July 11, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
The idea of a nation decaying is difficult to comprehend – its enormity, its breadth, the causality, and its consequences. Understanding is necessary to develop an appreciation of the concept. The objective of this segment is to potentially enhance your current understanding of the idea.
The segment contains excerpts from six very culturally different authors from whom you will be hearing throughout: a British diplomat (Patrick Davies), a gifted scholar schooled in ancient Greek literature (Spencer Klaven), a Canadian immigrant and journalist (Mark Steyn), an Orthodox Jew and conservative podcaster (Ben Shapiro), a prominent businessman, public servant, and defeated 2022 senatorial candidate (David McCormick), and a North Korean defector who is now a U.S. Citizen (Yeonmi Park). Each expresses their concern on the decaying state of our country. The message: the concern is widespread within our society and the free world.
Their excerpts raise many of the concerns that will be explored further in the series: the need for U.S. leadership in the free world; the threat of China; technological transformation; overspending by the U.S. government; our National debt; the internal conflict within our society fueled by the desire of some for equity, diversity mandates, and school children indoctrination; the weakening of our national security via immigration policy, crime throughout the land, and military decay; threats to our liberties. And importantly the decay of patriotism, a very strong need for American renewal. So, the segment can be viewed as a microcosm of what lies ahead.
Next: A good way to develop understanding of national decay and/or decline is to observe it via history. Ray Dalio has spent a half century studying the rise and fall of empires and superpowers throughout history and learned that each had similarities in causality which he terms the Big Cycle. Further, there are also three similar sub-cycles that were experienced. Developing this understanding of history is the objective of the next segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The idea of a nation decaying is difficult to comprehend – its enormity, its breadth, the causality, and its consequences. Understanding is necessary to develop an appreciation of the concept. The objective of this segment is to potentially enhance your current understanding of the idea.
The segment contains excerpts from six very culturally different authors from whom you will be hearing throughout: a British diplomat (Patrick Davies), a gifted scholar schooled in ancient Greek literature (Spencer Klaven), a Canadian immigrant and journalist (Mark Steyn), an Orthodox Jew and conservative podcaster (Ben Shapiro), a prominent businessman, public servant, and defeated 2022 senatorial candidate (David McCormick), and a North Korean defector who is now a U.S. Citizen (Yeonmi Park). Each expresses their concern on the decaying state of our country. The message: the concern is widespread within our society and the free world.
Their excerpts raise many of the concerns that will be explored further in the series: the need for U.S. leadership in the free world; the threat of China; technological transformation; overspending by the U.S. government; our National debt; the internal conflict within our society fueled by the desire of some for equity, diversity mandates, and school children indoctrination; the weakening of our national security via immigration policy, crime throughout the land, and military decay; threats to our liberties. And importantly the decay of patriotism, a very strong need for American renewal. So, the segment can be viewed as a microcosm of what lies ahead.
Next: A good way to develop understanding of national decay and/or decline is to observe it via history. Ray Dalio has spent a half century studying the rise and fall of empires and superpowers throughout history and learned that each had similarities in causality which he terms the Big Cycle. Further, there are also three similar sub-cycles that were experienced. Developing this understanding of history is the objective of the next segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING GUIDANCE FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 1
THE IDEA OF AMERICAN DECAY - EXCERPTS
THE NEW YORK TIMES – 8/5/2022: The idea that America is in decline isn’t new. For decades, academics have warned that partisan gridlock, politicized courts and unfettered lobbying were like dangerous substances – if taken in excess, America’s democratic systems were at risk of collapse. That’s what some experts say is happening now – that the Capitol riot and its aftermath have normalized a sense among Americans that the country, its economic system and its standing in the world are in decline. New data supports this claim: 70% of Americans believe the U.S. is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” according to a recent poll.
Just a few years ago, a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was one of the greatest nations in the world. In a Pew Research survey from 2017, 85% of respondents said either that the U.S. “stands above all other countries in the world” or that it is “one of the greatest countries, along with some others.” Additionally, 58% of those surveyed said the American democracy was working “somewhat” or “very well.” This American narrative that has held us together, it doesn’t hold anymore.”
Now, according to Pew Research survey, a median of just 17% of respondents said democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow. America still benefits from some positive reputational assessments around the world, with a majority of respondents to the Pew survey expressing favorable opinions on America’s technology, its military and its entertainment output. But some experts argue those sources of soft power are also under threat in conjunction with democratic backsliding. “One of the side effects of losing the democracy is losing control over the markets,” Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School, said adding, “I think it’s an incredibly dangerous moment. I think we absolutely could lose the democracy.”
