Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

By Victor Davis Hanson  April 18, 2023 

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises.  Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode.

Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more? 

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

Urban schools are not places of instruction anymore. That fact is accepted by teachers’ unions, whose operative principle seems to be that the more hopeless the idea of educating urban youth is understood to be, the less burdensome the workload, and the greater their hazardous duty pay.

Urban chain stores are closing down on the principle that if police cannot or will not stop consumer violence and theft, then consumers there should not have any store to buy anything, anyway. If there is no store, how can it be looted or shop-lifted?

The only mystery remaining is how long these Democrat-controlled, racially charged, and corrupt municipalities can sustain their budgets and pension commitments with increasingly declining revenue. One can tax the well off, and perhaps even gouge them as California does. But one cannot insult and ridicule them in the process. Being highly taxed is one thing, being highly taxed while hated is quite another.................To Read More....