The Xenophile Historian

1933 to 2009

	First, an Explanation of the Title
	The New Deal
	New Deal II
	Getting Out of the Depression--The Hard Way
	The Gathering Storm
	Pearl Harbor
	World War II

	The Country Boy From Missouri
	Enter the Cold War
	China, Korea, and the Pumpkin Papers
	"I Like Ike"
	Life in the 1950s

	The "New Frontier"
	Who Really Killed JFK?
	The "Great Society"
	Nixon Returns
	"All the President's Men"

	Years of "Malaise"
	The Reagan Renaissance
	George Bush the Elder
	Clintonism

	The Clinton Scandals
	Islamism on the Move
	The Battle of the Ballots
	George Bush the Younger
	Angry Democrats, Drifting Republicans
	An Election Like No Other

	The American People Today
	Going South (and West)
	The Grey Generation
	The New Americans
	The Browning of America
	The Incredible Expanding Government
	Federal Spending
	Federal Agencies
	Taxes and Regulation
	The Cabinet
	From History to Current Events
	Go to Page Navigator

Since 1980, the number of American women who have not had children by the age of 40 has doubled. Still, the United States has a better than average growth rate, by Western standards. In the modern world, most developed countries (Japan, Russia and nearly all of Europe) have shrinking populations; for them the slowdown caused by the Industrial Revolution has gone too far. Besides the United States, the only advanced nations with a positive growth rate are Canada, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.

If all we needed to do was state that America has gotten more crowded, the discussion on demographics could end here. However, four related factors have changed the face of the nation: the movement of Americans out of population centers in the North, an aging population, the torrential increase in immigration, and new racial demographics. Let us now look at the effect from each of these:

Going South (and West)

Texas grew steadily throughout the twentieth century. Oil was discovered there in 1901, and for the next seventy years, Texas was the largest source of petroleum for the United States. The resulting drilling and refinery industry created many new jobs, and Americans from other states began moving there. After Interstate highways were built to connect Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc., Texas piled on new numbers even faster. With the 1990 census, Texas pulled ahead of New York, like California had already done, so the Lone Star State now ranks #2 in population. More recently, because of California's financial woes, Texas has replaced it as the most prosperous, most influential state.

In percentages, Florida's growth was even more dramatic; it achieved an almost thirty-fold increase in the twentieth century, compared with a nearly sevenfold increase for Texas. In 1900, Florida had half a million residents; not much happened there, and most of the state was covered by forests and swamps, fit only for alligators and Seminoles (I'm not talking about the teams from Florida's two leading universities!). The invention of air conditioning made life more bearable during the long, humid summers, and we noted a brief land rush in the 1920s, so the 1950 census showed population had grown to 2.7 million. Then came the Interstates, the decision to build America's space center at Cape Canaveral, and the construction of enough amusement parks to turn Florida into the world's most popular destination for tourists; all this led to a space-age boom. By the time of the 2000 census, Florida had nearly 16 million people, and a 2007 estimate put the total at more than 18 million. Thus, today only California, Texas and New York have more people, which explains why Florida's votes were so bitterly contested in the 2000 election.

Following every census, the US Census Bureau runs the numbers and comes up with something called the Mean Center of Population. This is a spot on a map of the United states where the same number of people live north of it as south of it, and there are just as many people west of it as east of it. By comparing where these population centers are, it is possible to see a few trends, the main one being the general westward movement over the course of American history. Whereas the 1790 population center was located in Kent County, MD, east of Chesapeake Bay, it has shifted over the decades through Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, following a path roughly parallel to the Ohio River. With the 1980 census the center point crossed the Mississippi, meaning that for the first time in history, there are more people living west of that great river than east of it. Since 1920 the population center has moved southwest, instead of due west; in 2010, it was next to Plato, a tiny community in southern Missouri.

Of course, when Americans moved to the Sunbelt, the Northern states paid the price. Their representation in Congress shrank, along with their populations, and because of the loss of industries, they suffered the most when the economy hit a bump. Cities like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Gary, East St. Louis, Buffalo, the Bronx, Newark, and Chicago's south side--all became symbols of high crime and urban decay. Detroit fared the worst of all; from 1970 onward, the three big automobile manufacturers based in Detroit (Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) found it increasingly difficult to compete with foreign auto companies like Volkswagen, Toyota and Hyundai. In 1950, Detroit had the highest per capita income of any major US city, but since then, bad government, bad policies and the loss of jobs have caused more than 50 percent of Detroit's population to move away; by 2007 its rank in per capita income had fallen to #62. Some immigrants moved in to take their place, but because they were poorer and less educated than those who left, all they did was create the largest Moslem community in the United States.⁽¹²⁴⁾ Consequently Detroit missed out completely on the economic booms under the Clinton and Bush administrations; you can't grow your economy while your community is shrinking. And because most of the people leaving were white, the remaining population was mostly black; nowadays it seems that any black racist, prone to conspiracy theories, can get elected to the city government. By 2009, Michigan had the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 12.9%, and Detroit had become such an undesirable place to live that an average home in the city sold for $7,500 (You read that right, seven thousand and five hundred dollars. I did not leave out any zeroes.). The Pontiac Silverdome, a roofed football stadium that cost $55.7 million to build in the mid-1970s, was sold for a mere $583,000 at a 2009 auction. Check out the Time Magazine slide show, Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline, for pictures showing how far the former center of American industry has fallen.⁽¹²⁵⁾