Source: The New York Times article “The Idea of American Decay” 8/5/2022.
Patrick Davies The Great American Delusion: The belief in American exceptionalism – that the US has some unique purpose to lead the world as the exemplary free nation – remains strong. In some ways this is perfectly understandable. Few external factors drive Americans to challenge this view. While the US retains its position as the world’s superpower and biggest global economy, America’s mythological exceptionalism appears to be confirmed by the country’s continued preeminent status, whatever the problems at home. Americans are typically less immediately affected by what is happening in the rest of world, much of which is just a long away across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. And so, Americans don’t routinely compare themselves with others and the myths endure, however flawed. The Airways are filled with highly partisan analysis of the causes of social and economic problems in the US, who is to blame, and how they can be fixed. But few Americans would diagnose a deeper crisis in the US way of life. The national myths persisted despite the growing evidence against them.
Nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, the West needs America to mobilize again. But this time the request is not for the US to intervene directly or militarily somewhere in the world in a fight against a fascist or communist enemy to secure the future of Western democracy. Rather it is a call for America to take a hard, dispassionate look at itself, to acknowledge the growing weaknesses in the American system as the US matures as a nation and as competition from other states grows stronger. In essence, it is a call to fight the enemy within, for America to fix itself so it can continue to thrive. Only by addressing the growing systemic problems concealed by its national myths will the US be able to maintain its political stability, secure its continued economic success and retain its position as the world’s leading superpower. And only then will America continue to be seen as a beacon for others aspiring for democratic freedoms and values which are so essential for the future of the Western system.
No other single country can play the role of ‘defender of the West’ despite the sometimes-lofty claims from the European Union and other individual nations. On the US has the scale, power and resources to secure the future of the Western system, to influence the course of history by the power of its example, backed by its economic strength and military might. Even the US cannot do this alone as great powers emerge in China and India; it needs to work ever more closely with allies in Europe, Africa and Asia. But whether we like it or not (and many in Europe don’t), the future prosperity and the longevity of the West once again depend substantially on the US. No one in the West can afford the US to weaken or decline more quickly than it might in the normal course of history. The loss of the US as a strong symbol and defender of Western democracy would have global implications that the West’s enemies would quickly seek to exploit. Tensions would grow as malevolent powers would seek to expand their areas of influence and control. The global economy would be hit by falling confidence in America’s economic future. And democracy itself would begin to lose its attraction for countries in transition aspiring for a better future.
I will argue that the US has reached appoint of maturity in its development as a nation that calls for a new approach. This is not currently happening, or if it is, it is taking place at a glacial pace which leaves the US vulnerable to being overtaken by rapidly emerging powers or global events. And so finally I will consider whether Americans will be able to come together to achieve the reforms necessary to fix the systemic weaknesses concealed by their national myths, or whether growing divisions in US society will put essential change beyond reach before it is too late.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davies (2020)
Spencer Klaven How to Save the West: The 21st century seems to threaten civilization collapse at every turn. Every new event provokes apocalyptic speculation, and every news cycle provokes more certainty that the end is nigh. Whether the culprit is white nationalism, or cancel culture, of COVID-19, or the election of Joe Biden, the constant refrain seems to be that America and the West will soon be history.
It is always possible to look back and see in retrospect how everything went wrong. But because humanity is broken, even our noblest aspirations can go astray – which means that any era, no matter how prosperous, and any philosophy, no matter how sound, has the potential to veer toward dystopia down the road. Look closely, and you can see the beginning of destruction even in the best of times.
In our day, signs of impeding collapse are everywhere: riots in America’s streets and in her Capitol building, declining birth and fertility rates around the world, depressed further by a conviction among some would-be parents that looming catastrophe makes it irresponsible to foist life onto yet another unwitting soul, and a digital revolution in information technology as transformative as the invention of the printing press. It has all proved unsettling to say the least. The accompanying struggle for dominance of this new medium between governments and tech magnates – or governments working with tech magnates – is shaping up to be every bit as desperate and vigorous as the battle between the Roman Catholic Church and its detractors at the dawn of the age of print.
