Thread – A New Year’s Eve Retrospective on 2020 America 1.…

2. Recommend taking the time to carefully read this through (twice!) and then ponder the questions asked and the actions evinced in America over the past year. It is a fabulous commentary.

3.

"A year ago today, at the close of a retrospective on the ending decade, I wrote this: "We step into a decade that will likely be more terrible than we grasp. For the nation, for the world, many bills will come due & the survivors will be the quiet and the unseen.”

4. Finishing from a year ago: “My fear — which I expect to be vindicated, even as I hope it is not — is that the decade just ended will be remembered with one word: prewar.”

5. There is no reward in prophecy. Here is the opening passage of Stefan Zweig’s 1941 “The World of Yesterday”:

5A. When I attempted to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fulness by calling it the Golden Age of Security.

5B. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability.

5C. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representative of the people) and every duty was exactly prescribed. Our currency, the Austrian crown circulated in bright gold pieces an assurance of its immutability.

5D. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to what was permitted and what forbidden … [A]t its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order.

5E. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason."

6. The Golden Age of Security. We look back on it ourselves, now, from history’s maw. We remember the splendor of the not-distant past. We remember winning great contests of nations and men. We remember our superiority in every sphere.

7. We remember, above all else, the peace of our homes and hometowns. Hollowed townscape wastelands were the stuff of Northern Ireland and Lebanon. Lost generations were the coin of Africa and Southeast Asia. The dead stacked in refrigerator trucks — well, it can’t happen here.

8. The retrospectives on this ending year focus mostly upon the persons of the President and his successor. As an exercise in writing and analysis, this has the virtue of being easy. It is also superficial. The men matter, yes, but the grand structures matter more.

9. We have to see the outcomes of our elections as consequences more than causes now. A Washington and a Lincoln are causative men. Nearly every other elected officeholder, across history, is mostly a consequence. The question therefore arises: a consequence of what?

10. In 2020, the answer is: a consequence of the dissolution of the postwar American consensus. A consequence of a coming-apart, a wholesale re-ordering that is probably as momentous as those of 1776, 1860, and 1932.

11. Think back to everything we’ve seen across the past few years. The questions ask themselves:

11A. What is the effect of two post-1990 generational cohorts who have lived through successive crises?
What is the effect of the disappearance of the assurance of generational improvement in living conditions?

11B. What is the effect of the diminishment of American social mobility?

What is the effect of the dissolution of the American civic narrative?

What is the effect of the rejection of the American Founding?

11C. What is the effect of the large-capitalist firms assuming ideological-guardianship roles across society?

What is the effect of the elite classes increasingly (and openly) engaging in social-manipulative lies?

11D. What is the effect of the large institutions, especially within government, declaring themselves unaccountable to the Constitutional order?

12. A pandemic — or a major war, if there were one — does not create these things. What it does is expose their consequences. That is what we saw in 2020. We saw the consequences. Well, let me amend that: we saw the prelude to the consequences.

13. Here is a short and by no means exhaustive list of what we saw:

13A. We saw the United States surrender, voluntarily and with no fanfare, its hegemony over Europe.

We saw the fifty American states, expected to exercise power in crisis within the bounds of federalism, mostly incompetent to do so.

13B. We saw the fifty American states, handed that expectation, dumbfounded at the mere existence of that power.

13C. We saw several of the American states band together in extra-Constitutional organizations, and one of them — the Western States Pact — briefly attempt to conduct relations with the federal government on a government-to-government basis.

13D. We saw a networked insurgency terrorize American communities, with over one thousand violent actions to its credit.

We saw American elites, especially media and left-leaning officeholders, actively abet or excuse the insurgency.

13E. We saw the tactical emergence of Cultural-Revolution methods brought to bear for the destruction of ordinary Americans.

13F. We saw the strategic emergence of Cultural-Revolution methods brought to bear for the eradication of various strands of American identity and inheritance: from the South, to Texas, to the American Founding itself.

13G. We saw the Armed Forces of the United States publicly abandon its own lawful domestic-order mission, on the insurgency’s behalf.

We saw the NY Times name various flag officers as prospective participants in a de facto coup, with no protest or consequence for those officers.

14. If these are the preludes, imagine as you wish the conclusions. Do not succumb to paranoia as you do: rationalism is enough.

15. Zweig again, on what came after the Golden Age of Security:

15A. There was no protection, no security against being constantly made aware of things and being drawn into them.

15B. There was no country to which one could flee, no quiet which one could purchase; always and everywhere the hand of fate seized us and dragged us back into its insatiable play.

15C. Constantly men had to subordinate themselves to the demands of the State, to become the prey of the most stupid politics, to adapt themselves to the most fantastic changes.

15D. Always the individual was chained to the common lot, no matter how bitterly he objected; he was carried along irresistibly….

15E. We have had to accustom ourselves gradually to living without the ground beneath our feet, without justice, without freedom, without security.

15F. Long since, as far as our existence is concerned, we have denied the religion of our fathers, their faith in a rapid and continuous rise of humanity ...

15G. But even though it was a delusion our fathers served, it was a wonderful and noble delusion, more humane and more fruitful than our watchwords of today; ….

15H. … and in spite of my later knowledge and disillusionment, there is still something in me which inwardly prevents me from abandoning it entirely.

16. It was a hard year. Everyone will agree to that. Most everyone will be wrong as to why. The pandemic was hard, yes. The economic tumult was hard, yes. But beneath them was a republic, and a people, in desperate need of revivification.

17. Here is where I depart from Zweig. Our fathers served no delusion. They lived and prospered in the last best hope of man on earth. They handed it to us, to save and extend if we can. We are the ones who labor in delusion, not them.

18. Our task — in the coming year and those to come — is to clamber back into the light of their truths.

19.
The truth that all men are created equal.
The truth that America is a good country.
The truth that America is created for good ends.
The truth of a sovereign people.
The truth of equality under law.

20. My sons, innocent and uncomprehending, play with their toys in the post-Christmas glow. A new year is upon them, and they are excited. They know there is second grade for one, and kindergarten for the other.

21. They don’t know that the country — the country of their adoption, of blessing and chance — convulsed this year. They don’t know that its tottering elites flirt evermore openly with the idea of closing off their futures.

22. They don’t have to know. Not yet. I have to know. I do. So do you.

That’s why we fight.

— New Year’s Eve 2020"

23. The problem here is unfortunately simple enough: No one is motivated to fight for the status quo. When you frame America as a project, you will find patriots even among the rankest millennials (though they may disagree about the ends of that project).

24. Whenever I hear DC grandees talk about the US as a "status quo power," I immediately write them off as well-read declinists.

25. Tragically, such people govern policy in both parties while the motivated battle endlessly and futilely in partisan bickering like Greek gods seeking to rule rival gods in The Iliad. However, we cannot give up hope because Mankind is by nature optimistic.

26. Optimism was behind the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers’ determination to create a government that maximized personal and economic freedom while keep tyrannical government under wraps as much as possible under a written Constitution.

27. It is up to us to fight on – optimistically! – in order to deliver the same freedoms to our progeny. That is our charge in the coming year.

///The end.