diverted, sidetracked, and polluted by ideological commissars, endangering the U.S. lead in science, math, engineering, and the professions. Even scientists have become deductive, starting out with a preconceived woke conclusion they feel will win influence, grants, and notoriety and then scrambling to warp evidence to fit it.

[Eupher]

I can think of a few things, but they will never happen.

1. Close Washington, D.C. I mean, SHUT IT DOWN, at least the federal government.
2. Move the federal government to Dubuque, Iowa. (There isn't room in Dubuque for the massive size of the government, but that's too bad. Put up tents if you need to. Use the high school football field, because they're not doing well with it anyway.) DoD will have to set up shop on a barge on the Mississippi River. (No life jackets -- if you can't swim, too bad. Take a chance.)
3. Congress gets only the benefits that the US Constitution provides. Only half of their current salary. Lobbyists are prohibited from interacting with any government official, employee, or skateboard maker. Violators will be imprisoned for not less than 10 years on another barge parked on the Mississippi. No shelter. Suck it up, cupcakes.
4. The president gets that old Motel 6 on the edge of town. There's no kitchen, so the WH chef and his entourage are fired. The president and his family can get their meals out of the vending machines in the hallway.
5. The House of Representatives gets the old Elks Club hall on Main Street. Just down from there there's the old Lion's Club for the Senate. (The Lion's Club is smaller, so suck it up, senators.)
6. The president's cabinet is cut down to only what is specifically within the U.S. Constitution. Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Education is history, as are the Secretaries of Energy, Homeland Security (we're not securing our homeland as it is), Labor, Transportation (don't let the door hit you in your well-used ass, Petey-boy, on your way out), the DNI, and all those dumbasses that clog up so much of the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building. All of them, gone. The VP uses the cells in the town jail that aren't being used.

In short, it's time to tear it all down and start over.

[enslaved1]

In short, it's time to tear it all down and start over.

There's only so much spackle and duct tape can hold together, and I think we are at the point where, yes, complete demo and rebuild is needed.