Fortress America: State and National Sovereignty and the Enemy Within

Fortress America: State and National Sovereignty, Socialism, and the Enemy Within

Matthew Hennessey, The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy editorial features editor, writes: “Reports of socialism’s death were always slightly exaggerated.

Bad ideas never die. They go into extended hibernation, typically in the caverns of academia, waiting for the intellectual spelunkers of the future to stumble onto them.

The Soviet Union was doomed to failure, built as it was on principles at odds with fundamental human nature—collectivism, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat. While rational people understood why such an experiment would never work anywhere, Western fellow travelers bewitched by socialism experienced the Cold War’s end as a temporary setback.

They set about building what writer Wesley Yang has called the “successor ideology,” which blends identity politics, pseudo anti-racism, intersectionality and eventually transgenderism.

Wokeism was merely socialism with Gen Z characteristics. A new crop of 30-something urban socialists imagine they are poised to seize the means of production.”

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Barton Swaim, Editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal, writes: “The socialist impulse, like the poor it’s meant to aid, will always be with us. It proliferates when three circumstances converge: youth, disaffection and irreligion.

Young people are naturally ignorant of history and prone to naiveté about human motivations. A sensible education can counteract the misguided idealism of youth.

The civics textbook I was made to read in 1988 relieved me of any attraction to what it called “command economics,” and I was a solid C student at a middling public high school.

But not even a sensible education, to which most American kids don’t have access now anyway, can counteract disaffection from one’s country or fill the void left by nihilism. Self-hating multiculturalism, a threat since the early 1970s, took over K-12 and college curricula after the Cold War ended.

For two generations, America’s young people were taught to think of their country as a hellscape of predatory capitalism and of their world as a cold and godless moral vacuum. For students raised on that outlook, socialism offers meaning and excitement.

The only antidote to that outlook is its opposite: gratitude to family, to nation and, ultimately, to God. How we go about advancing that message is the question of our time.”:

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Gerard Baker, Columnist for The Wall Street Journal, writes: “The U.S. has largely avoided the curse of a strong socialist movement, owing mainly to its historic socioeconomic conditions. Unlike Europe, America never had an entrenched class system in which political identity was formed around class-based dialectics, fertile ground for socialist arguments about economic ownership and appropriation.

Nonetheless, socialism’s specious promise of greater equality and fairness never quite dies. Its fortunes tend to improve when capitalism’s imperfections result in widening inequalities. We’re in one of those phases now.

The socialism of Democrats and their ilk is a marriage of economic discontent and cultural progressivism. This ideology has swept America’s elite institutions in the past few decades. Culturally brainwashed and financially disenchanted young graduates adopt it when they find that their expensive educations haven’t been the ticket to self-advancement that they had hoped.

The only certain cure for socialism is growing up: acquiring real-world knowledge and adult responsibilities that expose its intellectual inadequacies. But the disruptions of rapid technological advancement and changing demographics may give it a wider appeal and more life this time than it deserves.”

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Faith Bottum, Assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, writes: “When young people think of socialism today, they don’t think of the fall of the Soviet Union or the famine caused by Stalin’s policies, which killed more than three million people. They don’t think of the forced industrialization of China’s Great Leap Forward, which killed some 23 million—because those topics were ignored throughout their educational journey.

Socialism today is about attaching hopes and dreams to the vague fantasy that government can somehow fix everything. The new believers want instant serotonin— free healthcare, frozen rent, affordable housing—all wrapped up in TikToks that romanticize collectivism with a smile.

[Ignorant p]eople are attracted to it, especially the young. A recent survey shows that 43% of all Americans and 62% of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism.

The U.S. hasn’t had much to feel good about in recent years. Mental health spiraled during Covid, and studies show that global anxiety and depression have remained high even after the pandemic. The economic situation hasn’t eased the dissatisfaction.

Since 2021, the annual income required to qualify for a mortgage on a median house has increased by more than 60%. The average debt of a university graduate in the U.S. in 2023 was $29,374. This instability has made people anxious and pessimistic about the economy— and some have latched onto socialism as the answer.

Teaching history better would lessen socialism’s appeal. An improved economy, with greater financial horizons for the young, would also help. But the real solution may simply be time. Covid is behind us, but the U.S. needs to hold out against the lingering dissatisfaction until Americans feel that their sense of stability has been restored.”

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Tunku Varadarajan is a Contributor to The Wall Street Journal editorial page. He writes: “Socialism has never been dead in America. Yes, ordinary American voters have shunned it, and it has been absent from mainstream American values, but students and teachers have always kept it alive in academia.

In the past, campus socialism was difficult to export to the real world: It fizzled out when students graduated and encountered job searches, taxes, a market economy and grown-ups who told them to get a grip. Outside college, their ideas had no takers.

What’s more, Democrats and Republicans— for all their differences— historically shared a hostility to socialism. A Bill Clinton-style Democrat would have been as opposed to leftist grandstanding as a George H.W. Bush-style Republican.

But with the arrival of Barack Obama and the first election of Donald Trump, the architecture of American politics changed. The Democratic Party became identitarian and tribalist, scorning American unity and values and embracing income redistribution, climate dogma and international weakness. The Republican Party under Mr. Trump came to reject question the open markets and global leadership that defined such past presidents as Ronald Reagan.

