All indications are that those in power have no intention of allowing Americans to live normally—which for Americans means to live freely—again. And sadly, just as in Galileo’s time, the root of our problem lies in “the experts” and vested academic interests.
If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it and place us under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.
We can see today the totalitarian impulse among powerful forces in our politics and culture. We can see it in the rise and imposition of doublethink, and we can see it in the increasing attempt to rewrite our history.
We should respond to the COVID virus rationally: protect the vulnerable, treat the people who get infected compassionately, develop a vaccine. And while doing these things we should bring back the civilization that we had so that the cure does not end up being worse than the disease.
History will record that America’s China policy from the 1970s until recently was very costly because it involved a great deal of self-deception about the nature of the Chinese regime and the men who were running it.
The coronavirus lockdowns demonstrated our leaders’ ignorance of economic interdependence. After the riots, that ignorance has been shown to run far deeper. It is an ignorance about government’s most fundamental obligation: to safeguard life, liberty, and property. It is an ignorance about human nature and human striving.
Going forward, our best leaders will eschew political gamesmanship and work to control our borders, fix our public health agencies, and end our dependence on China and other foreign countries for goods that are essential to our national health and security. We must prepare ourselves to face the next pandemic without surrendering our way of life.
More and more areas of American life have been withdrawn from voters’ democratic control and delivered up to the bureaucratic and judicial emergency mechanisms of civil rights law. Civil rights law has become a second constitution, with powers that can be used to override the Constitution of 1787.
Colleges today are increasingly collections of hostile identity groups, each clamoring against the crimes of the other. Students are not invited to step outside themselves, to step outside their own time, and to look at things as they have been understood by the best over time. If they did that, they would then learn and grow not by invention but by discovery.
Ancient authors from Plato to Tacitus have suggested that affluence combined with leisure creates a laxity that leads to the kind of societal and institutional disintegration we are currently seeing. Another major ingredient is the failure of our education system to offer disinterested instruction, following from the post-1960s takeover by the Left of our colleges and universities.
