When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part One Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/
Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.
So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.
It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.
So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?
First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon.
No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok.
How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming?
All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode?
In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot.
When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parents’ basements?
What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty?
Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country?
Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities?
Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless?
And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity?
Why does the government shut down its sources of cheap energy, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace?
How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists?
How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles?
So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”?
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