The Grey Generation

The "Baby Boomers" are the most studied generation in history. Late twentieth-century demographers expected them to produce another baby boom, thus keeping the growth rate high. Instead, they had fewer kids than their parents⁽¹²⁶⁾, and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the oldest Baby Boomers reached the age of retirement. The result is that a growing population of the aged is now putting severe strains on the government services set up for them, especially Social Security. When it got started, Social Security worked because life expectancy in those days was 61 and people didn't qualify for benefits until they were 65; consequently more than half of Americans were likely to die without receiving anything. In 1940, the first year that Social Security payments went out, there were 159 taxpayers for every retiree. But the ratio did not stay there; in 1945 there were 42 taxpayers per retiree; in 1950 the ratio was 17 to 1. Since the 1970s, it has been about 3.4 to 1. And because people are now living twenty years or more after retirement, the total cost to support each beneficiary has gone up, too.

We noted previously that Lyndon Johnson solved the problem of balancing the federal budget by looting the Social Security trust fund. Since then there has been no money set aside for the elderly; instead the government simply gives retirees what it just collected in taxes, and writes itself IOUs promising to eventually pay back the taxpayers, when they in turn retire. If the current trends don't change, at some point the government will have to tell retirees that the money it promised them simply isn't there.

Unfortunately, efforts to keep Social Security financially sound haven't gotten anywhere. For many voters, the issue is so sensitive that it has been called the "third rail of politics"; politicians don't want to touch it, out of fear that it might electrocute them. George W. Bush found this out during his second term, when he tried to partially privatize Social Security, by giving taxpayers the option of having their money invested in stocks and bonds instead. Opponents of the proposal made such a fuss, screaming that Bush wanted to gut Social Security with a risky scheme, that it did not get through Congress, and Bush was forced to forget about it. Now the question is not if Social Security will run out of money, but when. For many younger Americans, including the not-so-young author of this work, there is a growing sentiment that UFOs are more likely to exist, because Social Security won't be around when they are old enough to qualify for payments.

The New Americans

When we last looked at immigration in Chapter 4, we saw Americans putting restrictions on who was allowed in, because of fears that the immigrants were Bolsheviks, anarchists and criminals, and because of competition for the few existing jobs during the Depression years. During World War II, 102,000 Jewish refugees were admitted, but many more were turned away; most of the latter perished in the Holocaust. After the war, when it became clear that genocide had been a crucial part of Nazi ideology, feelings of guilt led to more exceptions in the immigration quotas, allowing more Jews, war brides, refugees, orphans, and others displaced by foreign wars to come into the country. For most of the late twentieth century, anyone coming from a communist country could claim refugee status; that led to the creation of large Cuban-American and Vietnamese-American communities.

Despite all this, immigration officially remained at low levels for the rest of the 1940s and 1950s. Concerns about a racist approach to immigration increased with the rise of the civil rights movement, leading many to believe the quota system was immoral. The result was the Immigration & Nationality Act of 1965, also called the Hart-Celler Act, because it was proposed by Emanuel Celler, cosponsored by Philip Hart, and most strongly supported by Senator Teddy Kennedy. At the time it did not get as much attention as the Voting Rights Act and the Medicare/Medicaid Act, but it had just as much of an impact in the shaping of the present-day United States.⁽¹²⁷⁾

After 1965, most immigrants still came from a handful of countries; Senator Kennedy simply changed which countries those would be. But he probably didn't foresee how they would change the nation's racial and ethnic composition. 22.5 million immigrants arrived between 1965 and 2000; in the past most immigrants used to come from Europe, but now the largest shares came from Latin America and Asia. And while immigration quotas remained under the new law, they did not apply to family members of immigrants who had already arrived. In 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the top ten countries supplying immigrants were Mexico (161,445), India (84,681), China (69,967), the Philippines (60,748), Cuba (36,261), Vietnam (32,784), the Dominican Republic (27,504), South Korea (26,562), Colombia (25,571) and Ukraine (22,761). Of these, only Mexico had been a major source of immigrants before 1960. Also, because the immigrants tended to settle in high-population areas, California, Florida, Texas, and the Northeastern states were more strongly affected than "Heartland" states like Kentucky and Montana.

