The historical path that's led to America's fall helps put things in perspective. All that's been running through my head make the sad but obvious self-destructive path seem inevitable. My challenge is to try boiling it all down into a short blog post.
Mankind's earliest society was based on a tribalism. Tribes were extended families who lived together in their villages and worked together for mutual protection and made their living off the land, either by hunting and gathering or learning some basic agricultural and animal husbandry skills. The leader of each tribe was the father or grandfather of the family.
Tribes would raid each other to steal food or women, or take the land away from another tribe if they thought it was better than the land they already controlled. This grew into feudalism, where tribes began to coalesce into slightly larger regional kingdoms led by the strongest alpha male best able to keep enough people organized and controlled to protect their corner of the world from outside marauders.
But outside marauders were a fact of life, coming from other places in search of loot. Gradually there were newer things they came to steal, like tools and precious metals. So the petty Lords that were now calling themselves Kings got the idea of fending off the marauders by bribing them with those tools and gold and silver in return for leaving their little fiefdom in peace. The Lords came up with the idea of taxation and began taking a small percentage of each person's output each year to support the defense of the kingdom.
Some kings began to realize that they could become very rich and powerful by developing their tribes into accomplished warriors. The Persians conquered most of the known world, but the Greeks developed their own warrior class and the Persian Empire was supplanted by the Greek empire. The Greeks were so successful that they were able to explore cultural and scientific pursuits, once their society moved beyond the daily struggle to merely feed themselves and fend off invaders.
The Romans borrowed heavily from Greek cultural ideas and supplanted the Greeks as rulers of the known world. The Romans expanded on the Greek idea of democratic governance and formed a republic. Fighting to keep the republic alive, the Roman Senate executed the highly successful military leader Julius Caesar, the first Roman Emporer. But even that assassination turned out to be futile, as strongman warlords continued to rise and anoint themselves the imperial ruler of the Rome and thus the world.
Eventually the Romans became comfortable and decadent, just as the Greeks before them and perhaps the Persians before them. Their empire crumbled, and the western world reverted to feudalism.
Then Christianity took hold in the western world. Strong Lords were able to leverage a biblical idea based on King David, now called the Divine Right of Kings, to unite the fiefdoms under a single High King. The King found it easier to control larger and larger coalitians with a Bishop at his side, proclaiming him God's anointed ruler. Then the Europeans found America, the rich New World ripe for the picking. People flocked to the New World to escape tyrannical kings and seek their fortunes. Then English King George went too far, demanding ever-increasing taxes on the colonists. George needed the funds to support his ongoing war with France and restock his diminishing coffers as his own subjects productivity declined dramatically while the Americans were getting rich from the sweat of their brows. The onerous taxes George was imposing make him look like a piker when compared with modern tax rates.
America fought to be independent, and the fledgeling country decided to adopt a governing system modeled after the Greeks and Romans but leavened with Christian principles. There were plenty of struggles through the years with a terrible civil war fought over whether America was a confederation of independent states, or a unified country ruled from a powerful central government. The powerful central government won. But the country's success continued to build through the industrial age, then the Germans ignited two World Wars. After the devastation of the world wrought by the second War, a victorious America was left relatively unscathed and ascended to claim their perch as the most powerful and therefore wealthiest nation on earth.
The children of the war veterans who won this unprecedented power and prosperity for America rebelled against their parents, not as warriors but as philosophers of a sort. They rejected their parents' faith and values, despite enjoying the wealth and priviledge those values provided them. Now they're in charge of the American government. They weaken America's warriors because they've decided those warriors are bullies, not protectors and freedom fighters. They demand unprecedented taxation rates, demanding more than half of the output from the productive so they can give more to the unproductive (while lining their own pockets). In the meantime, marauders have begun their invasions. We are experiencing both economic and warrior marauders. Economic marauders sneak into the country to get in line for the post-war generation's generous wealth redistribution programs, while warrior marauders seek to destroy the country from within and out through terror, murder and destruction.
History shows that the marauders always win, eventually. The two factions vying for that role are Communists and Islamists, who for the moment are allies in the war against America. My guess is between the two, the Islamists will win because they're more committed to their cause and believe Allah is on their side. Communists are atheists, so they're not going to get revved up to win a victory for God. Their definition of victory looks more like a world where everybody's as poor and miserable as they are, they can kill all the babies they deem unworthy, and can grant homosexuals an extra share of the government dole with a false narrative about marriage rights.
America's already lost its perch atop the list of world economic powers. And enemy states no longer fear America's military, not because the military is no longer strong but because the Commander-in-Chief of that military is weak.
The only question remaining is how much longer does America have before it lands in history's dustbin alongside the Persians, Greeks, and Romans? 20, 50 years? Perhaps as few as 10 years, I think. Sorry about that, kids. It's all the fault of my generation. Your generation can save America if you so choose, but all indications are you're oblivious.
It all tempts me to join the Amish. Living on the farm with a lifestyle out of the 19th century, I can just grow crops and tend the livestock all day and remove myself from the cares and worrys of modern America. At least I won't have any time to worry about the marauders taking my farm away until they arrive. One day it will either be a communist government representative officially confiscating my farm on behalf of the People's Revolution, or a squad of Islamist warriors lining me up alongside my family in the barnyard and executing us for being unrepentant infidels.
Good luck, kids.
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