Civilizational Killers. Part One. Perversion of the Law Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-one-perversion-of-the-law/
No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction.
When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is a result of internal choices, and usually a matter of failing to adhere to time-honored customs and traditions, while evolving to meet new threats.
In the case of the autonomous Greek polis, the culprit was the inability of some 1,500 city-states to create a workable federal system for the common defense of Hellas—when threatened by Philip and Alexander. The Roman Empire was not able to maintain a common culture among its 70 million varied residents, nor to increase productivity to pay for always greater entitlements, or to systematize imperial succession, or inculcate Romanity among an increasingly diverse population.
For the Byzantines, it is hard to criticize an empire that sustained 1,100 years of continuous civilization. But in the fifteenth century, it failed to evolve into a partnership with a dynamic Western Christendom, especially after the damage suffered during the Fourth Crusade, to create a common front against Ottoman Islamism. Nor was a shrinking Constantinople able to attract Europeans into the empire, much less to convert Anatolians into Orthodox Christians.
For Europe in the 1930s, the shock of World War I had institutionalized modernism and a revolt against 19th-century values, which were blamed for the 17 million dead between 1914–18 (rather than Prussian militarism and aggression). Poems no longer were to rhyme or have a particular vocabulary or meter. Paintings no longer captured or represented what the eye saw. Novels had no heroes, no elevated characters. Architecture became “functional”: if a gable or edifice served no pragmatic purpose, then junk it, as houses and offices turned boxlike.
Within that matrix, how can ancient ideas like patriotism and deterrence survive the trenches?
America was based on blind justice, and trust in equality under the law, the bedrock of our civilization. Without equal application and enforcement of statutes there can be no civilization. Both are disappearing from America—and for cheap political gain.
If Donald Trump were not once president or running again to be president, New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg would not be indicting him on a trumped-up charge—one past the statute of limitations, and presupposing a federal campaign offense outside his own local purview. No one disputes that reality.
Does anyone believe that Joe Biden’s illegal transference of classified documents after his vice presidency into several unsecured locations—offenses hidden for years—will earn the same federal scrutiny as the raid on and special counsel investigation of Mar-a-Lago?
Does anyone believe that the BLM and Antifa offenders during 120 days of looting, arson, murder, and riot in summer 2020 will ever warrant punishment similar to the hundreds arrested, indicted, and imprisoned during the January 6th riot? After all, we live in a world where theft and looting are called symptoms of poverty not of criminal intent.
Why are those who attack pro-life anti-abortion centers mostly exempt from punishment while others who protest at pro-choice clinics are jailed and face stiff charges?
Why cannot an American citizen reenter a U.S. airport without a passport, but a foreign national can cross the southern border illegally, without any identification, and with impunity?
Answer? The Left believes in a new strategy of obtaining through weaponized prosecutors what it cannot achieve through legislation or even the courts. In the process it is destroying confidence in American justice.
How can you have a system of voluntary tax reporting when the Bidens were enriched with unreported dollars from foreign sources? Why jail Donald Trump’s accountant for taking improper deductions, when Hunter Biden’s laptop is a veritable confessional of illegal Biden income and tax avoidance?
If one percent is paying 50 percent of income tax revenues, and being frequently audited in the process, how viable is such a system that exempts the hyper-rich and the subsidized lower middle classes?
If the United States does not treat all taxpayers similarly, or if it continues to release violent criminals on the day they commit their violent crimes, or if exempts Antifa and BLM from the sort of protests that earned over 1,000 souls on January 6 a long confinement and prison sentence, then how can any American have confidence in the law?
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