10 radical new rules that are changing America

Note from Ed.: We rarely repost entire columns from other sources, but this one, by Victor Davis Hanson, is so cogent, so urgent, that it deserves to be read in full. This appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 3/4/21. 

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. 

As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law. 

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim's fault as the perpetrator's. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer. 

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America's founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws. 

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the "founders" than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. "Noble lies" by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect "Neanderthals" from themselves. 

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating and air conditioning. 

6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill and create sufficient public shelter areas. 

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence. Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project requires any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are the new gospels. 

 Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized. The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Case for Trump. You can contact him by email at authorvdh@gmail.com. Tell him Walt sent ya!

USA "the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world"

One of Walt's favourite socio-political writers, Mark Steyn, is thinking seriously of moving back to Canada. He left the Great Not-so-white North in a huff, after having to defend himself before Canada's kangaroo court [Human Rights Commission, surely! Ed.] against charges of racism related to his warnings that the West risks being overrun by militant by Muslims.

His most recent books -- best-sellers highly recommended by Walt -- are America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. Reading between the lines of an interview with the Notional Post last week, Walt senses that Mr. Steyn has given up sounding the alarm and calling for a return to small government and economic discipline. In his opinion, changing the direction of the Obama maladministration will be very difficult. "America is the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world," he told Jan Gerson. Here's more from the interview; the emphasis is Walt's.

Q: Let’s have that discussion about how terrible things are about to get: Brokiest broke of all the brokiest countries in the world.

A: On its present trajectory, America is looking at $20-trillion debt by the time this president leaves office, just the federal debt. That will mean the 44th president has run up more debt than the previous 43 presidents combined. It was $10-trillion when he took office. No one has ever spent that much in the history of the planet. And he has nothing to show for it.

The question then becomes, is serious political course correction possible in the United States? And I think the answer to that is very difficult. The question then is whether the rest of the developed world sits back and watches America drag everybody else over the cliff, or whether they start making plans, as Australia and certain other countries are doing, for the post-American world.

The post-Second World War American order is over. [The West] didn’t ask for [this]. The Americans did this to us; we didn’t do it to them. But, you know, it’s a new world out there and we have to look for other partners.

Q: When do we know that we’ve reached the tipping point of the end of the American age?

A: Goldman Sachs thinks that China will become the world’s biggest economic power sometime around 2016. In other words, and if that year is right, let’s just suppose for the sake of the argument it is, it means Barack Obama will end his term in a position no president has been in since Grover Cleveland. We’re in a post-American world. And at that point the question is whether it’s a gentle decline, like for the European empires after the Second World War, or whether it’s, you know, Mad Max on Interstate 95.