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Three sectors of the political landscape have intersected and together they reveal the causes of the decline of American civilization: (1) violent campus pro-Islamic demonstrations, (2) decline in educational standards in K-12 and higher education, and (3) the shift of the Democrat Party from being “liberal” (based on Keynesian economics and rights-based left-of-center ideology) to being a neo-cultural Marxist, woke, pro-Islamic, pro-lawlessness and chaos, and globalist party of chaos.
To understand these three destructive intersecting threads, we should begin this brief survey of our national condition by defining the meaning of “decline of American civilization.” Decline from what? Decline to what? We have declined from our civilizational commitment to the ultimate worth of the individual. The individual is accountable to a holy God. The individual must prayerfully make his or her way in a world and a society that was not created by him or her.
The individual should not be threatened by a government that does not acknowledge natural rights – right not to be unlawfully searched, the right to practice his or her religion and to speak (the right to speak does not include the right to throw rocks at police or even to curse police), and the right to own property. Another important right imported from English law is habeas corpus – the right not to be imprisoned without first being charged, tried, and convicted of an unlawful action. It includes the right to trial by jury, and the right to worship as one sees fit.
Freedom of religion means there is no official religion that is the religion of the USA. However, the founding fathers – the writers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – clearly were Protestant men of prayer. The religious diversity at the founding of the USA was subsumed under the heading of what might best be called the “Protestant paradigm.” They clearly did not intend for any denomination or Christian religion to dominate all others in the USA, and following that they of course did not intend for any non-Christian law to be dominant such as the Sharia Law of the Islamic faith.
People are not required to attend church services or to contribute to any churches, but since the Holy Bible is the foundation for natural law and since natural law is the basis for our civil and criminal law (William Blackstone affirmed this as did our Founding Fathers), any doctrine that organizes against this scaffolding is intentionally subversive of our national socio-political life. This is the spiritual scaffolding that underlies the natural rights legal philosophy of our republic.
According to the Declaration of Independence, rights are “endowed by the Creator,” and that is why they should be respected by both the government and the citizenry. Campus protesters who are shouting invectives and barring ingress and egress from buildings are not exercising “rights.” They are exercising intimidation and intentionally obstructive and inculcating fear with their demonic speeches and pledges.
The roots of these nasty demonstrations are based in sharia hostility towards Israel and towards Jews in general, and are also deeply anti-Western and anti-Christian. The protestors’ tents on campus reveal the Arab roots of this discontent since the warlike followers of Muhammed lived in tents before oil money allowed them to live in palaces.
Muslim immigration intensified since the Obama years. From 2009 to 2016, the number of approvals for immigrant visas (for permanent residents) for nationals of majority Muslim countries increased from 80,435 to 117,444. This number does not include those admitted on short-term student visas. Additionally, 680,000 U.S. green cards were issued to immigrants from Muslim-majority nations between 2009 and 2013.
Twenty years ago, who could have imagined thousands of young people carrying so-called Palestinian flags (no country of Palestine has ever existed) and abridging access to classes for students at so many colleges and universities. If these demonstrations are not indicative of a fifth column operating to disrupt American higher education and American life, what is?
Further, this writer would suggest that with DEI admissions which includes an influx of foreign students, student skill sets are diminishing since the Obama years.
It has recently been noted that Harvard is offering remedial math courses to some entering students. This writer also teaches philosophy in a four-year City University of New York (CUNY) college, and students regularly ask me how many sentences in a paragraph, how many paragraphs in an essay, and should I write my name at the top of the page on the left side or the right side.
Are we surprised that with an uptick in admissions of persons from cultures that have more than 1300 years of contempt for Western Civilization combined with the dumbed down environment of so-called higher education, we now see so many who feel comfortable screaming obscenities and expressing solidarity with alien, anti-American and anti-Western societies?
