A Few Simple Truths

A country that raises most of its children in compulsory retardation factories will end up with an adult majority incapable of thinking rationally, restraining whims, understanding the long-term implications of choices, or voting like informed and responsible free men. No one should be surprised by this.

If forty-seven percent of a nation’s voters sincerely believe that their best chance to save their country from ruin and tyranny is to vote for a two-bit carnival barker who has no idea what the phrase “limited republic” means — or even, perhaps, what either of the words in that phrase taken on its own means — then that country is already far beyond saving, regardless of whether the forty-seven percent are right or wrong in their assessment of the situation.

Modernity as a political project was essentially the quest for a practical accommodation between freedom and equality, a quest which, we may presume, reached its closest actualization in the founding of the United States of America — from which it follows that the fall of America as a free republic based on natural rights and equality before the law constitutes the loss of modernity’s essence. When a living thing loses its essence, we say it has died.