In his book, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway introduced brief, yet profound, dialogue: “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” You can make the same analogy with termites eating away at a house. In other words, systems don’t abruptly collapse; there’s a long decline leading to that collapse. It happened to the Soviet Union, and it can happen to America. However, failures are like a chain. Break any link, and the catastrophe doesn’t happen.

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If America’s coming collapse isn’t prevented, some future historian will look back at America’s history, especially from 1965 to 2025, and see that there were several critical pieces of the puzzle that led to disaster:

• Ratifying the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, which shifted electing U.S. Senators from state legislatures to direct popular vote. This dramatically weakened States’ Rights.
• Ratifying the Sixteenth Amendment, also in 1913, which created the Federal Income Tax. This became the primary catalyst for an expanded federal government and a rise in spending and power that took off after 1930 and never quit.
• Allowing unrestrained immigration without conditions or requirements for assimilation for future citizens, or any plan at all for necessary, but temporary, guest workers. We’ve been nuts to let the old, infirm, sick, uneducated, and hostile jump to the front of the immigration line, making a mockery of the principles of Law and Order.
• Our refusal to pass a balanced budget amendment. Since 1965, there have been only five balanced budgets, none since 2001. There are no experts who even pretend that continued deficit spending is sustainable. Entitlements account for the vast majority of federal spending, at 51% today and expected to grow to 78% by 2035.
• Our unwillingness to pass term limits for politicians. It is evident by now that the era of the citizen stateman is over. Politicians go to Washington as a career and to feather their nests for power, connections, and advancement.

While not spoken of as often as entitlements, which are also a downward path, all of these issues are third rails for politicians who know fixing anything substantive will end their careers.

What happened to our country certainly did not happen overnight. Yet, it happened in full view of those who should have known better, kicking the can down the road.

We can now visualize that end of the road, because the system is breaking under the weight we’ve imposed upon it. This is just a short list of news items that demonstrate the craziness our country endures daily:

• The Democrat base calls for violence to oppose Trump’s agenda and tells Democrat lawmakers to prepare to “get shot.”
• Big Ten schools have created a “mutual defense compact” against Trump’s initiatives.
• The necessity for Trump to fire “woke” U.S. generals mattered.
• Leftists horror that new government hires should be loyal to the President’s agenda
• An antifa-style militia ambushed Border Patrol agents in Texas
• San Antonio City Council candidate Matthew Gauna used his X account to call for ICE agents to be killed.

William Butler Yeats’ grim poem, The Second Coming, written in the wake of WWI, dealt with a cyclical theory of history we are experiencing at the moment:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

How is it not perfectly obvious that without adequate resolve we can’t seem to muster, we’ll continue making the same mistakes?

Liberalism, or progressivism if you prefer, intends to destroy us by endless incremental demands on the producers to the non-producers in the name of fairness, charity, and obligation. People are slowly waking up to this scam, with our remaining producers starting to shrug their responsibilities, wondering why they volunteer to be patsies for the millions who lay claim to their sweat equity.

Yet, we are still supposed to act as if nothing has fundamentally changed, except that it has.

Mamdani’s rise to become the star of the Democrat party (a party he does not actually believe in, taking his orders from the Democratic Socialists of America) is another slow, incremental step in the direction of an ultimate, swift collapse. Many Democrats wish he would go away, but they’re afraid of being primaried by their own party if they admit this fact.

We must never forget that the primary purpose of a federal government is to protect our citizens! The world is a perilous place that requires strong leadership and the will to use force in those situations central to our beliefs. Incrementalism gets in the way of a lot of things. One of the most critical reasons we have a government is the right to exist as a free and independent people, and to remain the masters of our destiny and our government.

Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.