Hanson: As world watches transfixed, the unpopular Left eradicates a great nation’s underpinnings

by WorldTribune Staff, April 22, 2021

All of the “centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have now been put into doubt” by mad-with-power leftists intent on eroding “the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually,” columnist and historian Victor Davis Hanson noted.

“We are now witnessing a concentrated effort to alter the constitutional order and centuries of custom and tradition. Only that way, the Left believes, can it retain its transient power given the unpopularity of most of its current agenda,” Hanson wrote in an analysis for American Greatness on April 21.

The Left’s agenda includes:

• An assault on the 233-year old Electoral College and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual states establishing voting laws.

• Already gone is the 176-year old tradition of a pivotal November Election Day.

• Eradicating the 152-year old nine-member Supreme Court, the 170-year old Senate filibuster, and the 62-year old idea of a 50-state union are all priorities for the New Democratic Party.

• Justifying runaway spending by sophistries that debt is either irrelevant, or that inflation and stagflation are relics of the past — even as prices are now soaring.

• The military — after costly strategic stagnation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya — is now turning on its own. Some of the politicized top brass seem more worried about the politics of their own soldiers than the dangers of foreign militaries.

• Our public schools and colleges are systematically downplaying meritocratic curricula and substituting in their places ideological, racial, and cultural litmus tests. Admissions now often hinge as much on race, gender, and ethnicity than quantifiable achievement. The First and Fifth Amendments — free speech and due process — have vanished from most college campuses.

• Private monopolies that control most written communications of Americans censor expression entirely on the basis of politics.

“Friends and enemies abroad are becoming variously shocked, disheartened — and gleeful — as the United States cannibalizes itself,” Hanson wrote. “The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Instead, the greater problem lies within us.”

Adam Smith said of successful societies that they have a lot of “ruin” in them.

“He meant that a dissolute, leisured, and ahistorical generation has to waste a lot of its generous inherited wealth before it runs out,” Hanson wrote. “We are learning how much will soon be left of what our ancestors bequeathed. And the rest of the world is watching — some with glee, others with horror.”


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