Unfortunately, not all immigrants entered the country legally. From the 1970s onward, illegal immigration became a growing problem. Most of the illegal immigrants were job seekers from Mexico, Central America and Canada. They justified their presence by taking jobs that US citizens didn't want to do, but many US citizens feared increased competition for jobs nonetheless. Immigration laws were so poorly enforced that there was little danger of illegal immigrants being deported, especially if they had children after their arrival ("anchor babies"). To regain control over the borders, President Reagan, on the advice of a bipartisan task force, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. This offered amnesty for illegal immigrants who hadn't broken any laws besides crossing the border; if they could prove they had been in the country for at least five years, they would receive temporary resident status, which could eventually be upgraded to permanent residency and citizenship. In practice, however, there was extensive document fraud, and while estimates at the time put the number of illegal immigrants at two million, far more people than that applied for amnesty. Worse, there was no more will to enforce the new law than there had been to enforce the old ones.

The influx of illegal immigrants stopped only briefly, and when it resumed, the trickle became a flood. By 1996, the number of estimated undocumented aliens residing in the United States was five million; by 2006 estimates ranged from seven to twenty million. Democrats didn't want to stop illegal immigrants because they saw them as future voters, while Republicans saw them as unskilled labor, allowing American farms and factories to turn a profit (Victor Davis Hanson called them modern-day "serfs" or "helots"). The Mexican government encouraged border crossings because they worked as a pressure valve; as long as Mexicans could cross the Rio Grande, there were few calls for economic and political reform at home. In many American cities and counties, illegal immigrants put a severe strain on schools, social services, health care and law enforcement. Consequently, when another immigration bill was proposed in 2006, both President Bush and Congress supported it, but so many voters were outraged, that Washington had to drop the idea.

In May 2009, customs and border protection officials announced that the number of illegal immigrants captured has declined by 27 percent along the Mexican border, and 13 percent along the Canadian border, compared with how many were captured one year earlier. Assuming that the rate of capture hasn't changed, this means that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the borders is going down. There have also been reports of Mexicans going home, now that the job market has dried up for them. If this is really the case, the illegal immigration problem has been fixed, but only until the economy recovers from the current recession.

The Browning of America

In 1987, Ben Wattenberg, a conservative columnist, wrote The Birth Dearth, which warned that if current demographic trends continued, the United States would stop being a predominantly white country. He also saw a future economic crisis and the marginalization of Western nations, due to low birthrates. Although he came across as an alarmist, the basic trend he pointed to was real. White, non-Hispanic Americans were 80 percent of the US population in 1980, and the percentage is now just under 70. A 2009 report from the US Census Bureau predicted that this will drop below 50 percent in 2050.⁽¹²⁸⁾

In some parts of the United States, the ethnic crossover point has been passed already. It happened in the heart of the big cities, when whites escaped deteriorating neighborhoods by moving to the suburbs, and the blacks left behind took over. It also happened along the southern border. At the time of this writing, forty-eight counties in southwestern states, thirty-three of them in Texas, have populations that are more than 50 percent Hispanic. It is a similar story with Miami, FL, which became both a haven for refugees fleeing Cuba, and a port for commerce between Latin America and the eastern US. In Los Angeles, attempts to integrate schools by busing students failed because there weren't enough "Anglos" (non-Hispanic whites) to go around. Finally, Asian-American populations are concentrated in Hawaii and along the Pacific coast, to the point that if you pick up a phone book in Monterrey, CA, you will find more people named "Nguyen" than "Jones."

The Incredible Expanding Government

All those trends have continued, but in this chapter a new trend became dominant: the years since 1933 have been an age of massive federal government growth. Before the Civil War, the federal government only occasionally interfered in the lives of ordinary Americans; now with taxes, Social Security, Medicare and endless regulations, it meddles in our lives constantly. And much of Uncle Sam's growth has come at the expanse of the states; whereas the Constitution gave nearly as much attention to the rights of states as it did to the rights of individuals, today the state governments have become largely irrelevant to most of us.⁽¹²⁹⁾ The process is an incremental one, moving so slowly that few folks are aware of the changes, so look at the examples below to see how far we have traveled down that road.

