The tragedy of September 11th defined President George W. Bush’s first term, but it was also an inflection point that defined the American government.  Now, almost 22 years on, our nation still hasn’t recovered from the events of that terrible day, which changed our society and realigned us both politically and culturally, to our great detriment.

Subversive operatives in government took Rahm Emanuel’s famous commandment “Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste” to heart, and the result? Generally collegial relationships between our Washington representatives gave way to the zero-sum and anti-American political warfare we see today.

The political process is, by design, contentious.  Through this tension, the extremes of governance were supposed to be restrained, leading to gradual change, reliable policies, a degree of bipartisanship, and a predictable market economy.  There were always exceptions to the rule, but 9/11 was different, and it opened the door to profound changes in how we engaged the world and the way we viewed our own.  Unprecedented permanent powers were created to surveil Americans citizens, secret intelligence courts were established and normalized, and America’s role as guarantor of inalienable rights was no more.

The beginning of the rift between the government and its people results directly from massively increased spending and subsequent actions taken to “protect us,” which could also be construed as “control us” — it’s a fine line between “for your safety” and “for your enslavement.”  Politicians and agencies like the FBI exploited their new mandate to “protect and defend” to increase their power and prestige; today, we live with weaponized bureaucracies and two-tiered justice.

The first casualty of any war is truth.  War is more than actual combat; it also includes the political world from which war is born.  Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is politics by other means.”

The world as we know it began to unravel when the U.S. engaged in vaguely-defined combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later in secret conflicts elsewhere.  The War Powers Resolution of 1973 gave the president the ability to unilaterally engage in warfare under certain congressional limitations; but the parameters have been repeatedly deemed ineffective by critics.

We’ve also had a problem defining our national interest for decades.  This gave rise to wars conducted without defined endpoints.  How has this happened?  Once we decide to engage, why are we afraid to openly acknowledge that the point of war is to fight our enemies to destruction?  Why do we not share our reasoning?  (Proxy wars are another layer of the onion and deserve a standalone article.)

Our country has frequently been blessed with great leaders in our high chambers and presidency.  Yes, there are the occasional duds, but the tension built into our system has restrained rapid changes that would upset the proverbial apple cart.

That all changed though with Barack Obama in 2009.  Obama was able to capitalize; the country was at once, both fearful and hopeful.  We were coming off of one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, and Obama rode in on promises of “change.”

Even though the U.S. was technically on the economic upswing before Obama’s inauguration, he initiated massive spending on a scale not seen outside of wartime; he truly put the entitlement state on steroids.  The national debt is $33 trillion today.  At the start of the Clinton administration, it was $12 trillion.  With assistance from his political acolytes, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, eight years of Obama fundamentally altered our country’s checks and balances by evil intent.  Recall that Obama was a card-carrying socialist at one time and an unabashed Alinskyite community organizer who articulated a “fundamentally transform[ed]” America.

To our detriment, he achieved it, and we’re still paying for it through deficit spending, endless wars, and a contentious split between fiscal conservatives and dedicated progressives that want no less than a Marxist-America “utopia.”  With Obama’s legacy of class warfare, many believe that our country’s ongoing destruction bears his fingerprints on the levers of a compromised and incapacitated Joe Biden.

We’ve made a devil’s bargain: a two-party system where both parties rubber stamp out-of-control deficit spending.  We can’t afford it, so we borrow money to cover the gap!

If you argue that taxation was inadequate, review the growth of government since 1965, and you will see an average 17.6% annual increase in revenue.  However, in that same graph, spending has increased at an average rate of 19.8%.  How much is enough?  Whatever is available, the government will spend more.  Deficit spending allows both parties to throw fiscal discipline to the winds.

Democrats demagogue relentlessly about their bleeding hearts.  Yet, after spending trillions of dollars on poverty, homelessness, and all, disenfranchised populations are unchanged or greater in number than before the Great Society Programs were established.  These failures are pushing us to a reckoning with endlessly rising entitlement spending.  Even present-day supporters are forced to equivocate and acknowledge the failures.

Democrats, nay progressives, tell you they hate the “one percent” that steals from the poor; yet AOC preens in a $14,000 dress before fawning followers.  The one-percenters in both houses flaunt their wealth in clothing, jewelry, yachts, personal jets, and lavish trips and homes; they are Marie Antoinette, but without the noblesse oblige.  It’s those like Jesse Jackson, who sent his children to elite private schools instead of Chicago’s infamously broken public schools, which see 85% of children graduate functionally illiterate. It’s the Denver mayor who flies to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with his family — after urging others to stay home.  It’s the mayor of Austin, TX who jetset to Cabo San Lucas on a private plane.  It’s Gavin Newsom, who dined at a swanky French restaurant with lobbyists, none wearing masks, after force-closing businesses and muzzling Californians with “facial coverings.”  Everything is an illusion in Democrat political theater.

Our collective memories allow us to look back over the past 75 years and discern what is true and what is false.  We can objectively understand what works and what does not.  We are in the middle of a period that will puzzle historians for the next millennia. They will ask how we willingly destroyed the finest economic system ever devised, and they’ll wonder how we traded prosperity for a make-believe world of wokeness, deficit spending, class warfare, and adulation of those who collectively led us off the cliff.

God Bless America.

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

Image: Jennifer Parr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.