Is Everything Suddenly Going to Hell?

Or are people just starting to notice?

Is everything going to hell?

Maybe, maybe not.

There are lots of reasons to feel bad about everything:  The domestic political situation, the domestic – and global – economic picture, foreign affairs and national security, culture.  And they’re good reasons, and you should be worried.

But.

It’s also the case that a lot more people are suddenly noticing how bad things have gotten.  You see it on things like immigration, where now “sanctuary cities” are suddenly in favor of building the wall, now that people are actually immigrating to them.  You see it in the parental pushback on school closures and trans craziness.  You see it in the growing realization that the Biden Administration – and, really, the entire Western governing class – is clueless and inept on foreign policy and national security, and pretty much everything else.  And you see it in a growing impatience with the gentry class fixations on race, gender, and climate change while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet.

A few years ago most of our society was sleepwalking toward disaster.  Now more and more people are awake and noticing.

That’s not enough to solve the problems, it’s true.  Public awareness and unhappiness is what we lawyers call a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”  You can’t fix the problems without plenty of people being aware of them, but awareness on its own doesn’t fix things.

Still, it’s a start.  An analogy:

I’ve worked on Second Amendment issues for three decades or so.  The first decade was mostly made up of trying to get people to admit that there was a there, there.  From the 1960s well into the 1990s, the general belief, held by nearly all academics, journalists, and judges, was that the Second Amendment basically didn’t do anything, and wasn’t even worthy of discussion.  (Former Chief Justice Warren Burger made pretty much that exact argument, and made in in the Sunday-supplement Parade Magazine.)

When the Tennessee Law Review published a major symposium issue on the actual, functional meaning of the Second Amendment, and the New York Review of Books dedicated an entire, rather hostile issue to it – including a major trashing by Garry Wills – I remember Helen asked why I was happy.  “Because by debating, they’ve admitted it’s a debate,” was my response.  Also, I thought the quality of the trashing was poor enough that it might give second thoughts even to some of those otherwise inclined to agree.

The debate continued, and eventually we reached today, where the argument is no longer about whether the Second Amendment only protects the National Guard, but rather whether it protects bump stocks and the right of marijuana users to own guns.  It’s become ordinary constitutional law.

The first stage of that was the awareness stage, and though our fraught national situation in general is very different than the Second Amendment debate, we’re now at the awareness stage here.

So much of what’s been done to this country over the past couple of decades has depended on convincing people that the problems aren’t real, a process taken to the point of gaslighting.  That’s ending now.

And for better or worse, but mostly better, the various organs of gaslighting have lost credibility.  The press can still rally the folks who agree with it, but it’s largely lost the ability to mislead people who don’t, and it’s rapidly losing the ability to bully its political and ideological opponents. 

Once you have awareness, the next problem is organization.  This is something where the woke crowd has an advantage.  Because leftist politics is fed by a desire for a sort of almost tribal belonging, leftists are big joiners.  Because they get validation from politics, they gravitate toward political groups and causes.

There are some people like that on the right and in the middle, but fewer.  (And libertarians?  Well, as the old joke goes:  “How many libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb?” “Only one, but you have to get him to show up.”)

Still, self-organization in the face of a crisis has always been an American strength.  And we’re looking toward having a crisis, or several. Is that bad? Here too, the answer is maybe, maybe not.

I suspect some of our problems won’t be fixed without a crisis.  The debt is heading toward a crisis, and I don’t see any way out of it short of some kind of default.  That may or may not represent a calamity – the U.S. has defaulted before on several occasions, and the sky didn’t fall.  But I think too many people profit from the status quo to make drastic changes until they’re forced to.  People have been aware of the debt problem for decades, but nothing is ever done.

But people who favor smaller, common-sense government should be ready to swoop in with solutions that encourage that in the future: Drastic government shrinkage, balanced budget requirements, narrower limits on federal powers, etc. There will be a moment when everything is up for grabs, and that will be the time to make a grab.

I’ve made some suggestions along those lines here.

There will be similar opportunities where the other crises are involved. Now is a good time to think about what to do when they present themselves, and line up some folks to help.

I’d like to write more along these lines, but to be honest I’m tired, and a bit sad for obvious reasons given the state of the world, and I don’t have a lot of very clear answers tonight.  Except don’t give up, keep telling the truth about things to whoever will listen, and work to build up a network of people you can trust and rely on.  You’ll probably need them.