Federal Spending

In Chapter 4, we noted that Calvin Coolidge was the last president who actually cut federal spending; even Ronald Reagan could only reduce the rate at which spending grew (nevertheless, liberals called that a spending cut!).⁽¹³¹⁾ In years of prosperity (mainly in the 1950s, 80s and 90s), spending increased gradually, to cover ever-increasing costs; in times of hardship, spending increased even faster, to deal with the crises the nation faced. Furthermore, the cost of every spending program always exceeds what the president, Congress, and others say it will cost. Part of this overrun is due to increased expectations, part of it is the desire by bureaucrats to avoid a budget cut next year, and part of it is simply inefficiency; it has been estimated that out of every federal dollar spent to help the poor, only twenty-eight cents actually reaches the intended recipient (a worse figure than you'll see with most charities).

Federal Agencies

• Federal Communications Commission (FCC) = 1934
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) = 1934
• Social Security = 1935
• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) = 1947
• Medicare and Medicaid = 1965
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) = 1970
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) = 1971
• Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives = 1972 (replaced the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which had been around since 1920)
• Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) = 1973
• Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) = 1979

Taxes and Regulation

The Cabinet

Thus, today's Cabinet has fifteen departments. In addition, there are six Cabinet-level positions without executive departments, for the vice president, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Trade Representative, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Director of the National Drug Control Policy. As with the federal agencies listed above, each Cabinet position increases the size and cost of government, and once a position is created, it is usually there to stay, whether it accomplishes anything or not. That is why the government is no closer to solving the nation's energy and education problems than it was when those departments were created.⁽¹³³⁾

The best explanation I have heard for government growth is the "ratchet effect," as explained by the economist Robert Higgs. The ratchet effect explains why it is easier to gain weight than to lose it, and how, as time goes on, life gets more complicated in many areas. For example, designers will give new features to cars, appliances, and software that are initially seen as options or even luxuries, but later they are required. In his work Crisis and Leviathan, Higgs described how the ratchet effect works with government: "Once a crisis has passed state power usually recedes again, but it rarely returns to its original levels; thus each emergency leaves the scope of government at least a little wider than before." We saw how the United States found itself unprepared to fight before the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the two World Wars, but after each of those conflicts ended, the size of the armed forces, spending, and the amount of government activity never returned to prewar levels. In part, that explains why governments are always more willing to raise taxes than to lower them, and why freedoms willingly surrendered by the public are not willingly returned.

From History to Current Events

Thomas Jefferson once said that Americans need a revolution about every twenty years, to keep the American people aware of the freedoms they could lose if they don't pay attention. We haven't had that, but it seems that every seventy to eighty years there has been a major political upheaval, and it changed the nation permanently each time. The first such upheaval was the American Revolution, of course. The second upheaval, the Civil War, was also a case where a dispute turned violent, but the next one, in the early 1930s, was bloodless, if you don't count the labor strikes.

Thomas Jefferson was a Democrat, but how would today's Democrats treat him?

Before Chapter 4, it wasn't clear whether a citizen's first loyalty was to his state or to the federal government; that's why so many West Point-educated officers joined the Confederacy when the Civil War began. The Civil War answered that question; it established the rule that sovereignty belongs to the nation first and to the state second. Also, in the period covered by Chapter 4, we saw the government, more often than not, working on the side of big business. Then for this chapter, we had the age of the welfare state, when the government assumed more and more responsibilities that had previously been left to the people, in the name of reducing risk, danger and hardship; today one-sixth of the American people receive at least part of their income from the government.

Keep in mind that changes in government aren't obvious to most folks when they happen. The Roman Empire called itself a "Republic" until the end of its existence, though it stopped functioning as a republic in the first century B.C. Likewise, I expect the politicians in Washington will always pay lip service to the Constitution, whether or not they follow it.⁽¹³⁴⁾ Now it appears that the welfare state has run its course; spending for both cradle-to-grave social services and the world's finest armed forces appears to have reached its limits. The nation's leaders are learning the hard way that not all problems can be solved by throwing money at them. If you accept the theory of US history described above, the Third Republic ended with the 2008 election, and we are now witnessing the creation of a "Fourth Republic." Thus, if I compose another chapter on US history in the future, I will break off this chapter at 2008, and begin the next chapter from there.

Probably the biggest change is that in the future, the United States will not be the world's policeman. When Barack Obama made his first trip abroad as president, he spent much of it apologizing for American history, acting like a president without a country.⁽¹³⁵⁾ In addition, he announced he would cut defense spending, told an audience in Turkey that the US is not a Christian nation, treated friends of the United States (e.g., Britain, Israel) like enemies, and enemies (e.g., Venezuela) like friends. On the war front, he promised to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for as long as necessary, but he also promised to close the detention center for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and so far has done nothing but talk about the nuclear threats posed by North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile, Washington renamed the War on Terror an "overseas contingency operation," called acts of terrorism "man caused disasters," and called the detainees at Guantanamo Bay "refugees," as if a war could be ended just by changing the terms used.

