How America got lost: A look back at the past 50 years

How did we get here?”

That is a question I have asked myself a thousand times. When I look at the America we live in today and compare it to the America I grew up in 50 years ago, I am heartsick. And I am not alone.

Were there problems 50 years ago? Yes, of course. In particular, there were issues of racism that continued to plague the nation as a result of the scourge of slavery even though it had been abolished 100 years before. Other forms of discrimination also existed and were the subject of continuing reform efforts.

But in almost every other major aspect of life, we were better off then than we are today. Our economy was better. Our families were stronger. Our morals were firm. Our military was respected both at home and abroad. Our education was the best in the world.

Today, everything has been turned on its head — and what’s worse, plenty of people are glad of that. Our weaker economy has been a boon to the Third World and those who promote “social justice” at the expense of the American worker. Our weakened families have been a boon to government control of our personal decisions. Our weakened morals have allowed liberty to be mistaken for license, resulting in an ever more narcissistic culture than panders to appetites instead of aspiring to greatness. Our weakened military gives strength to those who would leave us at the mercy of their misguided conception of the goodness of human nature. Our weakened education system has compounded all of this by failing to teach our citizens the truth, leaving them untethered from their own heritage and adrift in a sea of moral relativism.

So — “How did we get here?”

That question can never be answered definitively, but it does seem to have its roots sometime in the last century when the globe was divided into the free world and the totalitarian world. Leading the former was the United States with assistance from Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia and other Western democracies. Leading the latter were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Communist China, in alignment with numerous small dictatorships throughout Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Such a division of nations cannot be doubted by anyone who has studied history. The global geopolitics of the 20th century was a chess game in which many nations were pawns that moved back and forth between the two camps. But the 20th century itself can be divided in two as well, and the strategic position of the United States shifted dramatically sometime in the middle of the century from a defensive posture against anti-American ideologies to a position of smug assurance that America had nothing to fear from its enemies.

Exactly when or how that happened would take a book-length exposition to make clear, but let’s draw an imaginary dividing line sometime around 1950 and see what we find.

Before World War II, the United States was plainly opposed to tyranny and considered it a threat not just to the world, but to its own republic. Thus, we had committees in Congress whose sole purpose was to root out enemies of the American way of life. The famous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in one form or another dated back to 1934, was dedicated to exposing subversives in our homeland whose intent was to attack “the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution.”

Now, of course, the idea of a Committee on Un-American Activities would itself be considered by many to be un-American, not to mention unconstitutional. That in and of itself should be evidence that some kind of a sea change happened in the mid-20th century. Whether this change was a result of intention or simply inertia is again a topic too large to be settled in a short weekly column; however, it is possible to establish the world view that made the change acceptable.

Prior to 1945, the safety of the West from foreign enemies was in doubt. Thus, despite the isolationist forces that remained strong in our country, the United States went to war both in World War I and World War II to oppose empire building that could eventually affect our own position in the world.

Between those two wars, as Marxism developed into Bolshevism and finally Stalinism, it became apparent to many American leaders that the communist ideology was not only dangerous when espoused by our enemies abroad, but was also contrary to our constitutional republic’s ideals and thus a potential danger from within as well. The emergence of Hitler’s National Socialism (aka Nazism) created a new threat that also had its domestic component intent on subverting the Constitution.

Americans who cherished their system of government — and the liberties and rights which it protected — took seriously the oath of office which they had sworn — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same [emphasis added].”

This oath explicitly acknowledged that the Constitution — and the government which it established — could have enemies who lived AMONG US, and who presumably could well be citizens. The Constitution therefore assumes that federal officials are empowered IN FACT to take action to DEFEND the Constitution against its enemies, even if they are citizens and regardless of their race, religion or any other defining characteristic. 

Yet today we are confronted with a federal bureaucracy and Congress that are not only sluggish to defend the Constitution against its enemies, but go so far as to offer them protections so that they may enjoy virtual immunity as they seek to destroy our way of life. Thus, freedom of speech has been perverted into a shield for sedition, and protections intended only for citizens have even been granted to enemy combatants.

Indeed, today it is part of mainstream thought to believe that anyone should be welcomed in America whether they are enemies of the Constitution or not. This is presumed to show just how marvelously open-minded we are, as opposed to those countries and cultures which zealously protect themselves against destruction.

Perhaps that point is instructive. No sentient being could possibly put a higher value on open-mindedness than on avoiding self-destruction. Therefore we have to assume that Americans, as a whole, at some point lost the ability to conceive of their country’s destruction. Without that consequence to consider, open-mindedness is of course preferable to narrow-mindedness. But with destruction in the mix, open-mindedness loses its allure quite rapidly.

So why is it that in the midst of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and with the memory of World War II still fresh in the national consciousness, that Americans no longer feared any threat to their way of life or their Constitution. Why did the American public presume that our country, our system and our way of life were inviolate — that they could not be corrupted by the influence of socialists, communists or other totalitarian ideologies?

My best guess is that the American military primacy established by World War II, and confirmed by our devastating nuclear arsenal, resulted in just such a feeling of invulnerability. Sure we had real problems in a land war in Southeast Asia, but our homeland never came under attack, and we knew that if worse came to worst, we could always drop The Bomb and be done with it. That lulled most of us into a false sense of security that allowed the nation to drift into a Rip Van Winkle slumber that lasted for half a century or more.

So, to answer my own question — “How did we get here?” — I guess the honest answer is that we sleep-walked into the 21st century. Now the question is, “When will we wake up?”