Looking back on that day in the Saudi desert in February 1991, when America was at the peak of its power and the world gazed upon us in awe, I find it difficult to square that moment with the present. We were invincible then, and now we are still contending with the consequences of being recently ’vinced by a bunch of seventh-century savages. Our president then seemed competent—we were not yet fully woke to the reality of the Bush clan—while today the occupant of the White House, assuming he has not been replaced by his hideous political consort, is a senile joke for whom any event where he doesn’t soil himself is a triumph.
Nevertheless, I am an optimist, and I believe America will rise again, albeit with scars.
What has happened in the last three decades will leave a mark. All the norms that were shattered cannot be pieced back together again so easily. The rules we thought we had agreed upon about personal freedom, property rights, and the relation of government to citizens have been rewritten for short-term convenience. They will not go back to what they were. Imagine the response the next time the American Civil Liberties Union, which once earned grudging respect even from its enemies for being so consistent that it defended the rights of Nazis to spew their nonsense, tells us we can’t take action against commie college professors intent on indoctrinating our kids. It will be something to the effect of, “Aren’t you the guys who wanted to mandate the vaccine because the Democrats wanted to? Maybe you should sit down and shut up.”
So, when we say America will rise again, we need to understand it will be a different America. And we also need not mourn the America that is gone. It was not perfect, though—like dead Republicans always cited by the mainstream media to chide breathing ones—old America will gain that proverbial strange new respect as the outlines of the future America become clear. It will be a more partisan and more ruthless America. Power will more often prevail over process. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a kind of federalist cold war where some states abort babies with abandon and others don’t, where in some states hobos wander freely leaving their spoor and needles on sidewalks, while in others they can’t.
That kind of cracked federalism might be a least-worst case, but we have seen plenty of worse cases. There was really nowhere to go but down back then in 1991, and the optimist in me hopes, seemingly against hope, that today there is nowhere for us to go but up.
Of course, that is wrong. We can certainly go down further, for leftism has no bottom. As we have seen, there are myriad ways it could get worse, much, much worse. And yet, as we have also seen, there are ways it could all get better.
I think it will get better. I have to believe that we will get through this, that America’s era is just beginning, and that the mediocrities and morons who are bringing us low will not prevail. The mere thought of it is hateful. We cannot let these losers win. But I cannot pretend that my optimism is based upon any actual evidence. Should you examine the evidence, the rational conclusion is pessimism. Instead, my optimism is purely a gut feeling. But then, so is diverticulitis.
To the extent that that constitutes optimism, color me optimistic. Yes, it could all go utterly bad, but optimism remains our only reasonable choice. To accept that we are headed for one of these dooms we have reviewed or some other fate that we have not yet imagined is to shrug and sit waiting for the asteroid to hit. We could decide that there is no hope and no reason to fight, but then the prophecy would fulfill itself.
Conservatives have a knack for pessimism. This is likely because conservatives recognize the imperfectibility of man and thereby understand that those same endemic flaws will necessarily infect the institutions we create. The United States of America is, after all, a nation of men—and women, and that’s all, because there is nothing else—and we conservatives accept that about the best we are going to get out of any government is going to be mediocre.
But pessimism is exhausting, and boring, and worse, it is self-defeating. When you talk to a pessimist, it’s nonstop assurances that it’s all over and we’re finished and the like. Maybe it’s just easier to make your peace with the coming collapse than to confront it. But whatever it is, it is not helpful to the project of preventing the worst-case scenario.
Better to go down fighting, because the hell with them. The hell with the people who got us here and their garbage ideologies and their desperate need to force our submission. They get nothing, not our obedience, our cooperation, or our complicity in turning this country into a historical footnote or a cautionary example that Chi Com college kids can study to learn what not to do.
Pessimism might be realistic, but realism is not helpful in tough spots. You have to believe you can win. And, of course, you might actually win—the 150 or so Brits of the 24th Foot did at Rorke’s Drift in the face of 4,000 Zulus and their assegais. Of course, we remember them because their win was so improbable. There are lots of Rorke’s Drifts in history, and in most of them the guys in the Zulus’ position killed everyone. We don’t talk about them because of course the 4,000 guys with spears annihilated the dudes they outnumbered thirty-to-one.
We talk about the outlier because what probably should have happened didn’t happen. And what probably should happen to our country is that it fades into insignificance, either by subjugation or through chaos or simply by way of monotonous decline. That’s what history would tell us is likely to happen. The great powers shine and flicker out. Why should we be different?
But we are different.
We are not quite at the surrounded-by-Zulu-impis point. Nor are we quite fully down the cursus horribilis of ancient Rome. There are some echoes and parallels, but no Gracchi have been beaten to death by the establishment yet. Lesser-known folks, the occasional Ashli Babbit, yes, and that might well prove a foretaste of what will come. But it hasn’t come yet.
We still have some ability to be heard, whether through elections or the courts, and some access to platforms, be it books or Fox News or various social media. And, of course, we still have our guns.
The point is that this is not over. There’s another election coming, another fight up ahead. We will lose some, but we will win some. We’re never going to know the end of the struggle. Freedom is a perpetual fight with the people who can’t stand that we have it. But what we have here is something undeniably special—though our opponents regularly deny it.
The United States of America is the greatest nation in the history of mankind. Its foreign enemies are clumsy and evil, with huge problems we overlook because we are too fixated on looking at our own. And our domestic enemies are unaccomplished in inverse proportion to their self-regard. They are not genius supervillains; they are ridiculous fanatics who think they can tweet us into serfdom.
I cannot imagine that America will ever fall to the puny likes of them.
What I can imagine is us, the patriots, bringing America back to where it was in February 1991, and then taking it beyond.