With the economy shrinking as well (the GDP dropped 6.3 percent in the last quarter of 2008, 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009, and 1 percent in the second quarter), it looks like in the next few years, the United States will see a serious decline in its power. This caused Walter Rodgers, a former CNN bureau chief, to write ecstatically that "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy."⁽¹³⁶⁾ Unfortunately, the world has not yet reached the stage where the lion can lay down with the lamb, and in a world governed by force, at least one nation will use military or economic power to set policy for the rest. If it is no longer the United States, who will it be in the future? China or India, perhaps?

On the domestic front, we now arguably have a government more oppressive than the one the Founding Fathers rejected in 1776. Conservatives and Libertarians like to compare the present-day situation with a frog in a pot of boiling water. As the story goes, if you throw the frog into the pot and the water's already hot, it will jump out right away. On the other hand, if the water is cold or lukewarm, the frog will stay in the pot; then if you turn the heat up gradually, the frog will enjoy the bath--until it is cooked. Likewise, in recent years the American people, bit by bit, have given the federal government permission to do things that were once rejected out of hand, from income taxes to nationalized industries and health care.

Political and economic practices once called "socialism" and "communism" are now sometimes seen as inevitable, the "wave of the future." It's a similar story with social issues; same-sex marriage, for example, was once seen as something only liberals on the fringe would support, but now it is being debated in several states, some of which have recently put same-sex marriage laws on the books. If the USA ever becomes the "USSA," it is more likely to happen through a peaceful transition, with the approval of most of the public, than through a violent revolution (see the Gus Hall quote in footnote #35). In one year following the beginning of the 2008 "Great Recession," the federal government took over 30 percent of the US economy, using the same argument about being "too big to fail" that it had used for AIG. For example, in the spring of 2009, General Motors declared bankruptcy and became "Government Motors." Therefore, to those in the hot tub, I ask, how is the water feeling now?⁽¹³⁷⁾

A few years ago, Jared Diamond, an ecologist with an interest in history, wrote Collapse, in which he put forth his theories on why civilizations fail. He concluded that the five factors most likely to bring down a great nation are environmental damage, changing climate, loss of trading partners, hostile foreigners, and stupidity. If all a civilization has to face is one of the first four challenges, it will probably survive, and may come out of it stronger than before, as Rome did after vanquishing Carthage. On the other hand, if you combine any of the first four with stupidity, heaven help that nation!

How does Collapse apply to twenty-first-century America? I think it's safe to say that the environmental threat is under control. Compare today's pollution to what cities experienced a few decades ago; the carbon dioxide environmentalists are worried about isn't as bad as sulfuric acid, lead or excessive ozone in our atmosphere, or toxic waste running into our waterways. It also looks like climate change is not our most serious problem, since predictions made in the past about global warming, global cooling, overpopulation, epidemics, running out of oil, etc., simply haven't come true. And we're not suffering from a lack of trade; about the only countries that don't do business with the United States are those that don't have anything Americans want, like North Korea. On the other hand, the threat of hostile foreigners (e.g., Islamic terrorists, those who support them, and the last communists) is real, and the US had better deal with them as effectively as it did in the past with the American Indians, British, Germans, Japanese and Russians, in order to remain a successful nation in the future. That is where the stupidity factor comes in. We already saw the effect of stupidity on domestic affairs, in the form of "political correctness," and the growth of government beyond our ability to pay for it. It took longer than expected for the federal government to feel the effects of what the historian Paul Kennedy called "imperial overstretch," presumably because our economy can afford to support more people and more things than previous economies did, but it appears the nation finally reached its limits in the second term of George W. Bush. Now let's look at the role stupidity is playing in the current conflict.

Regarding the enemies of the past, the United States had to pound the Indians, Germans and Japanese into the ground before it could deal peacefully with them again. Unfortunately, we have forgotten the lessons we learned from those struggles. Today a lot of intellectuals insist that Uncle Sam must fight terrorism with one hand tied behind his back, as if anything else would be unsporting. In addition, today's generation of Americans don't seem to have the patience to see the conflict to its end; they let the enemy and the media decide who wins each battle. Finally, the US and its allies are buying a vital resource--oil--from nations whose sympathies are with the other side. To win this struggle, Americans will have to rediscover the determination that won the Cold War, and the ruthlessness that won World War II.⁽¹³⁸⁾

Many observers have compared the United States with great nations of the past, especially the Roman Empire, and they always conclude that eventually the US will also decline and fall.⁽¹³⁹⁾ Some look back further, to the Athenian democracy, and point out that it only lasted for one century, so our constitutional government must be running on borrowed time.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ I would agree that no nation or government created by man lasts forever, but if it was that simple, the North American Republic wouldn't have lasted this long. And the end of a golden age doesn't mean there can't be another one later. Indeed, if you want to use the Roman example mentioned previously, after the fall of Rome, the Romans made a partial recovery under Justinian in the sixth century, and another partial recovery under the Macedonian emperors in the ninth and tenth centuries. To give two more examples, the Egyptians and the Chinese each had at least three golden ages, when everything seemed to be going fine. Thus, I expect the USA will continue to exist as a nation for some time to come, whether or not it is at the top of the heap.

