https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/faded-flag-bruce-thornton/
When I put out my flag for Memorial Day, I noticed how faded it was. At a time when we honor those who died defending our country and its freedom, this year my faded flag seems a portent of the dangers that lie ahead for our exceptional nation.
Nations decline the way one of Hemingway’s characters went broke: slowly, then all at once. In just four months, the Biden administration’s policy proposals, executive orders, and “woke” rhetoric suggest that we will continue to draw ever closer to that moment of “all at once.”
Many signs of decline have been evident for decades, punctuated by brief moments of revival. The Sixties and Seventies were a low point in our national morale, a time when the “best lacked all conviction, and the worst were filled with passionate intensity.” The protests over the war in Vietnam, the riots and terrorist bombings, the specious Watergate scandal, the oil crisis, economic stagflation, and the general assault on traditional virtue, faith, and morality––the Nietzschean “revaluation of all values”–– culminated in the presidency of Jimmy Carter with its rhetoric of doubt and retreat evident in his inaugural address. There he mourned the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled us not “to dwell on remembered glory,” asserted our country’s “recognized limits,” and preached that it “could only do its best.” He reprised these defeatist sentiments later in the “crisis of confidence” speech.
But Carter’s one term of failures––particularly his feeble and appeasing response to the Iranian Revolution, the violent occupation of our embassy in Tehran, and the taking hostage of its staff–– was followed by Ronald Reagan and his “morning in America” confidence and optimism. Reagan revitalized the economy, and his actions signaled to the world and our Soviet rival that the “crisis of confidence” was over, and America had recovered its nerve. He brought moral clarity to the Cold War by rejecting détente and coexistence, and stated instead, “We win, they lose.” A few years after he left office, the Soviet Union was relegated to the “dustbin of history” the Soviets had predicted for the democratic West.
In the Roaring Nineties that followed, however, the anti-American left was still tramping on its “long march through the institutions.” Many of today’s toxic ideas like “cancel culture” and “systemic racism” were incubated during those years in the universities, whence they infected public schools, entertainment, and the Democrat Party. More immediately dangerous, the extravagant optimism of the “end of history,” the triumph of liberal democracy over Soviet communism, reinforced the idea of a “New World Order,” the transnational, multilateral “rules-based international order” that presumably would transcend the parochial, and dangerous, interests and passions of diverse sovereign nation-states.