A once-muscular can-do nation is becoming a flabby can't-do crippled giant.Today comes a jeremiad from historian Victor Davis Hanson on much the same subject, written for the Hoover Institution. VDH compares what brought down the Byzantine empire to what is happening in today's America, and concludes:
What would once have been seen as radical neglect of our existential problems is now the normal way of getting by one more day. What destroys civilizations are not, as popularly advertised, plagues, global warming, or hostile tribes on the horizon, as much as self-indulgence, self-delusion—and, finally, abject paralysis.Remember Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian future society, described in the short story "Harrison Bergeron," which created equality by handicapping all who were not handicapped? That's us today, obsessed with comforting the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, in Findley Peter Dunne's memorable phrase.
It's a form of mass hysteria called "progressivism."
