USA 2024 Elections Thread

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https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/18/10-steps-to-save-america/

Victor Davis Hanson: 10 Steps To Save America

Yes, there is a way. But is there the will?

Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong—and very
abruptly—with the United States. They are certain that our wounds are
almost all self-inflicted. The current pathologies are not a result of
a natural disaster, an exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an
existential war.

Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel
costs amid “normal” seven-percent-plus annual inflation,
bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of
racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation
abroad—all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a sick
patient. Our crises are not as the Left maintains—a nine-person
Supreme Court, the Electoral College, or the filibuster—all
distractions from existential problems the Left largely created.

So, what are the therapies and prognoses for America?

In the spirit of constructive rather than blanket criticism, here is a
partial, 10-point plan of national recovery.
1. Cut the Debt

Americans’ national debt is now $31 trillion. That is about 123
percent of current GDP. The liabilities are unsustainable. We run
annual deficits of $1.6 trillion. These financial obligations will
eventually ensure that rising interest rates to service the debt crowd
out essential spending for national defense and the general welfare.

Or in extremis, in the not too distant future, the government will be
forced to default on what it owes the “rich” bondholders and foreign
debt holders. Or the government will be forced to confiscate private
wealth, as for example occasional crazy suggestions to nationalize and
absorb 401(k)k retirement plans into the soon-to-be-insolvent Social
Security system. Or the state will simply print millions of dollars to
pay off obligations, Weimar-style.

In addict style, the more we come to realize that our binging habit
cannot go on, the less we can practice self-restraint. And the more it
is the case that those who receive government redistributions
outnumber those who pay the majority of federal income taxes, the less
hope there remains to avoid insolvency.

In 2010 then-President Barack Obama appointed a bipartisan “National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.” More commonly
remembered as the Simpson-Bowles commission, after chairmen Senators
Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles (D-N.C.), it included private
citizens and elected officials.

The commission recommended radical tax simplifications and some
cuts—along with reductions in tax deductions and credits, an increase
in the gas tax, restraints on entitlement spending, and various
spending caps.

Obama and Congress ultimately rejected the recommendations and the
commission’s blueprint died. But had it succeeded, the current debt
would have long been frozen at the 2014 level of $17 trillion—with
annual reductions ensuring that this coming year 2023 the debt would
have plunged to $10 trillion and then disappeared in another decade.

Something like Simpson-Bowles could still stop the madness and avoid
the natural corrective on the horizon of financial collapse. Note that
federal tax revenue has increased almost every year since 2010.
Sometimes it grows by nearly a half-trillion dollars per annum, even
as we sink deeper in debt. Our crisis, then, is one of spending what
we do not have rather than one of declining revenue.
2. Secure the Border

We no longer have a southern border. There have been 5 million illegal
border crossings just since Joe Biden took office. He intentionally
destroyed immigration law for cheap political advantage. Nearly 50
million current American residents were not born in the United States.
Well over 20 million—and perhaps 30 million—are illegal aliens. Old
melting-pot efforts at assimilation and integration eroded into the
salad-bowl metaphor that has just become tribalism—even as
intermarriage is at an all-time high.

The Left brags that “demography is destiny” as it cheers the changes
in the electorate aimed at ensuring its political dominance. And
simultaneously, it smears conservatives who agree with its
triumphalism as “great replacement theory” conspiracists.

Yet we finally found a solution in 2019-2020. Had we continued
replacing rickety border fencing with an effective wall and then
completed it along the entire border, had we stopped
catch-and-release, had we continued demanding that refugee status be
obtained before entry, had we forced Mexico and Central American
governments to stop exporting human capital and subjected them to
taxes on more than $60 billion in annual remittances (along with trade
penalties) for their complicity with the situation at the border, had
we continued to deport those who entered illegally, had we returned to
assimilation and integration on the theory any who entered America did
so because they wanted to become Americans, then a desired legal,
meritocratic, and diverse immigration policy might easily have
assimilated and absorbed perhaps 200,000 skilled and legal immigrants
per year.

Again, we had the outlines of a solution and then simply destroyed it
for liberal political agendas and cheap corporate labor.
3. Tap Natural Resources

Similarly, by 2020, the United States enjoyed inexpensive fuel. It was
all but independent in gas and oil. It had become the world largest
combined gas and oil producer. That status radically curtailed the
need for optional military engagements in the Middle East. It gave
America enormous clout against hostile oil exporters like Russia,
Iran, and Venezuela. And such independence helped reduce vast trade
deficits.