All of this leaves many people fearful that some crash or disaster is imminent. Perhaps it is already here. It feels as if old and established powers – and, in time, nations – may be dissolving into irrelevance and careening toward disaster. Political and cultural certainties that once seemed ironclad now appear flimsy and obsolete. One cannot help but wonder: Is the West about to fail?
The irony is that the classics of Western culture have become most maligned exactly when they are most needed. Many of the people who run our cultural institutions hardly seem to care whether or not the great pillars of our civilization crumble. It is an attitude that has been a long time in the making.
Source: How to Save the West by Spencer Klaven (2023)
Mark Steyn After America: What is happening to the United States is not “cyclical,” but structural. Thanks largely to distortions driven by government, we have too much college, too much housing, too much financial sector, too much “professional servicing” – accounting, lawyering, and other activities necessary to keep the fine print in compliance with the regulatory state. All of these are huge obstacles to making productive use of even or non-borrowed money and to keeping America competitive with the rest of the world. When government spends on the scale Washington’s got used to, that’s not a spending crisis, it’s a moral one.
In the early 21st century, foreign and domestic debt piles up to the cost of liberty. These programs are wrong. They’re wrong because they represent a transfer from the citizen to the state not of money but of power. A society can cope with corroded infrastructure and a devalued currency more easily than with corroded liberty and a devalued citizenry. The bad news is our children will not enjoy the American Dream.
Like President Obama, the progressive elite doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, yet somehow assumes that the very exceptional peace and prosperity Americans have enjoyed since 1945 are eternal – as permanent a fact of life as the sky and the oceans.
There have been two competing theories at play in the 21st century. The first and better known is “globalization” – which is less a theory and more a religion with universalist claims. To its worshippers, globalization is some kind of mysterious metaphysical force that’s out there remaking our assumptions about the planet. That’s America’s first role. Its second is just as important: the burgeoning middle classes of China, India, and elsewhere improve their lives by making stuff to sell to us. America’s government is the guarantor of global order; its people are the guarantors of global prosperity. That’s the United States the world needs: in security terms, the order maker; in economic terms, the order placer. Unfortunately, neither role is sustainable. America is on course to be the first great power in history literally to shop till we drop.
When money drains, so does power. The British learned that the hard way, even as theirs drained to the friendliest of successor powers across the Atlantic in Washington. Today, money is draining across the Pacific.
Source: After America by Mark Steyn (2011).
Ben Shapiro If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It (2022)
“America’s Slow Suicide:” We must cure all inequality, even inequality caused by differences in behavior – the unavoidable condition of humanity – by spending trillions of dollars not yet created. We must rectify the imbalances of history – the unavoidable condition of humanity – by skewing all institutions toward “equity.’ We must abandon our prior foreign policy commitments – and our real foreign policy interests – in the name of quixotic attempts to “build back better” at home. We must rewrite the basic social compact in order to alleviate all natural differences between human beings.
We must sacrifice our sons and daughters to our hunger. We must teach them idiotic doctrine about complete human malleability, training them for confusion and chaos. We must indoctrinate them with the evils of our own philosophy, while teaching them that cultural diversity mandates that we overlook the far greater evils of other cultures. We must demand that our children protect us, rather than protecting our children. And, of course, we must snarl them in a web of debt not of their own making, condemning them to a future footing our bills. And then we eat ourselves. We turn on each other, recognizing that our mission has been lost and that our hunger can’t satisfy us. We treat each other as enemies; downplaying the actual presence of actual enemies.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
David McCormick Superpower in Peril: The world is changing rapidly, and our policies, institutions, and leaders are not keeping pace. Our strength and our self-confidence are slipping away.
Our success will require more than just big ideas. It will require transformational leadership that shapes America’s future by redefining how our government serves our society, renewing the souls of our institutions, and setting forth a unifying vision for our nation.
When the Cold War ended, America stood alone at the top. It had unchallenged economic, military, political, and cultural force. We were perhaps the most powerful country the world had ever seen. In the generation that followed, our primacy slipped little by little. Our leaders wasted the strategic advantage granted by the fall of the Soviet Union. We disarmed, then got bogged down in foreign wars. Across administrations, America aided and abetted China’s rise, and now it has become our gravest economic rival and military threat.
The Biden administration’s abandoning of Afghanistan in August of 2021 was for me a shocking and deeply troubling symbol of that decline. First the White House pulled out most of our troops, seemingly overnight. In their wake, or most strategic position – Bagram Air Force Base – and billions of military equipment were left open for the taking. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who had fought alongside us, as well as their families, were left exposed to the depredations of the radical, evil Taliban.
