Commentary: American Society Has Been Turned Upside-Down and Our Rendezvous with the Unthinkable Draws Near

In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.

The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.

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Commentary: Our Republic Endures Only When Political Enemies Can Retire in Peace

Sometime during the latter part of the 18th century politics took an unprecedented turn in the English-speaking world: it ceased to be dangerous. Although little appreciated by scholars for its historical consequence, perhaps because it consisted of non-consequences, things that didn’t happen, it was essential to the development of modern democracy. Up to that point, in just about every time and place, politicians who lost high office, or failed in grasping at it, faced the possibility of imprisonment, confiscation, exile or death. Now in Britain and America, then increasingly elsewhere in Europe, and eventually in places even further afield, loss of office, while not pleasant, was no longer lethal.

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Commentary: The Environmentalist Assault on Civilization

No reasonable person would deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable: cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, and more efficient use of resources. The list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.

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Commentary: The Slow-Motion Suicide of the West

I have been thinking a good deal recently about Arnold Toynbee’s much-quoted observation that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” As an historical proposition, I’d say that it was like the story of the curate’s breakfast egg. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the curate replied. “Parts of it are excellent!”

And yet we all see the pertinence of Toynbee’s point. While there are, as a matter of historical fact, plenty of civilizations that succumb to invasion, occupation, and subjugation, there are also many that wither from within from a failure of self-confidence, of (for the Bergsonians out there) élan vital, of what your philosophy graduate student likes to call thumos: spirit, gumption, “heart,” manliness.

The fact that no one can even speak of “manliness” today without looking over his shoulder these days is an index that thumos is on the endangered species list (along, as it happens, with sperm counts in the Western world). Why this should be is a fraught question—something whose answer is “overdetermined” as our Freudian friends like to say.

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Commentary: The Destruction of Marriage and Family is the Destruction of Civilization

Marriage and families are the cornerstone of not only civilization but of nature itself, without which humans would have never survived as wandering nomads and early farmers, let alone building cities, an economy and governments to represent the people in state-to-state relations.

Without families as a basic building block, children are not nurtured, educated and empowered to raise and sustain families themselves, and the human race could not continue, always being but one generation away from extinction.

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