On the other hand, if the American people have lost the spirit that made them great, then there is real cause for alarm concerning the nation's future. For a start, many no longer seem to have the courage and individualism that marked the American spirit in previous ages. Perhaps we have become complacent, after spending our lives in a society that is free, peaceful and prosperous. In the name of keeping what we have, we have forgotten the spirit that allowed us to overcome previous hurdles, so now we are all too willing to trade away freedom for security. This attitude has made us overprotective as well. In the past, for example, a child falling down and hurting himself was a routine part of growing up, but now it is grounds for a lawsuit. The result is that we grow up thinking that safety from harm is just as important as the freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights. Along that line, let me remind you of an FDR quote that appeared previously in this chapter: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

The same change of spirit may explain why we aren't exploring as much as we used to. I mentioned in Chapter 3 that Americans were optimists as they moved west; having an unexplored frontier gave them a place to get away from a fully established civilization and renew their youth. But after the frontier disappeared in the West, new frontiers were not explored and exploited as eagerly. For example, Americans were eager to explore space when it looked like the Soviet Union would land men on the moon first, but after the United States won the space race, interest faded, as concern over expenses and the safety of space flight outweighed national pride and the desire to explore strange new worlds.

Feeling that it got a solid mandate in the 2008 election, the current administration is pushing a liberal's dream agenda (e.g., redistribution of wealth, universal healthcare, replacement of fossil fuels with "green" energy sources), and claiming it needs to be done with revolutionary speed. In doing so, they forget that Herbert Hoover and FDR prolonged the Great Depression by excessive meddling. Apparently they think an economic crisis is the best time to spend money like it's going out of style, in the name of social engineering, when it is really the worst time to spend.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ Meanwhile, President Obama seems determined to make everyone see the United States as just another nation. This ties in with the moves his predecessors made, to unite all nations in a "New World Order." Those with an eye for history will consider the next quote, from a 2009 speech, chilling:

"Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it."

Obama would do well to heed the words of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. In the July-August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Gelb looked at the American decline and gave this response: "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit."

The Egyptians, Romans and Chinese taught us that a wealthy nation with a glorious past and an attractive culture can survive many hardships, and postpone its fate for centuries, but not when it has "a mediocrity of spirit." A superpower without a compelling reason to keep on living is a hollow superpower, like Rome in the fifth century or China between Qian Long and Mao Zedong (1796-1949). If Americans truly believe they are no longer different in any meaningful way from the peoples of other nations, then the "social experiment" that we talked about at the beginning of Chapter 1 is over.

In the 1980s, the author read the novels and short stories of Keith Laumer, a former diplomat who became a science fiction writer. In Laumer's tales of diplomats in space, most of the human characters are incompetent, and the hero, Jaime Retief, saves the day by ignoring the rules of diplomacy and bureaucracy. With the first stories, the general attitude toward Retief's companions could be summarized as "Sure, they're idiots, but they're our idiots." As time went on, though, Laumer's storytelling grew grimmer, and the message became, "Hey, these bastards are doing us real harm." In the past, I took the former view when Washington was controlled by people I didn't agree with; unfortunately the latter view now seems more accurate.

Of course, not everything done by a government full of extremists will succeed, and this one will blame its failures on either the opposition or the previous government, using some variant of "It's Bush's fault!" But with them in total control, the public will only accept that excuse for so long, and judging from recent protests, the honeymoon the American people gave to Obama is over already. When income taxes came due in April 2009, there were multiple "Tea Party" protests around the country, against the current government's tax-and-spend behavior.⁽¹⁴²⁾ Another major rally against big government occurred in Washington in September. Over the years, poll after poll has shown that most Americans are center-to-right in their social and political opinions. They may have voted against an inept Republican Party in 2006 and 2008, but they didn't want the new government declaring war on small business and capitalism, or otherwise pursuing a far left agenda; most of this was invisible during the election campaigns.

We have also noted that no president or political party since the 1920s, not even Reagan, has been able to halt the growth of the government and its spending habits. This is mainly because the public has usually been apathetic, while the media, entertainment industries, schools and federal bureaucracies have come increasingly under leftist control, and thus are opposed to moves to cut big government's power. It would probably take a national catastrophe to change this trend, like a major depression or a war, and many are now realizing that it will happen, if the current group of leftists have their way.