In recent years, the southern border has become a freeway for drugs and human trafficking. Inflation hit 40-year highs. Food and gas prices skyrocketed. Cities saw record levels of violent crime, carjackings, and robberies. COVID took over one million American lives. Our schools continued to struggle, and violent mobs tore down statues of our nation’s founders. We suffered through the reverberations of the indefensible and shameful violence on the steps of our Capitol on January 6, 2021. Our country confronted an unprecedented assault on her values, history, and liberties. There’s a tendency these days to see American exceptionalism as a dirty word.
To those who question our goodness, I say show me a better country. Show me a freer country. Show me a more artistic, innovative, diverse, or welcoming country. Show me a country that has done more for the world in its short history. Show me a country that gives more opportunity and liberty to more people. Show me the country as willing to admit when it is wrong and then change to make it right. The truth is, in absolute terms, relative to other countries across history, no nation can compare to America in the advancement of freedom, democracy, prosperity, progress, and equality.
But there come times when Americans are called upon to renew it. When everything seems to be crashing down and the future looks dark – in these moments of great trial, America has always found hope and opportunities to grow stronger, to expand the frontiers of our power, and to begin a new era of American leadership.
In doing so we have to recognize that for too many Americans today, the intergenerational promise of opportunity has been broken. America has become a deeply polarized place, in large part because the loudest voices among us are making it so. Activists want to teach our kids radical ideas, like the ridiculous notion that America was founded to protect the institution of slavery. We are even fighting over what it means to be an American, encourage by social media platforms, which promote echo chambers and incentivize groupthink, and by traditional media, which cherry-picks facts to feed their preferred narratives. There’s a cost to all this. Many young people think America is worse than other nations. Many say it’s not worth defending.
History shows that great powers do not so much decline as stagnate. By any measure, the United States is headed down that path. Slow productivity growth and declining entrepreneurship stink of stagnation. Globalization has left too many workers behind and undermined our industrial competitiveness – our ability to produce goods at a fair price and to raise the real incomes of our citizens at the same time. The U.S. military is being “out-innovated” by adversaries and rapidly losing its ability to deter China.
America has descended from the pinnacle of the unipolar moment, but it bears repeating: we are not bound to fall any more than we are destined to remain the strongest nation. There’s nothing inevitable about national decline – no inexorable power pulling us down or unstoppable adversaries destined to overtake us. There is no doubt America is an exceptional nation. We now have the opportunity to prove it by what we do next.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America (2023)
Yeonmi Park: While Time Remains: A North Korean Defectors Search for Freedom in America: On the night of March 30, 2007, when I was thirteen years old, I escaped North Korea into China. I didn’t escape in search of freedom, or liberty, or safety. I escaped in search of a bowl of rice. While I was in China, not knowing any better, I started to believe that the whole world must be nothing more than variation on a North Korean theme: fear, cold, abuse, despair.
The United States remains the only country that, for me, was even more magnificent in person than its reputation. In January or 2022, I became an American citizen. I sometimes have to pinch myself as a reminder that it’s true. I never imagined that I would have the degree of freedom and personal liberty that I’ve been able to enjoy in the United States.
What I am committed to is an absolutist ideology of individual rights and freedom, of the kind that Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. shared in common. I’m also committed to resisting any encroachments on it, which is why I draw on my knowledge and experience of North Korea to illuminate – not exaggerate – threats to liberty in America. And I do see threats on the horizon.
That’s why I wrote this book. Because I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom and found it. Because I made it to the promised land, and had a son, whose first breath was as an American citizen. Because I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to my new home. Because I want us- I need us – to keep the darkness at bay. Because I need your help to save our country, while time remains.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE IDEA OF AMERICAN DECAY - EXCERPTS
THE NEW YORK TIMES – 8/5/2022: The idea that America is in decline isn’t new. For decades, academics have warned that partisan gridlock, politicized courts and unfettered lobbying were like dangerous substances – if taken in excess, America’s democratic systems were at risk of collapse. That’s what some experts say is happening now – that the Capitol riot and its aftermath have normalized a sense among Americans that the country, its economic system and its standing in the world are in decline. New data supports this claim: 70% of Americans believe the U.S. is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” according to a recent poll.