Again, the Biden Administration simply exploded the idea of
fossil-fuel independence as a gradual transition to sustainable
energy. So simply doing the opposite of its policies would correct the
pathology almost immediately: Issue more federal gas and oil leases,
approve the Keystone and Constitution pipelines, reopen the Arctic
National Wildlife Reserve, and build nuclear power plants. The present
course of high-priced and scarce gasoline and oil is eroding the
middle class, spiking inflation, widening class divisions, and
reducing American autonomy abroad.
4. Oppose Discrimination

Never has the United States seen more evidence of progress in racial
relations, and never has such progress given way to more tribalism. If
we do not return to a Martin Luther King, Jr. “content of our
character” policy—one that views race as incidental rather than
essential to who we are—then our future is a sectarian one with echoes
of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraq.

Affirmative action was never envisioned as permanent quotas and
race-based reverse-discrimination. Yet after over a half-century it
has ballooned under the idea of “diversity” to invent a victim class
of nearly a third of the nation, absurdly and loosely defined—in an
age of commonplace intermarriage—as “non-white.”

Help for the underprivileged should be race-neutral and entirely based
on class and income, given numerous ethnicities exceed the so-called
white medium income. The labyrinth of racial categories grows
unfathomable. The identity politics mess logically results, on the one
hand, with rank iconic frauds like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill,
and Rachel Dolezal, and, the other hand, with well-off poseur victims
in the manner of a Meghan Markle, Colin Kaepernick, or Jussie
Smollett.

Substitution of racial criteria for merit, rather than aiding the poor
of all races, is creating a commissar-like drag on the economy,
spiking racial and ethnic tensions, and ensuring that every group will
eventually, for its survival, go tribal on the basis of the same logic
that applies to nuclear proliferation. Again, the remedy? Just enforce
civil rights statutes that prohibit racial discrimination and consider
the Pavlovian shriek of “racism!” as the revealing projection of
racists.
5. Disrupt and Reform Higher Education

Our universities are failing to produce competent graduates essential
to a meritocratic nation engaged in fierce global competition.
Increasingly, students are politicized, largely ignorant, indebted,
bitter, and unable to ensure American preeminence in basic science,
technology, engineering, and math.

Yet the solutions are again simple: get the government out of the
student-loan business that ensures escalating tuition hikes greater
than the rate of inflation. Eliminate faculty tenure and replace it
with five-year contracts that require demonstrable achievement.
Subject large endowments to taxation on their interest income to curb
their wasted spending. Allow public schools to hire either those with
school of education credentials or one-year master’s degrees that
focused solely on academic study. Require standardized exit tests, in
the fashion of erstwhile SAT and ACT entry tests, for the
certification of the bachelor’s degree. Force universities to follow
the Bill of Rights on campus, regarding due process and freedom of
expression.

These are not radical suggestions. Yet the likely fierce faculty
opposition to them is proof that the Left envisions higher education
as it views Silicon Valley—another private monopoly that helps to
maintain political power in lieu of popular support.
6. Revive the Armed Forces

Our military is in dire straits. It is overcommitted, under-resourced,
and without any geo-political strategy other than ad hoc responses
without defined objectives. It has become politically weaponized and,
inevitably, unable to meet recruitment goals. The Pentagon remains
obsessed with exorbitantly priced weapons that cannot be produced in
sufficient numbers in an age of hostile swarms of cheap, mass-produced
drones and thousands of batteries of ground-to-air and shore-to-ship
missiles.

Constant profiling, racial, and gender quotas and obsessions over
proportional representation and disparate impact increasingly apply to
training, education, and promotion—to everything except worries over
the disproportionate profile of those killed in battle. The Pentagon
has become adept in publishing racial data on every aspect of military
service to emphasize disparity and bias—except concerning the combat
dead.

To address the changes, retiring high-ranking officers should refrain
from board memberships on contracting corporations for at least five
years upon leaving the military. The uniform code of military justice
must be strictly enforced, including article 88 which prohibits
retired officers from attacking in personal terms high-ranking elected
officials, and in particular their commander-in-chief.

