Anyone paying attention knows the United States is in peril. Of course, there are those in denial. There are also those who are cheering the downfall. But the inescapable fact is that socially, economically, and militarily, the United States has suffered a precipitous degradation. As recently as three years ago, we were considered the world’s sole superpower. Now we are a super clown show.
What happened? There are those the world over who have desired our decline for many years, but none of these enemies could have ever inflicted the damage that the United States has inflicted upon itself.
It is a fact that Marxists have been chipping away at the fringes of our society for over a hundred years. It is also a fact that they infiltrated our education system. I recently had the honor of talking with Stanley “Skip” Cahn, a retired Air Force chief who had served in some pretty nasty fighting in Vietnam. He confided that he and others he had served with looked upon our current problems from the lens of “why did we serve?” They recognized that “we were trying to kill the communists over there, but they were hiding out in our schools”—perceptive and to the point. This country cannot be cured unless this problem is fixed.
Since the Cold War ended, Americans have forgotten that communists are the mortal enemy of freedom. We grant them our freedoms, and they use them against us. Two chapters in F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom explain why we cannot allow Marxists to dictate our dialogs. Those chapters are “Ten: Why the Worst Get on Top” and “Eleven: The End of Truth.” To be clear, all Marxists are totalitarians. The former chapter explains that only the vilest people will inflict absolute control on their fellow citizens. The latter chapter not only calls them the liars that they are but explains that they force everyone else to live the lie.
Despite all the written and voiced warnings, the United States academia has embraced Marx as some force for good. As pointed out in Hayek’s eleventh chapter, nothing could be further from the truth. Marx was such a troublemaker that he was disowned by his parents and banished from the entire mainland continent of Europe. Had it not been for Engels, he probably would not have found refuge in England. The details of his life are even more appalling. Only a naïve academic could believe that such a foul individual could be a force for good.
Complex systems do not react linearly. Reactions are delayed and magnified over time. Furthermore, such systems are prone to catastrophe. In other words, there is always potential for the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The United States itself is a complex system comprised of multiple complex systems—society, businesses, banks, schools, churches, and government institutions to name a few. Society creates institutions for stability. If any one system starts to fail, the others can react to stabilize the failing one. But they can also compound the instability and destroy each other.
In 2020, George Floyd’s death lit a fuse that had been set up with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2013. The latter created Black Lives Matter. BLM is and always has been a Marxist organization. For some inexplicable reason, the fact that they were pushing “dead cops” got lost on the mainstream consciousness. As a benevolent society, we should not be promoting murder of anyone, but wishing the death of those serving in one of the main institutions of peacekeeping and justice preservation is confounding until one realizes that Marxist takeovers begin by turning societies upside down. This is exactly what Hayek documented in his chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Law-abiding citizens are made into criminals, and the criminals become the jailers.
What follows an embrace of Marxism is always “the end of truth.”
American institutions have historically been grounded in truth. This doesn’t mean that lying doesn’t happen. Certainly, it does, but the truth has always been foundational. That stopped with many American institutions in 2020. Whereas society had created all our institutions, those institutions ceased to be pillars of stability. The worst are now on top, and they view law-abiding Americans as the enemy.
