美国正奔向系统崩溃吗？
Victor Davis Hanson 是斯坦福大学胡佛研究所的古典主义者和历史学家，也是《第二次世界大战：第一次全球冲突是如何进行和赢得的》（The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won）一书的作者。
Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?
Heading into 2022 elections, Americans should consider Venezuela as a warning: a once prosperous country that fell prey to self-inflicted problems. Pictured: Downtown Caracas, Venezuela. (Photo: Elizabeth Fernandez/Getty Images)
In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a “systems collapse.” The term describes the sudden inability of once prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it.
Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities. They feel their streets are unsafe. Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably. Every day things stop working. The government turns from reliable to capricious, if not hostile.
Consider contemporary Venezuela. By 2010, the once well-off oil-exporting country was mired in a self-created mess. Food became scarce, crime ubiquitous.
Radical socialism, nationalization, corruption, jailing opponents, and the destruction of constitutional norms were the culprits.
Between 2009 and 2016, a once relatively stable Greece nearly became a Third World country. So did Great Britain in its socialist days of the 1970s.
Joe Biden’s young presidency may already be leading the United States into a similar meltdown.
Hard-left “woke” ideology has all but obliterated the idea of a border. Millions of impoverished foreigners are entering the United States illegally—and during a pandemic without either COVID-19 tests or vaccinations.
The health bureaucracies have lost credibility as official communiques on masks, herd and acquired immunity, vaccinations, and comorbidities apparently change and adjust to perceived political realities.
After decades of improving race relations, America is regressing into a pre-modern tribal society.
Crime soars. Inflation roars. Meritocracy is libeled and so we are governed more by ideology and tribe.
The soaring prices of the stuff of life—fuel, food, housing, health care, transportation—are strangling the middle class.
Millions stay home, content to be paid by the state not to work. Supply shortages and empty shelves are the new norm.
Nineteenth-century-style train robberies are back. So is 1970s urban violence, replete with looting, carjackings, and random murdering of the innocent.
After the Afghanistan debacle, we have returned to the dark days following defeat in Vietnam, when U.S. deterrence abroad was likewise shattered, and global terrorism and instability were the norms abroad.
Who could have believed a year ago that America would now beg Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil—as we pulled our own oil leases, and canceled pipelines and oil fields?
Our path to systems collapse is not due to an earthquake, climate change, a nuclear war, or even the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, most of our maladies are self-inflicted. They are the direct result of woke ideologies that are both cruel and antithetical to traditional American pragmatism.
Hard-left district attorneys in our major cities refuse to charge thousands of arrested criminals—relying instead on bankrupt social justice theories.
Law enforcement has been arbitrarily defunded and libeled. Police deterrence is lost, so looters, vandals, thieves, and murderers more freely prey on the public.
“Modern monetary theory” deludes ideologues that printing trillions of dollars can enrich the public, even as the ensuing inflation is making people poorer.
“Critical race theory” absurdly dictates that current “good” racism can correct the effects of past bad racism. A once tolerant, multiracial nation is resembling the factionalism of the former Yugoslavia.
The culprit again is a callous woke ideology that posits little value for individuals, prioritizing only the so-called collective agenda.
Woke’s trademark is “equity,” or a forced equality of result. Practically, we are becoming a comic-book version of victims and victimizers, with woke opportunists playacting as our superheroes.
Strangest in 2021 was the systematic attack on our ancient institutions, as we scapegoated our ancestors for our own incompetencies.
The woke have waged a veritable war against the 233-year-old Electoral College and the right of states to set their own balloting laws in national elections, the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year-old 50-state union.
The U.S. military, Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health until recently were revered. Their top echelons were staffed by career professionals mostly immune to the politics of the day.
Not now. These bureaus and agencies are losing public confidence and support. Citizens fear rather than respect Washington grandees who have weaponized politics ahead of public service.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former FBI heads like James Comey and Andrew McCabe, retired CIA Director John Brennan, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have all politicalized and vastly exceeded their professional purviews.
They sounded off in public fora as if they were elected legislators up for reelection. Some lied under oath. Others demonized critics. Most sought to become media darlings.
This governmental freefall is overseen by a tragically bewildered, petulant, and incompetent president. In his confusion, an increasingly unpopular President Joe Biden seems to believe his divisive chaos is working, belittling his political opponents as racist Confederate rebels.
As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, who will stop our descent into collective poverty, division, and self-inflicted madness?
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The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won – Oct. 17 2017
World War II was the most lethal conflict in human history. Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya.
The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory.
An authoritative new history of astonishing breadth, The Second World Wars offers a stunning reinterpretation of history's deadliest conflict.
