Is America Doomed?

An Optimistic Case from Fabius Minarchus (Well, Optimistic for this Blog Anyway)

Editor’s Note: I hope that all of the readership of the Contemplations on the Tree of Woe celebrated the New Year in fine style! We shall begin 2024 with a dose of hope and optimism.

Two weeks ago I ran a guest column entitled “The Great Satan and the Last Man” by Ahnaf Habib in which Mr. Habib laid out his case for America’s imminent doom. At the close of his column, I appended this note:

If any of the regular readership would like to pen a rebuttal to Mr. Habib’s essay, offering a more optimistic case for the future of the United States, I would happily publish it! Just don’t make it too optimistic, because this is of course the Tree of Woe and not the Shrub of Joy.

Substacker Fabius Minarchus has risen to the challenge. The… somewhat… optimistic opinions that follow are, of course, those of the Mr. Minarchus and do not reflect my own world-weary despair.

The Democrats have run against God, Motherhood, apple pie, and the American flag – and won elections. They even won while running brain damaged zombies for both President and U.S. Senator.  The rot is deep.

Either America hates itself, or the ballot stuffing is immense. Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by 7 million votes even as crime raged and left wing rioters were in open insurrection. Compare that with 1972 election where Nixon got over 60% of the vote or 1968 where the combination of Nixon and Wallace got nearly 57% of the popular vote. The rot runs deep.

But at least today’s Anti Patriotic Left aren’t the peace loving hippies of yore. No! They have now embraced censorship, secret police, and plans for world domination. Fight four major wars at one time? No problem, thanks to our new Monty Python Military!

And we get to print the money to pay for it, thanks to the magic of Modern Monetary Theory. Our leadership is literally insane.

And between Trump’s bad manners and RFK Jr. splitting the populist vote the whackdoodles running our country into the ground have a good shot a re-election. It’s easy to believe that America is doomed.

Because it is doomed – unless we do something about it. A lot of something. A woeful amount of something. So much something that it’s tempting flee the country flee to Argentina.

Or maybe Mars.

The former is a stopgap. A national socialist superpower is rising in the East. Even Argentina is not safe. And as for Mars, the transportation cost will be huge, and you better not forget to bring all your essentials.

Fighting back hard, smart, and starting now is the safest and easiest option.

And unless these truly are the scheduled End Times, victory is still feasible, albeit a great deal of work. By the end of this rant I will reveal several means to leverage our efforts. 

1. Don’t Rely on the Pendulum

But first a message to the Cheerleader School of Republicanism: America has not swung to the Left. America has collapsed to the Left. The wacky election totals are the result of the Left taking over nearly every power center in the country: the once mainline Protestant churches, the universities, the public schools, Hollywood, Wall St. and now even the military is going woke. Pressure has been building for years. Witness the near success of Bernie Sanders. Between assisted voting and Trump’s bad manners, the dam broke in 2020.

And don’t rely on inherent American greatness to save the day. America has been great for reasons, and those reasons are going away.

America began as an unusually Christian country. Several of the original colonies were founded by religious dissidents. Those colonies were thus dominated by Revealed Preference Christians, not people  practicing Christianity just to be respectable. Their faith and diligent Bible study gave us a high trust society and extra Divine Providence – which are now being squandered by Identity Politics and Sacred Sexual Deviants.

America had a huge natural resource/population ratio. Indeed, our resource/population ratio is still one of the highest in the world, but the frontier is long closed, and the current administration is working hard to level the playing field by importing millions of poor people.

America had a large landed yeoman class. All government is ultimately military government. We made limited government democracy work because we had a militia based military. And we could make a militia based military work because we had a large body of men we could trust with military weapons. They could be trusted because they had ownership in the system and an ethos of self sufficiency. A society of renters, specialists, and welfare recipients is less capable of self-government. Read some Heinlein.

America had an excellent business environment. The U.S. was an early adopter of easy incorporation. Tariffs provided protection for infant industries; the federal government was small and funded largely by land sales and taxes on the slave plantations of the South. Today, we have high taxes, subsidized outsourcing, crushing regulation, and lawfare by environmental activists. China is kicking our butts at the game of business.

America had some wise leadership. The Founders weren’t metaphysical superheroes, but they were classically educated and well versed in Biblical Law. Our deeply Protestant culture made them People of the Book, vs. devout followers of human leadership. This wisdom and mindset went into our Constitution. Today, you can get an Ivy League degree in the classics without learning Greek or Latin, and you can get more Old Testament wisdom from reading Heinlein novels than you can get from most pulpits. And today, a Constitutional Scholar is an expert in lawyering around the Constitution.

