BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON | P J MEDIA
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.
Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.
In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President
Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.
A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing
nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who
should be removed from power.
After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced
catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China,
Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this
rare window of global military opportunity.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy,
energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a
professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice
system — are dissolving.
Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a
40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy
of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of
hyperinflation.
There is no southern border.
Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the
United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will
have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys
deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally
10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave
Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles
County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are
spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city
events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets
of millions of Americans. An American president — in a first — casually
warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.
Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An
illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v.
Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has
created a national hysteria.
Related: There’s Been Another Supreme Court Leak … No One Will Be Happy About This One
Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up
at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering
their votes.
There is no free speech any more on campuses.
Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention,
grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the
right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic
category.
When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last
redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional
schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible
declining standards of living.
What happened?
Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not
fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in
the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and
to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.
Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political
advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor
non-participation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows — at a
time of pent-up global demand.
The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized,
impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal
immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.
Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories — “modern monetary theory,”
critical legal theory, critical race theory — now dominate policymaking
in the Biden Administration.
The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism,
common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically
correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful,
and popular.
Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from
18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary
disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?
The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the
radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them
through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate
cabinet nonperformance.
Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.
So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing,
cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming
the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely
violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.
Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court
decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the fall issue
more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending
the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states,
and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more
dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the
people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove
most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.
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