Just a few years ago, a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was one of the greatest nations in the world. In a Pew Research survey from 2017, 85% of respondents said either that the U.S. “stands above all other countries in the world” or that it is “one of the greatest countries, along with some others.” Additionally, 58% of those surveyed said the American democracy was working “somewhat” or “very well.” This American narrative that has held us together, it doesn’t hold anymore.”
Now, according to Pew Research survey, a median of just 17% of respondents said democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow. America still benefits from some positive reputational assessments around the world, with a majority of respondents to the Pew survey expressing favorable opinions on America’s technology, its military and its entertainment output. But some experts argue those sources of soft power are also under threat in conjunction with democratic backsliding. “One of the side effects of losing the democracy is losing control over the markets,” Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School, said adding, “I think it’s an incredibly dangerous moment. I think we absolutely could lose the democracy.”
Source: The New York Times article “The Idea of American Decay” 8/5/2022.
Patrick Davies The Great American Delusion: The belief in American exceptionalism – that the US has some unique purpose to lead the world as the exemplary free nation – remains strong. In some ways this is perfectly understandable. Few external factors drive Americans to challenge this view. While the US retains its position as the world’s superpower and biggest global economy, America’s mythological exceptionalism appears to be confirmed by the country’s continued preeminent status, whatever the problems at home. Americans are typically less immediately affected by what is happening in the rest of world, much of which is just a long away across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. And so, Americans don’t routinely compare themselves with others and the myths endure, however flawed. The Airways are filled with highly partisan analysis of the causes of social and economic problems in the US, who is to blame, and how they can be fixed. But few Americans would diagnose a deeper crisis in the US way of life. The national myths persisted despite the growing evidence against them.
Nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, the West needs America to mobilize again. But this time the request is not for the US to intervene directly or militarily somewhere in the world in a fight against a fascist or communist enemy to secure the future of Western democracy. Rather it is a call for America to take a hard, dispassionate look at itself, to acknowledge the growing weaknesses in the American system as the US matures as a nation and as competition from other states grows stronger. In essence, it is a call to fight the enemy within, for America to fix itself so it can continue to thrive. Only by addressing the growing systemic problems concealed by its national myths will the US be able to maintain its political stability, secure its continued economic success and retain its position as the world’s leading superpower. And only then will America continue to be seen as a beacon for others aspiring for democratic freedoms and values which are so essential for the future of the Western system.
No other single country can play the role of ‘defender of the West’ despite the sometimes-lofty claims from the European Union and other individual nations. On the US has the scale, power and resources to secure the future of the Western system, to influence the course of history by the power of its example, backed by its economic strength and military might. Even the US cannot do this alone as great powers emerge in China and India; it needs to work ever more closely with allies in Europe, Africa and Asia. But whether we like it or not (and many in Europe don’t), the future prosperity and the longevity of the West once again depend substantially on the US. No one in the West can afford the US to weaken or decline more quickly than it might in the normal course of history. The loss of the US as a strong symbol and defender of Western democracy would have global implications that the West’s enemies would quickly seek to exploit. Tensions would grow as malevolent powers would seek to expand their areas of influence and control. The global economy would be hit by falling confidence in America’s economic future. And democracy itself would begin to lose its attraction for countries in transition aspiring for a better future.
I will argue that the US has reached appoint of maturity in its development as a nation that calls for a new approach. This is not currently happening, or if it is, it is taking place at a glacial pace which leaves the US vulnerable to being overtaken by rapidly emerging powers or global events. And so finally I will consider whether Americans will be able to come together to achieve the reforms necessary to fix the systemic weaknesses concealed by their national myths, or whether growing divisions in US society will put essential change beyond reach before it is too late.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davies (2020)
Spencer Klaven How to Save the West: The 21st century seems to threaten civilization collapse at every turn. Every new event provokes apocalyptic speculation, and every news cycle provokes more certainty that the end is nigh. Whether the culprit is white nationalism, or cancel culture, of COVID-19, or the election of Joe Biden, the constant refrain seems to be that America and the West will soon be history.
It is always possible to look back and see in retrospect how everything went wrong. But because humanity is broken, even our noblest aspirations can go astray – which means that any era, no matter how prosperous, and any philosophy, no matter how sound, has the potential to veer toward dystopia down the road. Look closely, and you can see the beginning of destruction even in the best of times.