America was a meritocracy. While Europe was still groveling to aristocrats of inherited greatness, America celebrated the Self Made Man. Excellence was often rewarded. We were able to drain Europe of ambitious geniuses and go-getters as a result. Today, our leaders celebrate Equity, which is the opposite of excellence. And soon, our military will be sending its Very Special Forces to be massacred by our enemies.

American greatness is no longer a given. We need to re create the conditions that led to our past successes.

2. What Won’t Work

Before I get to what needs to be done, let’s dispose of what won’t work.

Voting harder won’t work. You only get one vote per race – unless you are willing to risk serious jail time. And besides, simply electing Republicans won’t get the job done. More than half of Republican Incorporated is clueless. While electing a clueless Republican is generally better than a woke Democrat, it’s not good enough.

Exposing the Conspiracy won’t work. The public has already been jaded by too many wacky conspiracy theories to act on those conspiracy theories which are actually true. This is the case even with the conspirators come out of the closet – in more ways than one. Yes, there are people talking about George Soros’ massive funding of pro crime DAs, but does that talk have any effect? Has Soros been arrested? Have any campaign finance laws been changed? Some of the pro crime DAs have been exposed, but they would have been just as easily been exposed for their pro crime activities without any knowledge of George Soros. Finally, as I have written before, if space aliens were to beam up all your “favorite” conspirators to take them to Gay Valhalla, little would change. Our midwit DEI consultants, lefty public school teachers, Marxist professors, and Hollywood homosexuals don’t need orders from the World Economic Forum in order to continue destroying America.

The Steve Sailer Strategy won’t work. If the Republican Party becomes just the Party of White People, it’s game over. Look at the demographics of the younger generations. And then look at a by state electoral map of the United States. Some of the Bluest states are also the Whitest: think Oregon, Minnesota, Vermont… Meanwhile, the populous states of Red America are among the Blackest. Think Dixie.

Breaking up the United States won’t work. Few Red state are all that Red. Nearly all have Blue cities, often very Blue. And just how Red are the younger generations in the Red states?  Furthermore, we might need to stay united in order to stave off conquest. China has graduated from Communist basket case to National Socialist superpower. China is building its economy and military at a rate comparable to Nazi Germany leading up to World War II. But China has a much higher fraction of the world population to work with. The time to use soft power to persuade China to join the liberal world order has long passed. We lost it to high crime, homelessness, and over the top homosexuality. We are no longer a shining City on a Hill.

3. What Needs to be Done

At the very least, for America to remain America, America needs to:

• Teach the younger generations to appreciate liberty and capitalism.

• Replace Equity with Excellence in the critical sectors of our society.

• Make patriotism the norm again.

• Restore marriage as a respected and viable institution.

• Give the morally earnest moral license to protect their neighborhoods and nation.

• Have a Christian revival, including some real Christianity for our intellectual classes.

• Do something about our excessive insanity and sexual deviance. Westboro Baptist Church has a point, albeit rudely made.

This is is both long and incomplete. But worse yet, each goal has multiple layers. The rot is deep.

Let’s take marriage. We could blame the decline of marriage on the decline in Christianity. Or we could blame Hollywood, cable TV, and online porn. We could blame No Fault Divorce, feminism, or the modern welfare state. And we’d be right.

But not right enough! The real root of our moral decline is deep within our biology and defective economy. Biology screams out to do marital acts long before our society says you are ready for marriage. Marrying a high school or college sweetheart after graduation is economically perilous these days. A decade of debauchery before marriage has become the expected norm. To make marriage the expected intro to marital acts, we need good paying jobs for young adults. And we need affordable housing in family friendly neighborhoods. This country needs to:

• End subsidized outsourcing.

• Reverse credential inflation.

• Teach practical arts at an earlier age.

• Let future professors and professionals get started on their specialty in high school.

• Have a tax code which favors labor over financial manipulation.

• Have a tax code which allows couples to focus on family formation while young and then catch up on retirement saving after their children have grown up.

There is no single solution to solving our sexual morality problem. We have multiple layers of rot to deal with.

How about teaching the young to reject the siren song of socialism? It would certainly help if we could fire the commie twinks who infest our schools and universities. But that would not be enough. Our youth are rejecting capitalism and the American way because capitalism and the American Way are rejecting them! Housing is too expensive. Entry level jobs stink. The 1968 minimum wage would be $10.00 or $13.92 (depending on occupation) in today's dollars according to the Consumer Price Index, and I suspect the CPI of cheating. 

This country needs to:

• Teach the horrors of real world communism. 

• Teach the youth how to thrive in a free society. Basic business courses should be part of the core curriculum.

• Stop subsidizing the Already Rich.