Lastly, we have seen the shift of the Democrat Party from being a liberal party based upon pro-working class policies and Keynesian demand side economics to a woke, neo-Marxist, revolutionary party which is geared to establishing a new world order and to overthrowing the cultural and philosophical roots of our country. President Obama set the wheels in motion for this shift by over-emphasizing Islam’s contribution to world progress in his famous sycophantic speech to the Arab world in Cairo. Obama promoted a cumbaya Rodney King philosophy (“can’t we all just get along”) when he said to his Muslim audience, “Faith should bring us together. And that’s why we’re forging service projects in America to bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews. That’s why we welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s interfaith dialogue and Turkey’s leadership in the Alliance of Civilizations.” Having tolerance for other religions with whom we may have real and eternal differences is not the same as “bringing together” one’s religion with other religions. This is bilge that opens the door for un-American ideas and ideals to advance as “being one” or congruent with American ideals of freedom, equality, liberty, and rights.
But the decisive move to the left for Democrats came in July 2020 when Biden caved to the far left by signing a 110-page pact with finger-pointing Marxist weirdo “Boynee” Sanders. Thus, he moved the Democrats from their traditional role as pro-working people and supporters of Keynesian economic theory to all out Marxists, socialists, globalists, and wokesters. This is exactly the tack not taken by Pres. Truman in 1947 when a prominent fellow Democrat, Henry Wallace, decided to run against him as the Progressive Party candidate. Truman did not sign a pact of unity with the pro-Stalin Wallace in order to bolster his chance of winning the election. But Truman won handily anyhow, defeating the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey as well as Wallace.
Now we are at a juncture where the revolutionary impulse has been set loose within one of our two major parties. The Democrat Party is now inciting violence. In the late 1960’s, the violent protestors demonstrated against the Democrats in Chicago. The pro-Democrat media nevertheless consistently portrayed violent protests in 2020 and, recently, those against ICE as being limited in scope and/or peaceful. Now the violence originates within the Dems, and thus is a threat to the stability of the nation.
The article expresses a profound understanding of the dynamics of social and political history that are presently in play. The author has a vision of the deep downward turn of our culture, our politics, and particularly of the Democrat Party.
There’s no profundity just the usual Christian conservative superficiality and tripe.
A philosophy professor who argues that natural rights come from the supernatural?
You are the reason for the decline of America from RATIONALITY to IRRATIONALITY, Sir.
“When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is what the Founding Fathers did in one crucial respect. All men, said Jefferson, are endowed “by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God. Despite Jefferson’s eminence, however, his statement (along with its counterpart in Locke and others) is intellectually unwarranted. The principle of individual rights does not derive from or depend on the idea of God as man’s creator. It derives from the very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from the requirements of man’s mind and his survival. In fact, as I have argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically. Through all the centuries of the Dark and Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a Creator; but it was only when religion began to fade that the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerged as an historical, nation-shaping force. What then deserves the credit for the new development — the age-old belief or the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protector of human liberty — God or reason?” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
“All rights rest on the fact that man’s life is the moral standard. Rights are rights to the kinds of actions necessary for the preservation of human life. Just as “it is only the concept of ‘life’ that makes the concept of ‘value’ possible,” so it is only the requirements of man’s life that make morality, and thus the concept of “rights,” possible.
All rights rest on the fact that man survives by means of reason. Rights are rights to the actions necessary for the preservation of a rational being. Only an entity with a conceptual faculty has judgment on which to act, volition with which to select goals, and intelligence with which to create wealth.
All rights rest on the fact that man is a productive being. Rights presume that men can live together without anyone’s sacrifice. If man merely consumed objects provided in a static quantity by nature, every man would be a potential threat to every other. In such a case, the rule of life would have to be that which governs the lower species: seize what you can be before others get it, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed.
All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
Thank you for writing this thought-provoking article. Absolutely, we have been witnessing a kind of perfect storm in our time. Progressivism (Wilson, Dewey, New Dealers, etc.) has rejected the Founding concept that government exists only to protect natural rights. Progressives believe in fact that there are no natural rights. Rights are what government grants, not what it protects. Cultural Marxism, influenced by the Frankfurt School and other such movements, has injected into the American spirit the view of oppressor and the oppressed. As you suggest, this seems to be a constant refrain within the Democratic Party, as well as other deconstructive ideas. Finally, globalism has challenged the Westphalian model nation-state. In all, absolutely it is a multifaceted, complex attack on Western civilization and the American experiment in liberty, whether by nefarious design, foolish impulses, or both.