In our day, signs of impeding collapse are everywhere: riots in America’s streets and in her Capitol building, declining birth and fertility rates around the world, depressed further by a conviction among some would-be parents that looming catastrophe makes it irresponsible to foist life onto yet another unwitting soul, and a digital revolution in information technology as transformative as the invention of the printing press. It has all proved unsettling to say the least. The accompanying struggle for dominance of this new medium between governments and tech magnates – or governments working with tech magnates – is shaping up to be every bit as desperate and vigorous as the battle between the Roman Catholic Church and its detractors at the dawn of the age of print.
All of this leaves many people fearful that some crash or disaster is imminent. Perhaps it is already here. It feels as if old and established powers – and, in time, nations – may be dissolving into irrelevance and careening toward disaster. Political and cultural certainties that once seemed ironclad now appear flimsy and obsolete. One cannot help but wonder: Is the West about to fail?
The irony is that the classics of Western culture have become most maligned exactly when they are most needed. Many of the people who run our cultural institutions hardly seem to care whether or not the great pillars of our civilization crumble. It is an attitude that has been a long time in the making.
Source: How to Save the West by Spencer Klaven (2023)
Mark Steyn After America: What is happening to the United States is not “cyclical,” but structural. Thanks largely to distortions driven by government, we have too much college, too much housing, too much financial sector, too much “professional servicing” – accounting, lawyering, and other activities necessary to keep the fine print in compliance with the regulatory state. All of these are huge obstacles to making productive use of even or non-borrowed money and to keeping America competitive with the rest of the world. When government spends on the scale Washington’s got used to, that’s not a spending crisis, it’s a moral one.
In the early 21st century, foreign and domestic debt piles up to the cost of liberty. These programs are wrong. They’re wrong because they represent a transfer from the citizen to the state not of money but of power. A society can cope with corroded infrastructure and a devalued currency more easily than with corroded liberty and a devalued citizenry. The bad news is our children will not enjoy the American Dream.
Like President Obama, the progressive elite doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, yet somehow assumes that the very exceptional peace and prosperity Americans have enjoyed since 1945 are eternal – as permanent a fact of life as the sky and the oceans.
There have been two competing theories at play in the 21st century. The first and better known is “globalization” – which is less a theory and more a religion with universalist claims. To its worshippers, globalization is some kind of mysterious metaphysical force that’s out there remaking our assumptions about the planet. That’s America’s first role. Its second is just as important: the burgeoning middle classes of China, India, and elsewhere improve their lives by making stuff to sell to us. America’s government is the guarantor of global order; its people are the guarantors of global prosperity. That’s the United States the world needs: in security terms, the order maker; in economic terms, the order placer. Unfortunately, neither role is sustainable. America is on course to be the first great power in history literally to shop till we drop.
When money drains, so does power. The British learned that the hard way, even as theirs drained to the friendliest of successor powers across the Atlantic in Washington. Today, money is draining across the Pacific.
Source: After America by Mark Steyn (2011).
Ben Shapiro If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It (2022)
“America’s Slow Suicide:” We must cure all inequality, even inequality caused by differences in behavior – the unavoidable condition of humanity – by spending trillions of dollars not yet created. We must rectify the imbalances of history – the unavoidable condition of humanity – by skewing all institutions toward “equity.’ We must abandon our prior foreign policy commitments – and our real foreign policy interests – in the name of quixotic attempts to “build back better” at home. We must rewrite the basic social compact in order to alleviate all natural differences between human beings.
We must sacrifice our sons and daughters to our hunger. We must teach them idiotic doctrine about complete human malleability, training them for confusion and chaos. We must indoctrinate them with the evils of our own philosophy, while teaching them that cultural diversity mandates that we overlook the far greater evils of other cultures. We must demand that our children protect us, rather than protecting our children. And, of course, we must snarl them in a web of debt not of their own making, condemning them to a future footing our bills. And then we eat ourselves. We turn on each other, recognizing that our mission has been lost and that our hunger can’t satisfy us. We treat each other as enemies; downplaying the actual presence of actual enemies.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
David McCormick Superpower in Peril: The world is changing rapidly, and our policies, institutions, and leaders are not keeping pace. Our strength and our self-confidence are slipping away.
Our success will require more than just big ideas. It will require transformational leadership that shapes America’s future by redefining how our government serves our society, renewing the souls of our institutions, and setting forth a unifying vision for our nation.
