Destroying America from Within

'A nation is not built from cyclopean stone. It is a fragile tissue of shared assumptions about the nature of its history, its social consensus, its cultural and political coherence, and its implicit sense of destiny which is always subject to the threat of unraveling into a tangle of loose strands. This is a process that has been gathering momentum for some time now. It did not begin overnight. We can trace this gradual dénouement (or unknotting) from the “progressive school” of education in the 1920s and 30s with its child-centered deprivileging of hard content in favor of method and personal experience, through the student revolution of the 1960s, to the affirmative action enterprise and self-esteem movement of the latter part of the last century, to the postmodern attack on the concept of verifiable, objective truth and the politicizing of the universities we see today...

Perhaps America deserves Obama, the creature of a blinkered and self-deluded electorate, as we Canadians deserved our Mackenzie Kings, Trudeaus, Clarks, and Chrétiens. Nonetheless, we somehow managed to outlast the Beckian “idiots” we propelled into office. Maybe we just got lucky. But the world is a different place now and I am terribly afraid the United States may not be so lucky. Barring the unforeseen, what America’s enemies have not been able to do, America may do for them. The vultures gather round while the president and his minions are distracted by the campaign they are waging against their own country...

But one thing is for sure. If Obama is not stopped in his tracks and the measures he is proposing effectively parried, a “great reckoning,” to cite Shakespeare again, is heading this way “when a man’s good wit [is not] seconded with the forward child understanding.” Then we would find, like the Bard’s effete, deposed Richard II, that we are “sworn … to grim necessity.” But of course, we do not need to read Shakespeare to understand or describe the predicament we are in. We need only open our eyes and read the proximate world around us.'

- David Solway, 'Destroying America from Within'.

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