I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school. Nonetheless, WWII was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history. It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished, and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won, and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school, I had a better grasp of world events, plus we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba. Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time, it was a U.S. Navy training/support station, and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro.

In the late 1980s, after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany. Our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans, who killed an American officer while I was there. I don’t remember all the details, but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission, and the East Germans said he was spying.

Image by Vince Coyner.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history. It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WWII to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, revealed America as the good guy, trying to do what’s right. There’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however: Everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything. In college (of course), I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed, but my words fell on deaf ears.

So now we are here, 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy.

Some time ago, it dawned on me that for most of my life, I had given the government the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite.

In college, I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. According to Caro, LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power-hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office, he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters, he wanted to help solve long-standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes; people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous Borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself.

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the Borg of American government has taken. In the 21st century, we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.

Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education. Educating children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children. The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs, and, ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians.

This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not. Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning? How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government, is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States. It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist election theft while quashing free speech internationally to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within.

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on.

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind, I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two.

For me, Uncle Sam was America and the government combined. Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and the fact that they recognized this dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain sight behind countless official-looking government seals and compassionate-sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat/bureaucrat Borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect, nation, and I remain convinced that, taken as a whole, throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history. To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed.

It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to set a course for bringing government back under the citizens’ control. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… It’s to be hoped they’ll get some help along the way.

Follow Vince on X at ImperfectUSA