https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/lessons_for_the_future_republic.html
Victor Davis Hanson and Dennis Prager are keen observers of American society. Like honored physicians who examine the body politic for disease, they expertly diagnose what ails our country. What they say and write matters. It is significant, then, when both reach the conclusion that the United States is disintegrating.
In an essay entitled “American Paralysis and Decline,” Hanson begins by quoting Roman historian Livy: “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” He then walks us through America’s open border crisis, unsustainable debt, epidemic of crime, and weaponization of the criminal justice system. In every instance, he argues, Americans know that the disease is killing us, yet we lack the courage to choose the proper remedy. Instead, our tormentors bully us into submission with meaningless taunts that we are politically incorrect, racist, nativist, uncaring, cruel, or bad Christians. As the Roman Republic collapsed in Livy’s time, Hanson worries that the American Republic will fall during his. When societies “are so paralyzed by their fear that the road to salvation becomes too painful to even contemplate,” he concludes, “they implode gradually, then suddenly.”
Within days of Hanson’s essay, Prager published an essay entitled “The Left-Right Divide Is Not Bridgeable.” Whereas Hanson’s essay diagnoses America as suffering from a state of “paralysis” in which we are unable to confront what is destroying us, Prager recognizes that even if we were able to snap into action, we are entirely too divided to heal ourselves. “Millions of Americans,” he begins, “harbor a wish that something or someone can bridge” our ideological divisions. That wish is “understandable” but a total “fantasy.” He then takes us through a compendium of symptoms that spell doom for the Union. Americans sharply disagree about such fundamental issues as biological sex, colorblind meritocracy, Hamas terrorism, childhood sexualization, law enforcement, free speech, respect for opposing points of view, and the nature of democracy. “Today’s left-right divide is at least as great as the North-South divide before and during the Civil War,” Prager laments. “The only thing that remains the same is that it was the Democratic Party that opposed freedom then, and it is the Democratic Party that opposes freedom today.”
Note the common warning from both Hanson’s and Prager’s respective diagnoses: American society is showing identical symptoms to societies that disintegrated into civil war. Both are plainly saying that, although we have detected the cancer destroying us, we have failed to treat it in time. The options still available to us are grotesque: amputation, debilitation, or even death. It is no longer clear that the patient can be saved or, if it is saved, whether it will resemble anything like its former self. Will the American Republic, like the Roman Republic, become a dictatorship and a slowly dying empire? Many would say we are already far along that path. Will Americans descend into such bloodshed as to destroy the Union for good? Many might agree that the U.S. government’s aiding and abetting of the criminal invasion at our borders has already precipitated so many drug-related or violent deaths as to constitute civil war.