In this new and turbulent political space, no politician seems to have the ability and conviction to block the entry of previously marginal leftist dogma. The grown-ups only have themselves to blame.”

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Dr. Arney H. Lange has worked as a biology and science teacher, research scientist, and physician. He is the author of a series of four recently published books called Confessions of a Conservative: Our Ship of State Towards Civilization. He currently, is a practicing community general internist in Ottawa.

“I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.”                                   

—Galileo Galilei

“As a scientist, I do not come from a religious background. But perhaps that is the point: Faith is still directly relevant to the present course of our culture, and scientists are uniquely placed to see that faith in a creator and scientific investigation do not have to be mutually exclusive. However, similar to the scientists of early Enlightenment times, there is a false conflict between articles of faith and freedom of inquiry. In the days of Galileo, the conflict was between freedom of inquiry and a totalitarian Christian church. Today, it is between freedom and other totalitarian theologies found in some parts of the world and in some nontraditional churches. And yes, I did describe in a previous article how “wokeism” has the characteristics of a new religion—complete with articles of faith and canon including so-called DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Why is this important now? It is true that scientists—and knowledgeable citizens—can reconcile empirical and biological reality with a creator. After all, the essence of faith is that one does not have to prove—just have faith in—a God. However, today there seem to be three main kinds of totalitarianism that oppose citizen freedom, including their articles of faith that intercede upon our freedoms.

The first kind of totalitarianism is well known in the past century. As per an axis of freedom, tyranny can be found on the left, and free will is to be found on the right for citizens. Canadians had to defeat national socialist and classical Marxist regimes, which sacrificed freedom for totalitarianism. Nowadays, there is a second kind of totalitarianism that I have described as green tyranny— where green clerics are imposing articles of faith based upon the ecological axis.

These are watermelons: green on the outside but red on the inside. In fact, cultural Marxism, neo-Marxism, and DEI ideology come directly from this underlying red ideology.

Then, there is the third kind of totalitarianism that I wish to describe more here.

It is driven by religious extremism—most often seen with terrorism and theocracies these days, particularly in the Middle East. Unlike the watermelons, this kind of totalitarian ideology relates directly to the faith axis, not the ecological axis.

Thus, we have to face this third axis with respect to the freedom axis.

The typical leftist authoritarian exists at the atheist, if not agnostic, end of the faith axis. This is where the phrase “ Godless communism” arises. However, there is just as much a cultural problem to have an extreme faith in God that cares so much about the afterlife that it destroys the here and now. In either case, I submit that there has been a disconnect with empirical reality—the repository of scientific reality and common sense. True human advancement requires reason, not just faith. Galileo was onto something when he pointed out that religious doctrine cannot contradict observations of the natural world.

During totalitarianism, tyrants acquire minions who no longer function as autonomous citizens capable of making their own decisions using free will.

Citizens must be scientifically literate in order to apply reason and wisdom to this problem. As it is, it seems that we are faced with a choice between DEI and die. For example, the leftist authoritarian identity politics of the woke cannot seem to accept the basic biology that the human species has only two sexes, male and female. This amounts to the cultural Marxist not having either faith or reason.

On the other hand, the religious extremist is more interested in jihad than any good works here on Earth. Thus, the religious extremist has all faith but no reason. In either case, neither woke nor religious totalitarians are interested in the present biological realities of life, making them anti-human. Mobs of radicals tearing down our historical memory— tearing down our statues—result from such ignorance of both scientific and historical reality.

In fact, as a scientist and physician, it has become apparent that the inquisitions of Galileo are arising again. An assault on citizens’ ability to think, speak, and reason freely has certainly begun in academia with colleagues having to write DEI statements to obtain research grant funding from our governments. More broadly, no citizen freedom ought to be lost because of either cultural Marxism or radical Islamism. The choice ought not be between either DEI or die. There must be an alternative. Thus, there is a need for moderation just as much on the faith axis as on the ecological axis.

What way is there to escape a totalitarian theocracy? It turns out that humanity has been down this way before. The trouble with the divine rule of kings and khalifs is that they have been invariably shown to be fallible and corruptible. Thus, outright tyrants are the rule. The ancient Greeks tackled this problem by making their rulers accountable through direct democracy. In the anglosphere,

our kings and their governments were first made accountable—and not above the rule of law—by the Magna Carta. Representative parliaments of the people developed thereafter. We have benefited greatly from the resultant freedom and democracy that flowed from these original ideas.

The fact is, the only path to peaceful coexistence will have to be through the separation of the religious institutions— including woke ideology—from the state institutions.

But of course, this does not endorse a Godless regime either. Why? Because in a Godless dictatorship such as by Marxism or communism, the leaders will think that they can replace God—but act solely by their own despotic rules.

Thus, this is just as much a recipe for unchecked human tyranny as religious extremism.

Prescription: The religious institution, including woke ideology, must not run the state institutions; nor should the state institution run the religious institution.

This used to be common sense for churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues, but it should also be remembered for the green and red clerics of cultural Marxism. The alternative is for us and our children to be trapped like yellow minions in a culture undergoing ideological capture—tyrannical and unaccountable.”

Next time: What’s Wrong With America’s ‘Elites’?