True believers on the Left are responsible for the recent awakening, too, because instead of having the humility to act quietly, they are moving heaven and earth to achieve their goals, and want to receive the credit for doing it. Having the same faith and dedication toward government that the religious have toward God, they are convinced that nearly everyone shares their philosophy and attitude, because their people were elected; anyone who does not agree with them must be demonized (see the Jefferson cartoon), or at least made to feel guilty. It has been said that you can judge a person's character by whom he associates with, and the current president's reliance on a cheerleading mainstream media, "community organizer" groups like ACORN, power-hungry unions, corrupt Chicago-style politics, and congressmen who pass his bills before they are even fully written, is starting to backfire, thanks to their failings being pointed out by the "new media" of FOX News, talk shows and bloggers.

In the past, when a radical government reached too far, trying to accomplish things too fast (and in this case, spending too much money to do it), voters were aroused and turned it out of office at the next election. As Sir Isaac Newton put it when talking about physics, "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" A political reaction replaced the "Free Soil" Republicans in 1868, and it happened to the Democrats in 1980 and 1994. Some conservatives are starting to compare Barack Obama with Jimmy Carter for that reason, but at this date (2009) there isn't a charismatic conservative like Ronald Reagan to take his place, except maybe for Sarah Palin. To go back to the frog-in-the-pot analogy, now that the heat has suddenly been turned up to "high," is it too late for the frog to jump out of the pot?

Of course after the rascals have been turned out, their replacements may act nearly the same way, and the voters may go back to sports, reality shows, shopping at the mall, or doing whatever else interests them. The trick is whether the public can overcome its short attention span and repair the damage done to American society over the past few decades. Then we will know if the nation's decline and fall have been prevented (at least for our lifetime), or if the nation simply received another reprieve. If you are a US citizen, you have just finished reading American history; are you now ready to make it?

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."--Ronald Reagan

123. This does not mean that everything is right in California. Californians had gotten used to the idea that they could have everything, presumably because of the state's spectacular scenery, the mild climate along the coast, and Hollywood's dreamy influence. They encouraged California's government to block large areas of land from development, in the name of protecting the environment, and banned offshore drilling for the same reason. Consequently, California's energy prices were among the highest in the nation, and real estate got so expensive that a person earning $250,000 a year could not afford a house in San Francisco. In the 1990s the Democrats gained total control of the government, and they turned the state into a "test lab," to show everybody what a great job they could do. The result was that they raised spending beyond any hope of balancing the budget. When the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, revealed the size of the deficit, he became so unpopular that he was removed in 2003 by a special recall election, but his Republican successor, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, could not fix the problem. Thus, the state has become ungovernable. Since 2000 California has seen a net decrease in its population, rather than an increase, as people and businesses look for a place that's cheaper. At the time of this writing, the state--or as some call it, a "job-free zone"--has the highest income and business taxes in the nation, a $41 billion deficit, a credit rating slashed to junk-bond status, and a middle class relocated to Arizona and Nevada.
California has been called a trendsetting state, because whatever gets popular there will eventually find its way to the other states. Is bankruptcy the latest trend from the west coast?

124. In the 1970s, 90 percent of the population in Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb, claimed Polish ancestry. Over the next thirty years, immigrants from Moslem countries (e.g., Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, Africans, etc.) displaced the Polish community, to the point that in 2004, the Hamtramck city council unanimously passed an ordinance allowing the use of loudspeakers to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer, five times a day. This is all the more ironic when one remembers which country saved central Europe from an Islamic invasion, in 1683.

125. Near Detroit, the city of Flint has lost so many people that the remaining population cannot support the police and other people needed to patrol and maintain every neighborhood, so in 2009 the treasurer of Michigan's Genesee County announced a plan to tear down as much as 40 percent of Flint, letting the abandoned districts return to nature. If the idea catches on, such bulldozings could take place in other declining communities. Does this remind you of the statement made during the Vietnam War, that soldiers had to destroy a village to save it? By contrast, in the old West, unsuccessful communities were simply deserted, becoming "ghost towns."

126. The "baby bust" may have been caused by the same factor that caused fewer babies to be born in the 1930s; the economy was poor for most of the 1970s, when the Baby Boomers were at their peak childbearing age.

127. "Be careful in revising those immigration laws of yours. We got careless with ours."--an Indian on a New Mexico reservation in the 1960s, giving advice to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

128. This trend, along with civil rights legislation, is why non-whites have played an increasingly important role in modern American society. To give two recent examples, Louisiana elected the first Indian-American governor (that's Asian Indian, not Native American) in 2007, and the first Vietnamese-American congressman in 2008.

