What is in store for the United States?
Some kind of change, to be sure. That is the subject of this book, and with some luck it will be a change into something better than our mediocre present. Without luck, it will be much worse. But it will be something, and yet there is a taboo against talking about what it might be. Even alleged conservatives, especially the kind who write columns like “The Conservative Case for Accepting Leftist Premises and Surrendering to Them Like Gentlemen,” whine that to think about the future is somehow to yearn for the fall of the present system. It’s not. It’s simply being realistic. After all, the idea that the United States will exist in its present form in perpetuity is ahistorical at best, but the idea that it will abide in some form is perfectly reasonable, at least through a few iterations. The question is what form the next phase will take.
The present form of the USA is just under 250 years old. The Roman Age of Kings lasted about a century, then the republic and the empire each lasted about 500 years. So, it’s not clear if we Americans are due for a change, at least chronologically. But are we due politically and culturally? That is a different question, and the answer seems to be in the affirmative.
It’s impossible to coherently argue—as the Left often does via its silly 1619 theory—that America is utterly unchanged from the Revolutionary Era. The culture is different. The population is different. The world is different, not least of all due to technology. It is impossible to reasonably dispute that we, as a people, have changed in important ways. But our system of government has not changed, at least not formally. Sure, we made some tweaks—senators are directly elected, you can tax income, women can vote, and Democrats can no longer have slaves—again, something the 1619 crowd glosses over. But the basic formal structure remains.
The informal structure, not so much. The administrative state has usurped both legislative and executive prerogatives, though it acts less independently than with a wink and a nod of support from the political branches that are happy to let faceless bureaucrats take the heat for the inevitable screw-ups of governing.
We have also changed our application of the Constitution, particularly in terms of the Bill of Rights. The Founders might be stunned to hear that their First Amendment allows gay porn; they would be staggered to hear that the Constitution mandates gay marriage. But when you look at the form of our federal government, with three branches, checks and balances, and protection for civil rights (even if those civil rights are previously unknown), we have not changed that much at all.
Yet some people now want to change it—dramatically, structurally—mostly left-wing people for whom the whole idea of negative rights grates. Limiting government, the whole point of the Constitution, is anathema to them since they desire to wield power via the force of government. Of course they hate obstacles, that is, negative rights, also known as civil liberties, and of course they adore the idea of positive rights, which is known as giving free stuff to layabouts. If the Constitution promises to give people something, that means that those in power are able to control that giving, and they must also necessarily control the taking away. There is no free lunch no matter what modern monetary theorists tell you; if you are going to give favored people stuff, it has to be taken from someone, and that’s certainly going to be from the disfavored people. Giving and taking was how emperors ruled, which seems to be the point.
If the leftists get their way, the transformation America will undergo will be from our own republic to, well, not quite a Roman Empire analogue, since the new elite’s search for power comes from crushing and looting internal dissenters rather than crushing and looting foreigners. It would be something else, a dictatorship to be sure, for socialism cannot be anything but. Social democrats are a contradiction in terms. Maybe the gulags would be more comfortable than some previous ones through history, but it would still be a dictatorship. And, of course, it would be sold as removing our liberty for our own good. If you want a picture of that future, imagine a condescending schoolmarm telling us to acknowledge our privilege and to use our inside voices—forever.
Yet that is only one way that America could fall. We shall look at several scenarios, bad and good—or at least, less bad. But we need to understand that America will fall, in the sense that at some point—and it may not be in our lifetimes—it will morph into something different. We can hope that what it becomes is still recognizable as America, just like the empire was still recognizable as Rome, but that is not the only option. It could become something very different, and something much, much worse. History is a not a drama; it’s a horror movie. And we comfortable Americans have got it into our heads that there are no real monsters left out there in the 2020s. But we’re wrong.
Kurt Schlichter is a trial lawyer, retired army infantry colonel, and author of We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