• Tax rent-seeking more than earned income.

• End subsidized outsourcing--

Wait a second! Most of what needs to be done is the same for reversing the Sexual Revolution. Task list shortened!

How about restoring patriotism? We used to teach it by rote, forced ceremonies, and downplaying our nation's past sins. These are no longer viable strategies.  Instead, this country needs to:

• Teach world history. Our history is pretty grim by modern standards, but compared to the rest of the pre-industrial world, we did some good things. And perhaps the biggest thing that we and the rest of the West did was create the industrial world! The steam engine and the electric motor did as much or more to fight slavery all the anti slavery moralizing.

• Have a true Ownership Society.  We need the Jeffersonian ideal of small farms, small business. Back when communism was a threat to our upper class, our government encouraged home ownership and preserved small family farms. Today, most small farms are merged or rented out, and Wall St. have figured out how to buy up single family homes at a profit.

• Have some antitrust measures. In a free society, employees should be free agents, not wage serfs. And renters should be customers.

• Reform the criminal justice system. Land of the Free and Home of the World's Biggest Prison System is a poor mix. 

• Restore Citizen Privilege. Anti discrimination law and low bottom tax brackets should be for citizens only.

As for that over the top gay thing, yes, this country needs to stop sanctifying sodomy, and it needs to get the groomers out of the public schools. But that is not enough!  Something chemical is going on! The amount of gayness today far exceeds any once repressed demand. Yes, permission can pull some people out of The Closet, and yes, groomers can imprint the vulnerable by encouraging disgusting acts at an intensely hormonal life stage. But overwhelming evidence suggests that more people are "born that way" than in the past. Even frogs are joining the transgender craze -- without the aid of the Devil Mouse, Mattel, or corrupt kindergarten teachers.

4. So What can WE Do?

In the beginning of this rant I said it was our choice whether America falls or not. And by "our" I mean this corner of Substack. Yes, we can make the difference, even though we are overwhelmingly outgunned in terms of resources. We have strengths the Enemy lacks, and I'll show you how to leverage those strengths before I'm done here.

Team D (Demon/Democrat) has apparently overwhelming resources at its disposal:

• Nearly all universities

• The most powerful Wall St. firms

• Hollywood

• Civil service unions

• Most of the Deep State

• Most non profit foundations

• Converged churches

• A majority of the public schools

• Most of Silicon Valley

• The television networks

• Most legacy publishing houses

Meanwhile, Team R has:

• The Supreme Court

• Trifecta control of 22 states

• Talk radio domination

• The fossil fuel industry

• Some of the sincere Christian denominations

• Some remaining old family legacies

• Conservatism Inc.

Compared to these resources, what can we do to make any difference? The answer comes from looking at each team's weaknesses:

Team D's weaknesses:

• Team D gained its power largely be default. Team R mostly neglected the Long Game. Team D is fragile and emotionally unprepared to fight on its home turf. Look at their reaction to Twitter restoring free speech.

• Equity precludes Excellence -- or even basic competence.

• Team D is destroying the institutions it controls.

• Team D is utterly delusional. Narrative trumps data.

• Team D is up against our Constitution and our traditions.

• Team D is hurting its own base. Liberal cafetopias have been converted into polluted wastelands.

Team R also has a brain problem. Team R has gone from being the blue blood and business party to the party of people who work with their hands while listening to talk radio.¹ Meanwhile, nearly all the good universities have gone woke. Getting a good education without getting brainwashed is an ordeal reminiscent of escaping the drug dystopia of Ira Levin's This Perfect Day. 

Moreover, what brain trust Team R has is geared to a Republican Coalition from an earlier era. Prior to talk radio and Trump, the political map looked like this:

War, jailing druggies, handing out tax cuts to the rich, and making life easier for America's corporations. They are not prepared to support the new Trumpy Republican Party. Populism needs a think tank.

And we're it. The brain power here is easily competitive with that of Heritage, CATO, and The Leadership Institute.

Team R needs a coherent populist platform, something like Tree of Woe's Physiocratic Platform. And it needs think tank quality articles to back populist positions, such as Woe's case against free trade. The credential heavy Deep State will not obey a populist elected government without an academic quality Narrative to back it up.

And those 22 R dominated state governments need to need to act now to stay Red. That means raising Red children. That means some serious education reforms. Our populist think tank needs to provide the training of the next wave of candidates, staffers and political appointees to embrace and implement the required strategies.

Team R needs a new braintrust, and we're it.

And Team R may need a new donor base as well. Wall St. and Corporate America have gone woke. Republicans in the lower right of the political map above have or will walk out of the Republican Party if it stays populist. But as I have already shown, we need the Republican Party to stay populist if this country is to return to its roots.

