By Michael Anton, Compact

Recently, I was asked to make the “pessimistic case for the future.” I present instead more of a “pessimistic take on the present.” The future, while imminent, is obscure. The present, by contrast, is knowable. This is also not so much a “case” replete with exhaustive evidence—there isn’t space for that, nor is there a need—as a quick tour through our present hell. No one who thinks “everything is fine” will be persuaded otherwise. Those who see the seriousness of our problems hardly need proof. Nor have I made any attempt to be evenhanded, much less philosophically detached. My account is perforce one-sided. I hope it is wrong.

Trending Down for Two Generations

Think of the fortunes of the United States—if you will, of the whole West—like a stock-price chart. There will be a lot of ups and downs, positive and negative spikes. But zoom out and the trendline is clear. In conventional terms, the United States peaked around 1965. One may quibble over that date. Why not the moon landing? Victory in World War II or the Cold War? Fine. When do you think our political, moral, and spiritual health were at their peak? When was our power, prestige, wealth, cohesion, competence, and confidence—on balance and in the aggregate—highest? (For instance, gross domestic product was lower and infant mortality higher in 1965, but by those other metrics, we were healthier.)

Whatever date you pick, part of the answer must be: not today, and not recently. The great exception might appear to be the “Reagan Era,” which I might amend to the “Reagan-Clinton Era,” to capture both our emergence from malaise and our post-Cold War decade or so of unchallenged preeminence. This period was sold to us at the time, and interpreted by its partisans ever since, as the restoration of the American spirit, a burial of the twin albatrosses of Vietnam Syndrome and stagflation. In hindsight, though, it was one of those spikes on the chart. Most, if not all, causes of our pre-Reagan anomie have returned with a vengeance, and are accompanied by many more causes for concern.

The Constitution Is All but Dead

We Americans are supposed to govern ourselves via a constitution that rests on a specific understanding of natural right (right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse exist by nature) and natural rights (government’s job is to secure people’s God-given rights to life, liberty, property, etc.). The Constitution specifically declares and delimits the purposes of government and its powers, and it specifies how we the people choose the officers of the state, who are supposed to exercise those powers.

We still choose, sort of, but that hardly matters, because the people we nominally elect do not hold real power. And when they do, they often use it for unconstitutional ends. America’s real rulers are not the constitutional officers we nominally elect, and certainly not the American people, whom our understanding of political legitimacy asserts to be sovereign. They are, rather, a network of unelected bureaucrats, revolving-door Cabinet and subcabinet officials, corporate-tech-finance senior management, “experts” who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police them.

Add to this the routine, repeated violations of our explicitly guaranteed rights—Big Tech censoring free speech, big cities denying the right of self-defense, the government itself violating the right to be secure in one’s person, home, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures—and it becomes more than a stretch to describe the United States as any longer a “constitutional republic.”

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