At the Risk of Abusing...

... the Fair Use doctrine, here are more than a few quotes from one of Mark Steyn's latest columns.

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

[...]

Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—one with a sustained commitment to liberty and democracy—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and, indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state), uniregal. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.

[...]

Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world. It starts with the money—it always does. But the money is only the symptom. We wouldn’t be this broke if we hadn’t squandered our inheritance in a more profound sense.

My purpose, of course, is to encourage you to read the whole thing.  Steyn hits upon multiple themes in his dark piece but not one single point in this column is anything other than true.  Those of us on the right recognize Steyn's points as the root causes of our perceived decline.  Those of us on the right understand what must be done to reverse course and get us back on track, the outcome of the recent mid-terms seem to suggest that MOST of us "get it."  But the fight will be long and hard... it takes a lot of time and space to turn an aircraft carrier around.  And so it is with entrenched leftists and the institutions they've commandeered.  But we know what to do.

As for me... I'm simply grateful that I was raised in a time when Classical American values were in vogue, when elementary school children were required to read the writings of Dead White Men and when the Anglosphere was acknowledged to be right, good, and proper... if not the very source and essence of all that is good.

Lemme close with a quote from my favorite poet: "So let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late."