Last Days of the Republic: Leftist Policies Could Push America
to Its Breaking Point
Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / May 13, 2022
In President Joe Biden’s America, the traditional bedrocks of the
American system—a stable economy, energy independence, law enforce-
ment, hallowed universities—are dissolving.
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory.
They may witness things over the next five months that once would
have seemed unimaginable.
Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land
war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.
In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian
President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of
nuclear war.
79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing
nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who
should be removed from power.
After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-in-
duced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad.
China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to ex-
ploit this rare window of global military opportunity.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy,
energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities,
a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal
justice system—are dissolving.
Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is
at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary
remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the
disease of hyperinflation.
There is no southern border.
Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into
the United States without audit, COVID-19 testing, or vaccination.
None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigra-
tion law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District at-
torneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges.
(Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack
comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and
the Los Angeles County district attorney refused to press felony
charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and
-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and poli-
tics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the
budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first
—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from
many shelves.
Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Re-
public. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court rever-
sal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own
abortion laws has created a national hysteria.
Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters
showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them
into altering their votes.
*There is no free speech any more on campuses.*
*Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention,
grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the
right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or
ethnic category.*
When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the
last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and profes-
sional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and
irreversible declining standards of living.
*What happened?
Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are
choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal,
and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build
the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development
on the planet.
Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term politi-
cal advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing
labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical
lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.
The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politi-
cized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the
entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.
Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary
theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate
policymaking in the Biden administration.
The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling
empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather
be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically in-
correct, successful, and popular.
Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from
18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary
disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?
The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022.
Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still
push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and
deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.
Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional govern-
ment or common sense.
So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more
doxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation,
swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and
likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.
Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme
Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the
fall issue more COVID-19 lockdowns. They will still dream of packing
the court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College,
adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds
of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of
the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they
prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.
***************
This is not an accident. No one could be this hate-filled and
lack and morals or empathy for this country or the citizenry.
We have to find a way to stop this evil.
Pray for God's grace and guidance before it is too late.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 