When the Cold War ended, America stood alone at the top. It had unchallenged economic, military, political, and cultural force. We were perhaps the most powerful country the world had ever seen. In the generation that followed, our primacy slipped little by little. Our leaders wasted the strategic advantage granted by the fall of the Soviet Union. We disarmed, then got bogged down in foreign wars. Across administrations, America aided and abetted China’s rise, and now it has become our gravest economic rival and military threat.
The Biden administration’s abandoning of Afghanistan in August of 2021 was for me a shocking and deeply troubling symbol of that decline. First the White House pulled out most of our troops, seemingly overnight. In their wake, or most strategic position – Bagram Air Force Base – and billions of military equipment were left open for the taking. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who had fought alongside us, as well as their families, were left exposed to the depredations of the radical, evil Taliban.
In recent years, the southern border has become a freeway for drugs and human trafficking. Inflation hit 40-year highs. Food and gas prices skyrocketed. Cities saw record levels of violent crime, carjackings, and robberies. COVID took over one million American lives. Our schools continued to struggle, and violent mobs tore down statues of our nation’s founders. We suffered through the reverberations of the indefensible and shameful violence on the steps of our Capitol on January 6, 2021. Our country confronted an unprecedented assault on her values, history, and liberties. There’s a tendency these days to see American exceptionalism as a dirty word.
To those who question our goodness, I say show me a better country. Show me a freer country. Show me a more artistic, innovative, diverse, or welcoming country. Show me a country that has done more for the world in its short history. Show me a country that gives more opportunity and liberty to more people. Show me the country as willing to admit when it is wrong and then change to make it right. The truth is, in absolute terms, relative to other countries across history, no nation can compare to America in the advancement of freedom, democracy, prosperity, progress, and equality.
But there come times when Americans are called upon to renew it. When everything seems to be crashing down and the future looks dark – in these moments of great trial, America has always found hope and opportunities to grow stronger, to expand the frontiers of our power, and to begin a new era of American leadership.
In doing so we have to recognize that for too many Americans today, the intergenerational promise of opportunity has been broken. America has become a deeply polarized place, in large part because the loudest voices among us are making it so. Activists want to teach our kids radical ideas, like the ridiculous notion that America was founded to protect the institution of slavery. We are even fighting over what it means to be an American, encourage by social media platforms, which promote echo chambers and incentivize groupthink, and by traditional media, which cherry-picks facts to feed their preferred narratives. There’s a cost to all this. Many young people think America is worse than other nations. Many say it’s not worth defending.
History shows that great powers do not so much decline as stagnate. By any measure, the United States is headed down that path. Slow productivity growth and declining entrepreneurship stink of stagnation. Globalization has left too many workers behind and undermined our industrial competitiveness – our ability to produce goods at a fair price and to raise the real incomes of our citizens at the same time. The U.S. military is being “out-innovated” by adversaries and rapidly losing its ability to deter China.
America has descended from the pinnacle of the unipolar moment, but it bears repeating: we are not bound to fall any more than we are destined to remain the strongest nation. There’s nothing inevitable about national decline – no inexorable power pulling us down or unstoppable adversaries destined to overtake us. There is no doubt America is an exceptional nation. We now have the opportunity to prove it by what we do next.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America (2023)
Yeonmi Park: While Time Remains: A North Korean Defectors Search for Freedom in America: On the night of March 30, 2007, when I was thirteen years old, I escaped North Korea into China. I didn’t escape in search of freedom, or liberty, or safety. I escaped in search of a bowl of rice. While I was in China, not knowing any better, I started to believe that the whole world must be nothing more than variation on a North Korean theme: fear, cold, abuse, despair.
The United States remains the only country that, for me, was even more magnificent in person than its reputation. In January or 2022, I became an American citizen. I sometimes have to pinch myself as a reminder that it’s true. I never imagined that I would have the degree of freedom and personal liberty that I’ve been able to enjoy in the United States.
What I am committed to is an absolutist ideology of individual rights and freedom, of the kind that Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. shared in common. I’m also committed to resisting any encroachments on it, which is why I draw on my knowledge and experience of North Korea to illuminate – not exaggerate – threats to liberty in America. And I do see threats on the horizon.
That’s why I wrote this book. Because I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom and found it. Because I made it to the promised land, and had a son, whose first breath was as an American citizen. Because I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to my new home. Because I want us- I need us – to keep the darkness at bay. Because I need your help to save our country, while time remains.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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