Jeff McAlister

“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain?” — Psalm 2:1

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

In the 1830s, the French aristocrat and visitor to America Alexis de Tocqueville made the following observations: “In the United States there is no religious hatred because religion is universally respected and no sect is predominant; there is no class hatred because the people is everything, and nobody dares to struggle against it; and finally, there is no public distress to exploit because the physical state of the country offers such an immense scope to industry that man has only to be left to himself to work marvels.”

Tocqueville was an astute chronicler of America’s strengths and weaknesses, and yet nearly two centuries later, the strengths he lists here are thrown into doubt.

Consider our current situation: We are “governed” by a president in steep mental decline, the puppet of a leftist elite who do not have our best interests at heart.

His chief opponent is an ex-president who has been the repeated target of a political prosecution by the current administration, a man with an outsized ego who could easily build his campaign on personal vengeance.

Major media outlets, Fortune 500 companies, a majority of public schools and universities and even the U.S. military are in thrall to a “woke” ideology mimicking Marxism, but replacing class with race and gender identity.

Even churches are not immune to this juggernaut.

Meanwhile, we are $33 trillion in debt, our southern border is porous, our youth are dumbed down by smartphones, AI threatens to make human creativity irrelevant and the World Economic Forum in Davos is busily designing a world in which we will own nothing and will nonetheless “be happy.”

In addition, the nadir to which modern education has sunk has been made painfully obvious in the reaction to the brutal assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians. The response by a disturbing number of students and faculty at our major universities was to cheer on the terrorists, revealing a toxic anti-Semitism under the cover of wokeness. The beheading of children and similar atrocities by Hamas did not move them.

Add to these woes the increasing number of Americans on both ends of the political divide who, if recent polling is to be credited, have given up on conventional democratic methods and are eager to impose their will by naked force. Such are the makings of a tempest which may not end well for us.

Writing in The New Criterion, Daniel McCarthy observes that global progressivism is “leading the United States and the West … toward a society of strangers, in which no common bond of religion or national loyalty characterizes the human beings within a given set of jurisdictional borders.”

This is a sobering statement, because a society of strangers is a society of people with next to nothing in common.

We should continue to resist despair, but we would do well to ponder the challenge once posed by T. S. Eliot: “The question of questions, which no political philosophy can escape … is simply this: What is Man? What are his limitations? What is his misery and what is his greatness? And what, finally, his destiny?”

Our own answers to these queries may make all the difference between life and death in the road now before us.