Woke training is destroying morale and battlefield efficacy. The
military must return to a race and gender neutral stance that does not
erode meritocratic standards to fit political agendas. We should never
again witness a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff virtue signaling
to Congress and the nation his intention to understand “white rage” in
the ranks, without supplying any confirmatory evidence or data for his
apparent allegation of systemic racism in the ranks—particularly not
while the greatest U.S. defeat and humiliation in a half-century was
unfolding on the horizon in Kabul. Any high-ranking military officer
who informs his Chinese counterpart of his own psychiatric diagnosis
that his commander-in-chief is unhinged and thus U.S. strategic
intentions will first be relayed to Beijing should be summarily
dismissed.
7. Fix Voting

Elections are a mess. The greatest political revolution in our
election history has been the change—accelerated under the cover of
COVID and the George Floyd riots—in many key estates from a 20-30
percent “absentee ballot” vote to 70-80 percent early/mail-in
balloting. In a mere four years we have all but destroyed Election Day
voting and Election Night final tabulations as we had known them for
decades.

All discussions of voter IDs, fraud, and charges and countercharges of
election denialism are irrelevant if there is no real mechanism to
validate the authenticity of mail-in ballots that have incomplete or
false addresses, names, and signatures, or do not match registration
rolls. Third-party ballot harvesting and ballot curing should be
outlawed at the federal level, and we should return to the requirement
of requesting absentee ballots rather than automatically sending them
out. Otherwise, no future election will again win the confidence of a
majority of Americans. And without trust in balloting, consensual
government becomes nonexistent.
8. Drain the Swamp

Americans distrust the “swamp,” administrative state, or deep state.
Call what you will, the Washington nexus of bureaucracies, media, and
lobbyists has created a huge, unelected permanent army of auditors,
regulators, investigators, and punishers, all mostly exempt from audit
and accountability and without fear of their elected overseers.

The easiest solution is to break up concentrations of power. Transfer
out of Washington, in this age of zoom and telecommunications, major
cabinet departments like Health and Human Services, Energy, or
Agriculture into the hinterland. Restore the idea that lying to
Congress, feigning amnesia, or pleading ignorance under oath to
Congress or federal investigators or in depositions is a prosecutable
felony with jail time.

Had we restored equality under the law, then an Andrew McCabe, James
Clapper, and John Brennan would not have dared lie under oath. And a
Robert Mueller, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, or Jack Dorsey might have
not so easily believed they simply could plead memory loss or mislead
in a fashion that no American would dare to do with the IRS.

Being forced to tell the truth would be a powerful deterrent against
bureaucratic overreach.

Finally, ossified centralized agencies like the FBI need to be broken
up and their bureaus redistributed through the cabinet-level
departments to avoid past pathologies resulting from a concentration
of power.
9. Upend the Welfare State

The number of those receiving federal and state subsidies is beginning
to match the number of those who subsidize them. “No one wants to work
anymore” is now a common public lament. Inflation and recession may
come and go, but workers are now scarce whether we are in boom or bust
times. Labor non-participation remains at an all-time high. Soon only
60 percent of the available labor force will be working.
Trillion-dollar COVID subsidies have accelerated the idea that
Americans need not work full-time to maintain a living.

We can easily return to the “workfare” championed by a triangulating
Bill Clinton in the 1990s that demanded healthy and able recipients to
be gainfully employed upon receipt of state and federal cash. In the
context of the homeless, we need to return to pre-Reagan norms of
institutionalizing the mentally ill and creating hospitals and safe
spaces away from American downtowns to house those who either cannot
or will not take care of themselves. Defecating, urinating, injecting,
and fornicating on city-streets are not victimless crimes, but
assaults on civilized life as we once knew it.
10. Restore Norms

Fact is, few public norms are left. Rather than the current
therapeutic obsessions that seek to divide Americans into binaries of
oppressors and the oppressed, we are in desperate need of civic
education in K-12 that acquaints all children and teens with American
institutions, key events like Gettysburg or D-Day, and familiarity
with the Constitution and the duties of the citizen. We will get
nowhere basing our understanding of the world on psychodramas and
therapeutics.

Neither journalists nor elites understand, much less appreciate, the
First Amendment, and in ignorance despises the Second.

Like it or not, the nuclear family remains the bulwark of the American
nation, which will not survive if current fertility rates of below 1.7
children per woman continue to diminish and age the population. The
government must incentivize childbearing and child raising.

Without clear punishment for violent crimes, deterrence is lost, and
the innocent become victims of the exempt criminal class. Critical
race theory, critical legal theory, and critical criminology theory
are euphemisms for unleashing lawbreakers upon the vulnerable. We are
in a strange cycle in which we deliberately do not enforce gun laws in
our cities and then when murder reaches near historic proportions we
blame unenforced guns laws rather than the criminals who are exempt in
using deadly weapons as the cause.

These are just a few of the many ways that the United States could
stop the present madness—which, after all, was entirely self-created.