{"id":9357,"date":"2016-06-20T10:52:09","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T17:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9357"},"modified":"2016-06-20T10:52:09","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T17:52:09","slug":"america-in-free-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/america-in-free-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"America In Free Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas<\/em><\/p>\n

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Before the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), where Philip II of Macedon prevailed over a common Greek alliance, the city-states had been weakened by years of social and economic turmoil. To read the classical speeches in the Athenian assembly is to learn of the democracy\u2019s constant struggles with declining revenues, insolvency, and expanding entitlements. Rome between the First Triumvirate (59 BC) and the ascension of Caesar Augustus\u2019s autocracy (27 BC) was mostly defined by gang violence, chaos, and civil war, the common theme being a loss of trust in republican values. Russia was in a revolutionary spiral for nearly twenty years between 1905 and the final victory of the Bolsheviks in 1922, ending up with a cure worse than the disease. And Europe between 1930 and 1939 saw most of its democracies erode as fascists and communists gained power\u2014eventually leading to the greater disaster of the outbreak of World War II.<\/p>\n

The United States has seen periods of near fatal internal chaos\u2014in the late 1850s leading up to the carnage of the Civil War, during the decade of the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939, and in the chaotic 1960s. Something similar is starting to plague America today on a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural fronts.<\/p>\n

The contenders for president reflect the loss of confidence of the times. Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist. Yet scan the record of big government redistributionism here and abroad\u2014from Chicago and Detroit to the insolvent Mediterranean nations of the European Union and failed states like Venezuela\u2014and there is no encouraging model of socialist success. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination\u2014if she is not the first nominee in American history to be indicted, on possible charges of violating federal intelligence laws, and perhaps perjury and obstruction of justice. Donald Trump has neither political experience nor a detailed agenda, but has charged ahead on the basis of his vague promise to \u201cmake America great again\u201d\u2014a Jacksonian version of Obama\u2019s equally vacuous 2008 promise of \u201chope and change.\u201d
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President Obama, in response to attacks on his record by Trump\u2014and by Bill Clinton, who has spoken of \u201cthe awful legacy of the last eight years\u201d\u2014is entering the campaign to brag about the current economy.<\/p>\n

But to do so, President Obama must ignore a number of liabilities that are soon coming due. Under his tenure, he did not address the unsustainable actuarial realities of Social Security and Medicare. The federal debt doubled in a manner never seen prior and can be now serviced only through de facto zero-interest rates, which in turn ossify economic growth. Due to tax hikes, new financial and business regulations, and the socialization of the health care system, per annum GDP growth under the President\u2019s tenure will go down in history as the worst since the Great Depression. He ignored the Clinton-Gingrich compromise formula of a quarter-century ago of balancing budgets by cutting defense, capping spending, and raising taxes. Instead, Obama slashed defense spending and hiked a number of taxes, but ignored entitlements, ensuring $500 billion annual deficits\u2014deemed successful because they were less than his first-term normal of $1 trillion annual shortfalls. The President points to the 5 percent unemployment as proof of his success, but that figure reflects Obama-era methodologies of not counting all those who have given up looking for jobs. In May 2016, a record 94,708,000 Americans were no longer in the labor force\u2014the highest percentage of non-working Americans since the Great Depression.<\/p>\n

Abroad, it is hard to identify a single region or U.S. national interest where things are not worse than prior to 2009. In the Middle East, few believe that the Iran deal will prevent the theocracy from obtaining the bomb; indeed, Iran has never been more active in creating chaos and threatening war. American intervention in Libya, American withdrawal from Iraq, and American neglect of Syria helped to ensure a general Middle East implosion. Reset with Russia empowered Vladimir Putin\u2019s ongoing agenda of reabsorbing former Soviet republics. China is building artificial island bases in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea to recalibrate the balance of power in Asia\u2014on the understanding that American failure to challenge this bellicosity has translated into de facto acceptance of it. And due to financial disasters, unchecked immigration, and populist revolts against Brussels, the European Union in its present form seems unsustainable. The only mystery is whether its unwinding will come with a slow whimper or abrupt bang.<\/p>\n

In President Obama\u2019s interview with The<\/em> Atlantic<\/em> and his chief foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes\u2019s disclosures to the New York Times<\/em>, it is evident that the administration holds a general contempt for the American-led postwar order\u2014and the Washington bipartisan and trans-Atlantic establishment (\u201cthe Blob\u201d) central to its stability. By any fair measure, President Obama believes that the U.S. does not, and perhaps never has, possessed the moral stature or the wherewithal to lead the Western world, which should be more equitably left to regional powers such as China, Iran, Russia, and Middle Eastern autocracies to adjudicate the affairs in their own environs.<\/p>\n

The result has been near anarchy, not just in the natural rise of anti-American rivals, but in the fright of former allies and neutrals who are being forced to make the necessary realist adjustments with old enemies\u2014or in the case of many Westernized allies, to perhaps privately reconsider the once taboo idea of acquiring nuclear weapons for the sake of deterrence.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the three most telling symptoms of the current chaos are race relations, immigration, and the status of our universities and colleges\u2014three interconnected issues that often inspire riots, demonstrations, and suppressions of free speech.<\/p>\n

