Ayaan Hirsi Ali, looking at the disintegration of our society, finds considerable truth about the causes of this disintegration in the writings of Yuri Bezmenov (a KGB agent who defected from the Soviet Union in 1970). He described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages. These are: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. She then goes beyond these foundation categories and says that they have been applied by American Marxists, the Communist Chinese Party, and Radical Islamists which three-pronged attack has led to our cultural disintegration. While this writer was intrigued and informed by Ms. Ali’s commentary, a summary of our decline would, I think, be better if seen under the categories of power, greed, atheism, and family hatred.

Eugene Debs ran as a Socialist (same as anti-Semitic ‘Boynee’ Sanders); yet if we read the Socialist Platform of 1912 it flat out says they wanted government ownership of the means of production -- same as Karl Marx’ and Frederich Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848. Although the Socialists seemed to be rejected in the Presidential elections, by 1916 the American people had voted in the 16th Amendment providing for federal income tax to pay for a widely expanded federal government thus taking a giant step towards socialism/communism. That amendment signified free enterprise was under attack. A dramatic expansion of government power and authority needed to be funded, and the income tax provided that funding.

These first communist incursions were rightly understood by Republicans in the 1920s as being related to the millions of immigrants from Europe from 1890 to 1920. Socialist and communist ideas were abounding in Europe during those years and many holding those views emigrated to the USA. So the Republicans restricted immigration to percentages of various nationalities from earlier periods.

Despite the attempt of immigration reform to save the country from leftist expansion, those restrictions were too little and too late to prevent the New Deal. In order to print more money -- which they claimed was justified by the widespread poverty of the depression -- the New Deal took us off the gold standard as backing for our currency, which decision opened the door to continuous inflation since 1933. These 90 years of inflation have been “fed” by the ever-increasing printing of currency by the federal government. Thus, the income tax, the printing of money not backed by gold, the setting of interest rates by the Fed, and the continuous promotion of the idea that the bigger the government, the more protected the people are (but actually the more in bondage the people are) became the four-part mantra of our ever-diminishing economic freedoms. The love of an elite for power took control over a fearful and widely uninformed population. 

But here’s an interesting point. The Federal Reserve was created under Pres. Woodrow Wilson to supposedly protect the economy from regular and destructive cycles of bank closures. But the irony was that even with the Federal Reserve, there was not enough money to save the banks which crashed in 1929. Despite the brilliant banking minds [sic] at the Federal Reserve prior to the crash of ’29 ushering in the Great Depression, bankers were allowed by the Feds to invest personal savings of account holders in stocks, thus putting those savings at greater risk than if used for safer investments. 

Interestingly, under FDR the banking laws were rewritten to provide greater protection to depositors, plus there was FDIC insurance. It took a Great Depression to wake up the Democrats to the inherently flawed and risky banking system, and the Glass-Steagall Act was passed which separated commercial banking from investment banking. However, in 1999, both Dems and Repubs took down the “wall of separation” between savings and investments, and the overturning was signed into law by Pres. Bill Clinton. This overturning in only nine years led to the financial debacle of 2008. This reversal was a greedy and vile step from which we still have not fully recovered. This writer was seated next to a vice-president of a major bank on a bus ride from New York City to Philadelphia who was utterly disgusted by the reversal of Glass-Steagall, sponsored by both parties.

Thus greed, which is condemned by the Ten Commandments (“Thou shall not covet”) infects both the Dems and the Repubs. Our skyrocketing debt shows how the greed has subverted good financial management first at the federal level and then metastasized to the state and local levels, putting many pressures on the citizens vis-a-vis taxation, chronic inflationary cycles, having both moms and dads work to meet basic expenses, sky-high interest rates for mortgages, etc. This is an outworking of the exponential growth of greed.

Then between 1948 and 1962 there were three or four Supreme Court decisions that eliminated all references to God in the public schools. The false and untenable doctrine of separation of church and state based on a misreading of a letter by Thomas Jefferson was affirmed by a 5-4 vote in 1947 after 171 years of functioning quite well without said “separation.” By the early 1960s, no reading of Psalms, no posting of the Ten Commandments, and no prayers were allowed as the doctrine of atheism took a big leap forward.

Lastly, the exaltation of the family as the fundamental institution of American life took a big hit with the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. By removing abortion from being a local matter to being nationally valid and constitutional, the death of 60-million-plus babies took on a bogus veneer of legitimacy as all those precious souls were sacrificed on the altar of women’s health. For 2020, a total of 620,327 abortions were reported to CDC, and the abortion ratio was 198 abortions per 1,000 live births. That means that an incredibly high one out of six births were aborted. Only a small percent of the abortions were to protect the health of the moms. Those purposeful killings were and continue to be the greatest holocaust in human history. With this wholesale rejection of children, not only was our tax base and our military recruitment adversely affected, but the centrality of the family as the pillar of society was undermined. What sense does “honor your father and your mother” (the Fifth of the Ten Commandments) mean if mothers and fathers don’t even want the children who would honor them? Similarly, in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision of 2015 legitimizing homosexual marriage (despite the Tenth Amendment which says that all matters of governance not addressed by the Constitution are left to the states, and 36 states including blue state California had already rejected homosexual marriage) was another giving of the middle finger to the Fifth Commandment. These two pieces of legislation expressed our turn as a country from family love to family hatred.

Thus, the USA’s decline is directly related to the categories of power-seeking, greed, atheism, and family hatred described above. However, you will not be surprised if I say that the one dimension missing from the piece is the spiritual, namely God’s judgment resulting from His removing His faithful hand of mercy and hope from a sinful people.

Image: National Archives