Cultural Survival Skills

Democracy is Failing in America!

I have studied the decline of societies since the mid-1980’s. In doing so, I have observed the various cultural evolutions in America and have read extensively in the literature of cultural evolution and cultural decline. My research has also led me to study the various components of sociocultures including American and World History, Religion, forms of Government, Economics, and more.

This intellectual experience has been greatly rewarding and has informed my various writings, including over 1500 blogs that I have published on this website.

After all of this, I have now grown used to people characterizing me as an extremest and my views as a form of radical conservatism. In response, I politely joke that I am “a little to the right of Attila the Hun”! I then often  follow this remark with the truth: “I am an American Constitutional Conservative.” This remark normally leads to blank expressions of my critics, ending that portion of our conversation.

I have come to recognize the title of this blog and my views of America’s obvious decline as a perfectly predictable symptoms of America’s transition into an aging or “Late Democracy”.

One of the most prescient books I have ever read is: Democracy: And Why It Will Fail In America, by John L. Bowman.

Bowman integrates the observations and predictions of philosophers and historians from the Early Greeks, to our Founding Fathers, and on to similar great thinkers of our more modern times….all integrated into a factual whole.

If you wonder why I use the words  “factual whole”: This is because the sum total of this massive intellectual achievement not only predicts the evolution to failure of democracies through history; It perfectly predicts America’s present state of decline.

At 75 years of age, I have witnessed the seemingly inexorable evolution of American Culture from its approximate azimuth in the late 1940’s to its present steep decline; and I have also studied America’s history that predates my own.

If you would like to know what is now happening to you and America, and why, I strongly recommend you read this book.

Although Bowman favors Democracy, he is forced to conclude the following:

“But freedom entails responsibility, self-restraint, and above all, rationality, which apparently are characteristics beyond the ability of most of humanity. In many ways, humans cannot handle the freedom democracy brings. They cannot because humans are driven by passion—their emotions do the thinking. Emotions are good, as we would not be human without them, but when they govern us all in the form of a political system, many things go wrong. Try as we may to cut the leash, we cannot escape our human natures.”

Bowman documents that democracy reliably devolves into socialism. He argues that this is the fatal outcome for all that ride the democratic cultural train from liberty and individualism, to equality for all, and finally to the fatal outcome of tyrannical socialism.

Bowman and others assert that Democracy contains the fatal elements of its own destruction and they are the poisonous seeds of socialism.

I hope you will read this book; If America’s voters can just understand what is happening to them and act accordingly, there is a very slim chance that it’s not too late.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., from “The Dancing Crane”,   5/13/17

Kindle Location 322.