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November 7, 2012
By James Lewis
This has been a mean-spirited campaign, and the meanest, most
destructive people won.
So be it.
In the last two Democratic administrations we have seen a sleazier, angrier
and more selfish part of America rising up more and more in our political
class. The Founders told us that ultimately our elected politicians are a
mirror of ourselves. Just like you, before November 7, 2012, I lived in the
fervent hope that the degradation of the Clinton and Obama years might be
an exception to the long trend of American history. But two times eight
years of radical leftists in high office can't be an accident. We can't just
blame our sleazy media, or just the leftist political class, as corrupt and
malevolent as they truly are.
No -- the balance of decency in America has changed. Every society has
normal, decent people and the other kind. The America we grew up in
was fundamentally decent. Decency was the expected standard.
Now the balance has changed.
The evidence for our sleazified culture can be seen all around. It is in our
pop music, which has lost melody and now just has rhythm. We have a
President who won on revenge against middle class values. That's what
he meant by telling his people to vote for revenge. And they did --
showing us exactly who they are.
We are now a society divided between the makers and the takers, and
the takers are on a campaign of theft and revenge.
We have a President who takes dangerous pride in his hatred for
"middleclassness" as Jeremiah Wright taught him to believe. We have
a President who culminated his campaign with a ghetto singer rapping
about hoes and *****es, about drug-ridden and broken families, as if all
those cruelties were good.
This is not normal, decent America.
It is not.
We need to face that.
Morality and values are not small things. The new tide in the affairs of
America also means that we can no longer be trusted to defend civilized
values around the world, as we have done for the last hundred years.
It's a sea change. Fools around the world will applaud Obama as a savior,
but wise people will see us crumbling. They know they will be the
worse for it.
Today the world is far more dangerous place than four years ago.
If you doubt that, keep an eye on the rise of barbarisms around the world.
Obama constantly facilitates barbarism, and the barbarians understand
that much better than decent people do.
History buffs will remember that we've had decades of sleaze before.
The Founders were followed by Jacksonian corruption. Abraham Lincoln
was followed by Reconstruction. Yet we somehow found our way back.
Come-backs can happen, but probably not soon.
So this is an elegiac moment, a moment of mourning for what has passed.
From Truman and Eisenhower to Bush 43 we have had leaders
of character.
No longer.
Republicans by and large still look, act, and speak like normal, decent
people. But they have a hard time even understanding a thoroughly
sleazified America. Normal, decent people do not know how to live in
this new, barbaric society. We live in protected communities, we drive
around in SUVs, like armored cars.
The left knows exactly how to act in this Brave New World. They've
made it. We are now ruled by sleazy demagogues who take bribes from
foreign nations that do not wish us well. Obama is the worst example
so far. Even the Clintons, both selfish narcissists, were somewhat better.
With the decline of American decency, the civilized world has lost its
foremost defender. America wasn't a world power in earlier times of
corruption. We could afford to make mistakes. Today, our national
decay endangers the world. The left has purposely attacked our
self-respect, our pride in our morality and decency, and our crucial role
in the defense of civilized values. We are no longer the Leader of the
Free World, because we have lost -- for now -- the values that guided us.
America can no longer be trusted, as we saw so clearly in Benghazi and
the fraudulent Arab Spring. Any nation that places any trust in our
promises today is run by fools. Our allies must arm up to protect themselves,
or they must find new, trustworthy allies.
For sixty years Europe has lived off our willingness to come to its defense.
The southern rim of Europe is now going bankrupt, and even France looks
ready to crumble. Without our leadership Europe has to rely on itself, or
on Russia, or on the spreading Muslim empires. But Europe has shown no
capacity to defend itself. Maybe they will learn. Or maybe they will be
swamped. We can no longer be trusted.
William Butler Yeats's most famous poem, "The Second Coming,"
was written out from overwhelming sense of social degradation in Europe
in the 1920s and 30s. Years afterwards Yeats wrote that maybe he was
anticipating the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the two greatest evils that rose
from the rubble of World War I