Most of us can sense that things aren’t quite right in America these days. Talk to most anyone and they will tell you that things have not be right for sometime now. However, they won’t be able to tell you precisely why. If pressed a dozen seemingly unrelated things will come to mind. They will to tell you about the dysfunctional Congress, a Court out of control, a rouge unlawful President, the selling of fetuses for profit, re-defining marriage, a rampaging Donald Trump, a 20 trillion dollars debt. On and on they will go. Despite the mile-long laundry list of things clearly gone wrong, we are left with confusion and a sense of anxiety at our core. We are frustrated because there seems to be no cause and effect that we can apprehend.
There seems to be no correcting mechanism to set our multitude of political and social problems right because no one can credibly explain what is driving them. We feel powerless, lost, and angry as our seemingly crazy society runs amok around us. We try desperately to make sense of the goings on. Unnerved and seeking reassurance, we latch on to the latest fad explanation or some politician who claims to know what’s wrong and how to fix it. But we soon realize that these do not hold together long. We soon return to our anxieties and deep sense that things are not right and that we are in danger. Our best defense against the onslaught seems to be to occupy ourselves with the tasks of everyday life and relegate the “things gone wrong” problem to the back of our minds.
I have watched the goings in America and the world for 50 years (I’m 68) and have come to understand that he United States is in a stage of history where the present is incomprehensible and the future unseeable and unknowable. We seem to have jettisoned our old system of governance, our original culture and our traditions without replacing them. We have thus invited a sort psychological and spiritual anarchy.
Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a movement coalescing around the objective of radically altering the form of government in the United States. There is no conspiracy in the traditional sense but rather a process of self-selecting coalescence around the goal of ending constitutional rule and terminating American society as it was. In the vast population of citizen-watchers of the political scene, there are those (in very large numbers) who seek profit, career success, fame, power, excitement, personal attention or retribution by bringing down the American constitutional republic. I think they have, at last, succeeded.
The history, virtue, necessity, and strength of American constitutionalism is but a faint and dim abstraction to most Americans. Societies tend to have poor institutional memories over the long run. There is a conspiracy of sorts involved. It is this: Various and sundry political players domestically and from around the world stand at the ready to exploit opportunities to empower, encourage, and increase the numbers of those joining the movement to take down constitutional America and replace it with something they can’t even articulate. Events such as Ferguson and Black Lives Matter are examples.
The United States is in the process of shedding all its traditional norms and replacing them with this vague and radical future. We are now in the stage of chaos and confusion in which neither the old traditions nor the new future is in place. We are in a political and cultural limbo where no clear set of guiding principles is available to us. This leaves vast numbers of hearts and minds there for the taking.
Original America is being killed off and the replacement America has yet to come into being. This is a historical period where no overarching social and cultural structure exists. Instead God is dead and all things are permissible. A thousand ideas, a million noisy people, interest groups as far as the eye can see, and shadowy figures in all corners of power compete in a mad free-for-all to be the arbiters, and the rule makers of the Brave New Anti-America. The only question is who and what will win.
Brent Perkins
September 15, 2015
