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Australia depends upon the United States for our defence in the event of a confrontation with China. The present state of the American nation is therefore an issue of vital importance not only for us but also for the world. What follows is a discussion of America’s present condition and the forces at work in threatening its greatness.
America is a very rich and powerful nation of about 330 million people. With the exception of about 40 million poor, the rest live well. Over the last 50 years Washington has directed $22 trillion to help the poor. It is no surprise that life in America attracts the world’s both the desperately poor and the ambitious.
Before the arrival of the Biden presidency the southern entry of foreigners seeking to live in the United States was firmly controlled. On taking the presidency, Biden immediately opened entry for all and sundry without any serious control of newcomers. The outcome to date has been a huge and still uncontrolled entry of a million adults and children from about 150 countries. In July 2021, for example, 212,000 people came through the southern border, a number that continues to grow with every passing hour.
Ninety per cent of all newcomers have not been formally registered. This continuing government-inspired flow of individuals is directed to the states, which are obliged to receive them. Tens of thousands have been placed in Florida for example, and some observers have suggested that the newcomers have been deliberately enticed so as to become reliable voters for the Democrats. Ironically, the northern border with Canada border is firmly policed and monitored.
Such events are indicative of a wider advent of change that has been steadily transforming America over the last 20 years or so. Public order and effective policing is fundamental to the maintenance of a well-founded society; but, in accord with Marxist theory, several cities of the American states have been overtaken by chaos, death and destruction and the steady loss of effective policing. This loss is accompanied by pervasive social theorising destructive of effective schooling, along with the elevation of ‘transgendering’ and the disappearance of ‘history’.
A sound democracy requires an honest electoral system. This issue arose in the recent presidential election when Mr. Trump claimed fraudulence of the process. That claim was dismissed by America’s mainstream media and suppressed by Big Tech’s control of social media, but the belief that Joe Biden entered the White House by means of electoral fraud remains widespread, adding a diminished faith in the ballot box to the perception of serious decline in public order, schooling and civil confidence.
An American oligarchy
Current events in America are notably unsettling; but behind these movements are deeper trends that are changing the economy (the national debt is $28 trillion-and-rising), and the distribution of wealth has changed markedly. There have been important changes through the advent of Big Tech. The outcome has been a fundamental shift in the location of power. Civil power in the hands of the ultra-rich and the capacities at hand in a colony of powerful organisations have already transformed life in America and the direction of its future.
US corporations social media giants enjoy near-unencumbered powers to curb free speech. They can block and stop whoever and whatever they choose, famously banning President Trump from Facebook and Twitter while those platforms even now allow the Taliban’s tweeters full access. Their combined power is immense and its scope is worldwide.
In a pamphlet published by America’s Hillsdale College in January 2021, Allum Bokhari , senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, explored the powers of the companies mentioned above. After an extended investigation he concludes:
If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it, because it would place us forever under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.
If domination by the few is the curse of oligarchy, is this to be the fate of America? If so, what symptoms should we expect? What has been said immediately above is certainly a powerful warning. What else? Probably new centres of authority, and new centres of civil unrest. In the last 20 years or so America has seen huge growth in wealth and important changes in the character of its beneficiaries. This has been accompanied by changes in the middle class, the working class, and altered economic and demographic profiles of states. These events have attracted the notice of American sociologists and journalists.
In the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic, American journalist David Brooks writes
The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation and endless political dysfunction
He follows this with an extensive inquiry into what he calls the “bobos”, an elite new class:
Over the last two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis.
The bobos or X people, or the creative class — or whatever you want to call them — have coalesced into an insular intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in the class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.
Brooks goes on to enlarge the changes referred to above with the views of Raj Chetty, an economist writing on the ‘American Dream’ in August, 2019 of The Atlantic. He quotes the third part of the writings:
Third, we’ve come to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while writing down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions.
As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave. Around 1990, nearly a third of Labour members of the British Parliament were from working-class backgrounds from 2010 to 2015, the proportion wasn’t even one in ten. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won the most educated counties in America by an average of 26 points – while losing the 50 least-educated counties by an average of 31 points.
Official power in the US is currently in the hands of the Democrats and its character and purposes are being revealed. President Biden’s ramshackle retreat from Afghanistan is one symptom. Then there is official indifference to ease the lot of those adversely affected by the catastrophe of those flooding through the southern border and the concerns of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” at home. The objectives at the moment, it seems, are to rule, to enjoy the protection of the press, to placate the nation’s enemies, and to relish the exclusive powers of oligarchy.
The America we cherish, it is hoped, will rediscover a resurgence of greatness and its immense capacities for achieving the good and the peaceful. But it is possible that external developments will overwhelm peace – and raise vital issues for Australia.
Barry Maley is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies
In Afghanistan, American wokeness, signaled recently by flying the Rainbow Flag over the embassy in Kabul, was rightly interpreted by the locals as a sure sign of weakness. It will be same everywhere. China is evidently covertly promoting Leftism inside the U.S. in order to weaken the defender of the Free World.
Australia today is practically defenceless, partly because the country is being run by a public service and major corporations that loathe our heritage, despise our traditional values, and regard themselves as part of an international elite that has a right to rule – and partly because without America backing us we are finished. It used to matter what military hardware we had because that was a component of our defensive system. Today all that matters is that our military is nice to gays and transgenders. We order submarines for the sake of appearances, but everyone knows that whether they will actually work is immaterial.
“This issue arose in the recent presidential election when Mr. Trump claimed fraudulence of the process. That claim was dismissed by America’s mainstream media and suppressed by Big Tech’s control of social media, but the belief that Joe Biden entered the White House by means of electoral fraud remains widespread,”
This completely overlooks the obvious: that the election was STOLEN., using the same nefarious means that the DNC used in the 2016 election, but failed due to DJT’s enormous popularity.