129. "One of the greatest perils which threatens us now is the tendency to centralization, the absorption of the rights of the States, and the concentration of all power in the General Government. When that shall be accomplished, if ever, the days of the Republic are numbered."--Orville Browning, Secretary of the Interior under President Andrew Johnson

130. "A recent analysis of the costs of government bailouts due to the housing crisis, the credit crisis and other economic woes tallies up to $8.5 trillion--more than the cost of all U.S. wars, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and NASA space program spending--all combined and adjusted for today's dollars."--former astronaut James Lovell, comparing Washington's bailout spending in 2008 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which was short on cash at the same time.

131. In Chapter 4, footnote #70, we looked at an unnecessary tax that had been collected for more than a century, simply because no one was paying attention. Sometimes expenditures are like that, too. One example is the mohair subsidy. The wool of Angora goats was used to make army uniforms during World War II, and after the war, Congress grew concerned about a possible mohair shortage when the next war broke out, so it paid farmers to grow more of that kind of wool. Instead, mohair production declined, and it wasn't even needed, because a few years later, the armed forces introduced uniforms made out of synthetic fabrics. Nevertheless, the mohair subsidy remained on the books, until Congress voted to abolish it in 1993. It wouldn't stay abolished, though, and lobbyists on behalf of the farmers receiving it, like the Navajo Indians, got the subsidy restored a few years later, so mohair producers are still getting their checks from the government today.

132. "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."--Ronald Reagan

133. The Federal Emergency Management Administration is a good example of how "mission creep" can cause a government agency to outgrow its original purpose. FEMA was created to assist states and municipalities dealing with catastrophic events, like nuclear attacks, major earthquakes and killer hurricanes. But these kinds of disasters don't happen every year, so FEMA redefined the meaning of "emergency" to justify its funding. By 1996 it was paying for snow removal in a Connecticut town that hadn't set aside enough money for the job, and just before his presidency ended, George W. Bush declared Washington D. C. a disaster area, making it eligible for FEMA funds, because Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration cost more and drew larger crowds than expected. Who'd have thought, in a country that has never experienced a coup d'etat, that the changing of presidents would be seen as a "national emergency"? When a first-class disaster finally struck, namely Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA was too bloated to respond effectively.

134. An example of ignoring the Constitution is the appointment of special-policy "czars," executives that are answerable to nobody but the president. Like the White House Chief of Staff, they have the power of Cabinet-level officials, but do not have a department underneath. It is unlikely that the Founding Fathers would have approved of such appointments. The first federal officials to be called "czars" held temporary jobs during World War II; FDR had what The Washington Post called a "transportation czar," a "manpower czar," and a "production czar," to make sure the nation's resources were used efficiently. After that, the term did not appear again for thirty years, until Nixon hired two special advisors, a "drug czar" and an "energy czar." The "energy czar" position disappeared when Carter created the Department of Energy, but both Carter and Reagan kept a "drug czar" on call. After that, George H. W. Bush had no czars in his administration, Clinton had three czars, and George W. Bush had four. But during that time, the Democrats became enamored with European-style controlled economies, so after Obama was elected, he appointed between thirty-two and forty-four czars in the first six months of his presidency, depending on your definition of what a "czar" is. These included a border czar, a health reform czar, an urban czar, a terrorism czar, a Guantanamo closure czar, a car czar, a green jobs czar, and even a "safe schools czar" and a "CEO pay czar" (to oversee how the bailout money given to corporations was handled). He may also have done it because most of the czars were left-wing ideologues, who would have faced a long, uphill confirmation process, if they were Cabinet or Supreme Court nominees. The Romanov dynasty gave Russia eighteen czars between 1613 and 1917, and seven previous rulers, starting with Ivan IV, also claimed the title, so Obama has the dubious distinction of producing more czars than the Russians!

135. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton called Obama the first "post-American president who's above all that patriotism stuff."

136. The Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 2009.

137. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C. S. Lewis

138. "Until then, all I ask of my country is that we don't beat ourselves and that we remain a place where Gwyneth Paltrow refuses to live."--Comedian Dennis Miller, December 8, 2006.

139. "Might Washington, like Rome, fall victim to imperial overstretch? Could military force abroad eventually have to be withdrawn because of bankruptcy at home? Might the whole idea of America eventually be challenged and destroyed by some charismatic new faith: some fundamentalist variant on Christianity? Or will nature disrupt America's new world order?"--Robert Harris, "Does Rome's fate await the US?," Sunday Mail, October 12, 2003

140. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship. . . . The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."--Alexander Tyler, a Scottish historian, circa 1787

141. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."--Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's chief of staff.

142. The term "Tea Party" has two meanings. Not only is it a reference to the Boston Tea Party, but "tea" can stand for "Taxed Enough Already."

© Copyright 2009 Charles Kimball