Fortunately, Team D is offering billions of dollars of business opportunities for enterprising reactionaries. Who wants to own the next beer empire? It's just barley water and branding, and the woke beer companies have just throw away decades of hard won brand equity.

Ditto for retail, entertainment, and online services. Opportunity abounds!

Yes, we are talking real work and risks, but the rewards are enormous. If a few of us succeed, we can turn our virtual thinktank into something more official and prestigious. And we can make candidates desperate for donations listen to some important seminars before they get their checks.

On the other hand, intellectuals aren't necessarily good at business, so we cannot depend on some of us hitting the jackpot. Fortunately, intellectuals can be very effective conspirators, as the Communists have proven repeatedly. Better yet, one of the commie conspirators converted to Roman Catholicism and wrote a short book on how the Communist conspiracy worked. Get yourself a copy of Dedication and Leadership by Douglass Hyde. Better yet, get several copies and give some away. I did.

The basic technique is simple enough. Any volunteer organization is starved for volunteers who actually do the work. The Communists would send members to join such groups and gain influence -- by being willing to do the jobs others weren't.

A quarter century ago I used this book to influence the Libertarian Party. After a bit a diligent lit dropping and whatnot, I found myself in a multi hour conversation with a former national chair. A year and a bit later, I was on the Libertarian National Committee. The techniques work.

True, influencing the Republican National Committee would be far harder, but we don't need to influence the RNC directly. Remember those 22 Team R controlled states? There's plenty they can do to reform education and break up Blue Zones. Influencing the Republican Party at the state level is orders of magnitude easier. Just be willing to knock on some doors and work some phones before pitching the ideas of our virtual think tank.

The leaders will come to you. The hunger for real volunteers is so intense they will go to other parties looking for volunteers! Seriously. I was part of a very active county LP affiliate where the core volunteers met weekly to plot and pontificate over beer and burritos.  Activists and candidates from the two major political parties would often join us for beer and BS. I got to grill a federal judge who was running for Congress about civil asset forfeiture vs. the 7th amendment. (He mumbled something about "common law courts" but couldn't give me a straight answer what the difference between common law and civil law was. I never did find out until I asked our host here years later. We have the think tank!)

You will also get an official position in short order. When my Libertarian group switched over to supporting the Ron Paul R3VOLution, members of our group easily got seats at lower level Republican conventions. Even the major parties have more party offices than they have volunteers to fill them. Showing up is half the battle.

Ye can probably do better by being actual Republicans.

If you live in a Blue zone, you can play the same game to influence other organizations. There is some overlap in values between old school liberalism and populism. Deborghificating the Left is an important task. If I lived on the Left Coast, I'd get involved in some environmental organizations. Letting bums and criminals take over the core cities is not eco friendly! And eco hippies can be handy allies for getting the gay chemicals out of the food and water supplies.

The Communist Transmission Belt Strategy is incredibly powerful. We can harness it to our own ends. And for those who believe that stealing a strategy from the Communists constitutes dangerous dabbling in the Black Arts, fear not. The Communists stole the strategy from the early Christians.

Luke 14:8  When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him; 

Luk 14:9  And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. 

Luk 14:10  But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. 

Luk 14:11  For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. 

1Co 9:19  For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. 

1Co 9:20  And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; 

1Co 9:21  To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. 

1Co 9:22  To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

Eph 6:5  Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; 

Eph 6:6  Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; 

Eph 6:7  With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: 

Eph 6:8  Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. 

Eph 6:9  And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him. 

And speaking of Christianity, our problems appear to have a strong spiritual component. We are seeing the fruits of a Post Christian America. Natural Church Ladies are scolding Puritanical Satanists instead.  This is not fun.²

And here is the hardest task of all: missionary work to America's elite. The old Protestant denominations attended by our old elite have gone low church and lite. They need to be repaired or replaced. If the latter, whether they should be replaced by a non converged High Church (Greek Orthodox?) or yet another new Protestant denomination is a difficult question.

But it is an important question. If these are indeed the End Times, and we thus fail to save America, then Treasure in Heaven is going to be worth a lot more than a ticket to Mars.

Editor’s Note: I take it back! Actually some of the views of Fabius Minarchus do reflect my own. Et toi? Be sure to leave a comment to let us know whether Mr. Minarchus has persuaded you that there’s cause for hope, or whether you have joined Mr. Habib in staring into an Abyss of American doom.

1. Yes, there are airheaded Ivy League graduates and intellectual truck drivers. I have known both. But there are some situations where a quality formal higher education is required.

2. See the ninth Screwtape Letter.