Many decades ago, still a teenager, I found my way to Santa Monica, California from the high desert of West Texas for a promised job. It was love at first sight. While the job never materialized, Southern California was a magical landscape, and at the time, a hotbed of everything that made the American dream the envy of the world. It was beguiling, charming and demanding.
No one cared about you, your pedigree or background. They cared about your talent and drive. They cared about ideas and determination. Every waiter and waitress, every bellhop, and every kid like me was looking for the opportunity to plug into the sockets of power that promised success in return for hard work and responsibility.
The hills above the city were exotic and unique, dotted with beautiful homes both old and new, unique locations, ranches and estates – the chaparral landscape dense with the odor of plants and scrubs basking in the sunshine. The magnificent Pacific ocean’s expanse was like the bluest crystal to the west, so inviting and yet so risky for those who mistook beauty for tranquility.
In the years since, though I never lived in California, I’ve traveled up and down her coasts many times, into her cities and inland treasures – and only grew fonder of this spectacular land.
Now many of those stunningly beautiful LA hills are reduced to smoking rubble. Dozens are dead and 10,000 homes are gone in a horrifying, heart-wrenching tragedy.
Why it happened is straightforward. The blinding hubris of unaccountable political power in the state was wedded to complete functional incompetence and operational stupidity. It was a very avoidable disaster, but for the elected officials hired to maintain the core duties of government – reliable public infrastructure and public safety.
How it happened is the larger story of the West’s drift into the intellectual ghettos of Marx’s class dogma, Nietzsche’s nihilism, and Marcuse’s rejection of moral boundaries and embrace of sensual liberation that have swept through the cultural, educational, religious and political institutions across the US, the UK and Europe.
The responsibilities of serious governing across the US and the Western world been subsumed by these godless ideologies, their commonalities overpowering their differences for the radical New Left who for decades now have commanded the political functions and the center mass of public and social institutions. The mingling of these radical concepts is built upon the shared, ageless idea of a world devoid of moral order and certain truth.
Marx proclaimed God an opiate for the masses employed by the capitalists and overlords as a materialist tool. Nietzsche, a proto authoritarian theorist for fascists, Stalinist’s and Maoists alike, famously pronounced God dead. The purge of the Western concepts of personal freedom and individual responsibility bound in the Judeo-Christian ethos can’t coexist with the New Leftism that built the post-Vietnam radical movement inspired by Marcuse.
If the question of our material existence has been solved by these ideologies as the radical’s claim – then why has such knowledge never produced food, or a watt of energy, or moved great loads thousands of miles? Why has it never built a house or building, or put out a fire or saved a life? Why can’t they maintain, much less build a civilization?
These ideologies only know how to take or steal that which they cannot produce. Festering in the poverty of ideas and philosophies that can never be righted with the moral and physical girders on which all Creation rests, the only assessment of these ideas must be measured by the effectiveness of their governance.
The staggering incompetence of modern liberalism to maintain, much less improve the core requirements of civilization is everywhere in evidence – hence the political earthquakes rocking the Western world where ineptitude and indifference, masquerading as social progress, is being challenged by what the left derides as “populism.”
But demanding the maintenance or improvement of core functions of public safety, infrastructure, healthcare delivery, education and energy in a city, state or nation, is hardly historical populism – it’s common sense. It is the realization on the part of working-class citizens that certain functions are left to the government, and that liberal governments have routinely prioritized other goals instead. The fire in Los Angeles is only the most recent example of this indifference and incompetence, close on the heels of the horrific response to Hurricane Helene.
Another example will be leaving national office in the US in only days.
Behind the Biden presidency is a trail of economic and social destruction as well. Instead of protecting Americans from skyrocketing inflation that hurt the poor the most, billions were printed and poured into foreign adventures of dubious purpose. Instead of promoting employment and jobs for existing citizens, the borders were thrown open to anyone – even if they had no interest in “being” American – who simply walked across a border regardless of the cost to existing citizens. Social comity was blown up with the advancement of engineered racial tension, emptying the jails, and truly bizarre assertions that the certain science of chromosomes could bend to the whims of gender and men could compete against women in sports without advantage. Instead of promoting competence, new demands were made that equity superseded the historical standard of equality. The mediocre would succeed the excellent.
This is how civilizations end. History is replete with examples of great nations falling to the weakest among them. The insane are treated as sane. The monsters become saviors. Nothing works because the makers are overwhelmed by political process. Finally, the basic duties of collective living become burdens. This is how the West slides into extinction, unwilling and finally incapable of maintaining the core duties of civilization. The ghosts of ancient Rome snicker at us from the mist of centuries gone by.
If a new Trump presidency and the energized populist nationalist movements across the West that are overturning the radical left governments can turn this tide – if they can reinstate the core responsibilities of governance and the historic ethos that drive them – they will have saved civilization for another generation.