Any one with at least a half an eye and an anus should be able to understand this. Biden garnered more votes that Obama did in 2008? SUIRE he did. And the White House is painted black, like today’s terrorist’s pickup truck. No other conclusion is possible following Mike Lindell’s recent expose, including the involvement of the CCP. Let’s get real here. the scamdemic was an integral part of the charade, This is obvious to folks the world over, resulting in the USA being regarded one of the most corrupt shit shows on the planet.
The ultimate victory of the Taliban gives us two lessons.
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The first is that a dedicated force of fighters in their homeland with adequate small arms can defeat a mighty foreign force if they keep at it.
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The second lesson is that a weak government without the backing of its citizens will cave in to aggression in order to avoid confrontation.
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As to the first, we do not have the small arms let alone the makings of a dedicated force skilled in their use. Instead, we have a dangerous fraud called gun control which saps police crime fighting resources. https://gunfactsaustralia.weebly.com/
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As to the second, without the backing of the United States, we can expect our nanny state government to follow the lead of the Afghanistan government. Indeed, we could even expect our government to hand over the Australian firearm registration details to our new rulers.
Nuclear Australia. Wake up.
The restriction in freedom of thought in both speech and the written word. I would have thought to be in breach of the American constitution ,as it diminishes the intent of the constitution to uphold liberties values, therefore leading to the destruction of brand Americana. This can hardly be in the national interest ,in regard at least to the universal pursuit of happiness.
Marxists are dedicated and resolved a hundred years ago to subvert Western societies. They have controlled the educational institutions for many years now, and successive conservative governments worldwide have offered no more than token resistance. For example, in 1995 a history syllabus for fifteen-year-olds produced under official auspices by a commission of academic historians, was censured by the US Senate by a 99:1 vote for being anti-American. Censured, nothing more. Today teachers’ unions support and push poisonous Critical Race Theory (which will turn Americans into Tutsis and Hutus hating each other) and they even have a fighting fund to persecute any parent who dares to stop this indoctrination of their children (Teachers Union v Nicole Solas). Conservatives will continue to lose unless they get serious in this fight. Already in the USA, it seems that big business has thrown their lot in with the “progressives” (they fund Black Lives Matter and also push CRT) no doubt seeing where the wind has blown.
It seems that the CIA has been controlling the American cable news networks since before the Trump presidency; they all sing off the same sheet.
We will know when socialism is firmly entrenched in America; the government will start shooting not only the opposition, but people at random. It is not possible to maintain a socialist state without creating fear by killing people. Read or listen to Prof. Yuri Maltsev. I am surprised that YouTube hasn’t taken him down.
A very nice summary of the cultural and social fault lines in the modern west, Barry.
However, this ground has been covered extensively by right-of-center and a few old ‘classic liberals (the older English sense of the term not the modern American) such as Brooks, Goodhart, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, Peterson, Chris Caldwell, Heather McDonald et al. and many others for some years now.
Perhaps the more pertinent question to ask is how to reverse (to take two of the major problems you outline above) the cultural dominance of big tech and the formation of a new hereditary oligarchic elite? After all, both of these situations arose in a climate of free-choice and, at least to some extent, free markets? Or is it that market of commerce and ideas hasn’t actually been that free since the 1960’s, as some of the comments in this section seem to suggest implicitly? In other word’s how do we stop the absolute cultural domination of the left in modern liberal societies if those same societies gave rise to this dominance?
Perhaps the even more pressing question is how do we make a great many leftists or left-incline of the cultural elite take seriously the problems you outline above? After all, if we want to defeat the true radicals who want to destroy the western inheritance totally, we need to get a significant proportion of the intellectuals/cultural elite like Brooks onto the idea that the common solution and common values he shares with the working class and the ‘Trumpists’ are better than towing the increasing unhinged radical left line. The problem is, when I see Brooks and may like him on PBS or his columns in the NYTs, he seems to think that Trump was worse or at least as bad as the alternative? In other words, even a substantial portion of the self-proclaimed classic ‘right’ don’t seem yet willing to take the hard medicine that will see them make common cause with the principles you outline. Would Brooks, for example, be willing to see another President like Trump really go hard after the cultural dominance of the left and support, say, legislation, banning abortion in the USA at a federal level or defund all ‘education’ programs in American schools/tertiary institutions that are explicitly Marxist, or other radical leftist programs such as Critical Race Theory? I don’t think so somehow, based on reading and listening to Brooks over the years.
A follow-up article to this nice entry, please, outlining how we can win a significant amount of the elites back to the center and center-right. The majority of the citizenry I have no doubt we have, but it will mean little unless we can form some sort of coalition with the likes of Brooks.
Part of the problem in American and Australian politics is that even many who are quite conservative often see the solution as some strong man who can save us from ourselves–if we only had somebody who would come in and make laws commanding this or that. The fact is that the power of the President of the United States has multiplied exhorbitantly beyond what was ever intended, or what is constitutional. It does not matter how good a man he may be, the only legal way to make laws is through Congress; and Congress is–constitutionally–strictly limited in the areas in which it can legislate.
The federal government has no power to ban abortion in the states.
The federal government has no power to fund education, good or bad.
The federal government has no power to say who can use bathrooms.
The federal government (unlike in Australia) has no power to say what constitutes marriage.
The federal government has no power to fund or control medical care.
If the federal government had restricted its funding and control to the areas to which they legally apply, and the U.S. Supreme Court had not taken upon itself to tell states what they can do in areas to which it has no prerogative, America would not be nearly so woke or socialist.
However, simply changing unconstitutional control from a leftist bent to a rightist bent would be just as unconstitutional.
It’s never right to do wrong to do right.