Have We Become Amerika? We Are A Country in Trouble
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/07/are-we-amerika-now/
A 1987 television miniseries that visualized the condition of the U.S. a decade after the country had surrendered to the Soviet Union was probably not far off the mark. Life in “Amerika” was nothing like life in America before the Soviet takeover. Though the USSR no longer exists, life in this country in 2022 feels like Amerika due to transformational changes brought by virulent inside influences, just as Nikita Khrushchev said would happen.
The U.S. is not a single-party state. There are pockets of resistance to the progressive agenda, most notably in Texas and Florida. But the effort to turn this nation toward a hard-left future has been accelerated by the lockdowns, mandates, and the do-as-we-say diktats of the Great Coronavirus Panic, and the Democrats’ control of the lawmaking and executive branches, as well as the administrative state.
Unlike the Americans in “Amerika,” we didn’t surrender to the Soviets. We have simply handed power to the left. The hard (and unrelenting) left controls most of the media, sets the tone for popular culture, and has hegemonized most of our institutions and many of our businesses.
Consequently, freedoms have been overrun, dissent forbidden, free speech shredded, and crime allowed to thrive. Our Second Amendment rights are in grave jeopardy. The price of energy is intentionally being increased. Failure to conform to leftist demands risks ostracization. The rule of law is being ignored. Our justice system has been corrupted by politics. Both policymakers and activists want to increase the middle and lower classes’ dependency on government. Wealth is not to be created but redistributed by elected officials and their functionaries in the bureaucracy. Inflation caused by Democratic policies has wrecked the value of the dollar. Abundance has been replaced by shortages, the worst of which are yet to come.
Amerika in 2022.
Seven years ago, while Barack Obama’s “transformational” efforts were winding down, and then to be passed over to Hillary Clinton for further fulfillment, constitutional law professor John O. McGinnis noted in City Journal that “progressivism’s vision of the role of the state conflicts with the system of government envisioned by America’s Founders.” The men who dreamed of a nation based on liberty proposed a unique system in which citizens would be “free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association,” while government power at both the federal and state levels was “to be tightly constrained.”
“From its inception, progressivism has posed a threat to constitutional government. It has sought to replace limited and decentralized governance with dynamic, centralized authority in order to force some arrangement of equality on the nation,” says McGinnis.
Leftists are in the minority in the U.S. Yet they punch far above their weight politically and culturally. They get their way through bullying, crying, turning protests into violent engagements, partnering with a like-minded media, throwing tantrums, and lying in ways that a decade or two ago were unfathomable, even in a profession (politics) that mass produces falsehoods.
And though they don’t outnumber non-progressives, that is independent thinkers and those who hold our founding values as sacred, humane principles, they are picking up converts. Soon every Democrat, and many independents, will have to identify as progressives, because the Bolshevik ideology that fuels the left leaves no room for opposition.
We didn’t aim to be negative. But we can’t avoid the facts, especially when the country is headed so hard and so fast in the wrong direction. Reality is an effective teacher, especially when it’s unpleasant.
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