President Obama has largely ignored the old ideal of the melting pot and in its place preferred a salad-bowl multiculturalism of competing ethnicities, tribes, and races, whose activism wins concessions from local, state and federal governments. Casual comments and references by Obama\u2014like \u201cbring a gun\u201d to a knife fight, the \u201cbitter clingers\u201d of Pennsylvania, and \u201ctypical white person\u201d\u2014stoked racial tensions. So did Attorney General Eric Holder\u2019s crude referrals to \u201cmy people\u201d and a \u201cnation of cowards.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ferguson and the Baltimore riots, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the systematic carnage in Chicago all embody paradoxes: facts are sometimes less important than allegations; the police are the culprits of urban violence both for responses that are too aggressive and too passive; and in a static economy, inner city youth can\u2019t find jobs because they have criminal records and lack the skills that would make them employable.<\/p>\n

Apparently, the Obama administration never considered that a multiracial America united by one culture was an historical exception. Everywhere else, multiculturalism and tribalism without assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have proved to be an abject and usually violent catastrophe: most recently, in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Rwanda, and the Middle East. Europe\u2019s attempt to emulate a multiracial United States is ending in utter failure with unchecked immigration, multicultural incoherence, and rising Islamism.<\/p>\n

The recent California riots at Trump rallies, along with the widely reported crimes committed by illegal aliens in sanctuary cities, reveal the wages of unchecked immigration that is increasingly neither diverse and meritocratic nor legal and measured\u2014the traditional requisites that promote rapid and full integration. Over one in four Californians was not born in the U.S.\u2014a statistic that becomes worrisome when coupled with the state\u2019s policy of sanctuary cities and new educational curricula that emphasize grievance and separatism rather than assimilation and unity. When rioting youths in San Diego, Fresno, and San Jose burn or deface American flags, as they have been doing in recent weeks, and wave Mexican flags instead, then we are witnessing a tragic farce, the consequences of decades of ethnic-chauvinism, multiculturalism, and cluelessness of the norms and realities outside of America.<\/p>\n

American immigration policy is not so much \u201cbroken\u201d as increasingly neo-Confederate and illogical. Three-hundred state and municipal jurisdictions have declared themselves, in good 1850s fashion, immune from federal law as sanctuary cities, while over 1 million illegal aliens have at some point been arrested, and make up nearly 30 percent of the federal inmate population. In Orwellian terms, illegal immigration largely from Latin America and Mexico, is called \u201cdiversity,\u201d nullification of federal laws is known as \u201csanctuary cities,\u201d and foreign nationals residing illegally are referred to as \u201cundocumented migrants.\u201d Ultimately the central paradox of immigration is the strange nexus of anger and grievance against the United States by immigration advocates\u2014and the overriding desire nonetheless to enter and reside in such a purportedly unattractive place.<\/p>\n

The universities in some sense are the embryos of social unrest. The 1960s free speech and free love movements, with their rampant drug use, advocacy of unchecked and raucous expression, and resistance to authority have strangely given way to today\u2019s speech codes, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings. Yesterday\u2019s \u201canything goes\u201d hippie student is today\u2019s Victorian prude who cannot quite square the circle of relaxed sexuality and drugs with the demands that the university act in loco parentis for perpetual adolescents.<\/p>\n

This election year so far has emblemized the perfect storm of unrest and confusion\u2014and an even more worrisome response to it. In the past, when 51 percent of societies no longer believed in or wished to defend their collective values and traditions, there were no longer reasons for them to continue. And so they did not\u2014a warning we should heed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas   Before the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), where Philip II of Macedon prevailed over a common Greek alliance, the city-states had been weakened by years of social and economic turmoil. To read the classical speeches in the Athenian assembly is to learn of the democracy\u2019s constant struggles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,1091,1090,375,203,28,111,846,99,46,100],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2qV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7146,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/loud-weak-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":9357,"position":0},"title":"Loud + Weak = War","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 25, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"China and Russia are no more impressed with empty bluster today than Japan was in 1941. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The Roosevelt administration once talked loudly of pivoting to Asia to thwart a rising Japan. As a token of its seriousness, in May 1940 it moved the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "China"","block_context":{"text":"China","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/china\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/477px-Franklin_Roosevelt_signing_declaration_of_war_against_Japan-238x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10684,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-deadly-cost-of-mutual-misunderstanding\/","url_meta":{"origin":9357,"position":1},"title":"The Deadly Cost of Mutual Misunderstanding","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 Hitler went to war without an accurate conception of the Allies\u2019 strength. The Allies did the same without an accurate conception of Hitler\u2019s ambition. Unprecedented bloodshed ensued. Editor\u2019s Note: The following is the third in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "War"","block_context":{"text":"War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10457,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-does-the-left-suddenly-hate-russia\/","url_meta":{"origin":9357,"position":2},"title":"Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review After 70 years of accommodating and appeasing Russia, Democrats suddenly foment a red scare. Russian Realism? No one doubts that Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia is no ally of the U.S. But rivalry is quite a different notion than returning to the Cold War, when enemies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":820,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-nato-still-matters\/","url_meta":{"origin":9357,"position":3},"title":"Why NATO Still Matters","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Germany\u2019s financial dominance may be worrisome, but is it a threat to European peace? The first Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the sober and judicious British Lord Ismay, famously remarked that the purpose of the controversial new postwar alliance would be \u201cto\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/geopolitics\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1679,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/tomorrows-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":9357,"position":4},"title":"Tomorrow’s Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Massively destructive engagements may again be on the horizon. by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal\u00a0(Winter 2010) Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western way of war?\u201d Two decades ago, I concluded\u00a0The Western Way of War\u00a0with that question. 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The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration\u2019s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "ISIS"","block_context":{"text":"ISIS","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/isis\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9358,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357\/revisions\/9358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}