Indeed... The virtues of the republic and early empire decayed over time. Marcus Aurelius was one of the last points of light.
The Decline of Western Civilization
- Thread starter CrimsonJazz
- Start date
Indeed... The virtues of the republic and early empire decayed over time. Marcus Aurelius was one of the last points of light.
I'm not familiar with ACOUP. I'll check them out.
I guess my point is that generating the patriotism, especially in the young, is not automatic. It takes cultivation. From the Roman Republic Horatius at the Bridge and Marcus Atilius Regulus are great examples. From our republic, men like George Washington, Thomas Nelson, Nathan Hale are great examples. in 1941-45, we fielded an armed forces with men like Audie Murphy, Dick Winters, and Chesty Puller. Those men felt their country was worthy of those exertions.
If all young people know of their country and its founding is that it is an oppressive regime and always has been, then we are not generating the next generation of patriot-heroes. Instead we are creating a generation of young men willing to cut off their own thumbs to avoid military service (or whatever the 21st century equivalent if that is).
The last major victory of the Empire, came in AD 451, but the western Empire had collapsed within a quarter of a century. This was because the Catalaunian Plains was a victory of Roman mercenaries and fœdoratii not Roman citizens. the sack of Rome and consequent disastrous drop in standard of living, literacy rates, life expectancy, etc. that followed demonstrate that the arc of history is not always upward.
Actually, by the time of the collapse, the population of Italy had come to resemble today's closely, with strong Germanic influence in the north and Greek in the south. Only the central region's genetics come close to tracking the ancient Roman population...
A complex and depth laden issue indeed...
My kids are less effusively patriotic than their counterparts in 1945 would have been, but they certainly want the US to do well and remain and equitable land of freedom and opportunity. The landscape has changed greatly in the last century.
Gens Z and Alpha have been raised in a time when the even the POTUS was telling everyone that the US isn't special. And a huge portion of the tribes lapped it up and continued to repeat it to the point that many / most of these generations aren't patriotic.
It's sad, as it starts at home, yet there are so many people who will doggedly speak ill of the US while never showing pride. And God forbid you allow the media to influence your view. It's no wonder so many lack patriotism.
I think you hit the nail on the head on the part you were addressing.
I think we can list a number of contributors to the (seeming) decline in patriotism, and I only say "seeming" because at times I tend to try to be optimistic that the part where we pull for the country exceeds the part where we criticize it for - yes - the bad things we've done.
1) We've Had It So Good
Lost in all the income inequality, affordability, inflation, and "how bad is that Trump guy" commentary is the simple fact that we really have had it GOOD for a long time in this country. Nobody is getting drafted into a controversial war nowadays, we aren't living hand to mouth with 24% unemployment like it's the Great Depression, we don't have a BUNCH of hungry kids anymore (certainly not like we did), and people still want to come here from other less fortunate nations. YES, we had a pandemic - the whole damn world had one. But overall, our recovery from bad things has gone so well that just a decade after the collapse of the housing market destroyed so much capital and retirements, people were right back to their lousy spending habits.
We REALLY HAVE had it good. That's not to say there aren't problems - but if we're being honest, the only difference in our previous problems and now is people can get online and whine about their predicaments and lazy bloggers can amplify them. My grandfather (1909-1985) worked at the West Point Pepperell textile mill in Lanett, Alabama, a town named for the two guys (Lanier and Bennett) who started the mill. His wife - my grandmother - worked there as well. They didn't own a car until they were in their late 40s, they walked three blocks to work in a house built by the mill for the workers. He also delivered newspapers once he got a car, just to make extra money to send their three kids to college. ALL THREE WENT and ALL GRADUATED, incredibly rare for folks born between 1936 and 1946. They never had the "good life" folks talk about now, never at any time, but they made it work.
They didn't have an I phone or a computer to whine about their hurting fingers and exposure to brown lung. They didn't have the time, either. The reality is, we have had it REALLY good in this country. My Oregon bud is in England right now and his own daughter - a hardcore liberal socialist who wants to defund the police - looked at him yesterday and said, "America blows this place away for convenience."
2) Fathers Not in the Home
This one has been beaten to death, but with the point about patriotism being passed down through families, the constant Baby Daddy phenomenon (and no folks, it isn't just a black thing, either) doesn't help.
3) Howard Zinn
Yes, the Commie who taught a generation of young people to loathe their country because we're all bad and no good gets some credit, too. Funny thing is - I missed out on this yo-yo. I only first heard of him about five years ago.
4) Declaring War on Iraq While Engaged in Afghanistan
We get attacked on 9/11 and a bunch of patriotic Americans do things like withdraw from college or volunteer right out of high school to serve in the military. And what does the Bush Administration do? Pivots entirely in another direction to settle an old family score with Iraq, all under the guise of "well, this guy has 'weapons of mass destruction' and he might give them to Bin Laden." We had people who joined the military to fight against the Taliban who went to boot camp, came out the other side, and wound up getting pulverized by a roadside bomb in a country we decided to attack almost on the whim of Donald Rumsfeld. Or we had folks go - repetitively - here then there then here then there for a decade.
5) Biden's Botched Pullout of Afghanistan
The botched pullout of something that should have been easy enough to do made it even worse. What American NOW - after the fleeing to the helicopters in Saigon, the abandoning of the American Embassy in Teheran, the choosing of a second war without ending the first in the Middle East, and the sudden "ah, what the hell, let's go home, Lloyd" pullout from Afghanistan.....what American with a functioning brain would ever volunteer for military service with our repetitive failures?
This cartoon from 2021 drives the point home better than anything I could say:
6) The Corruption of "Make America Great Again"
When Ronald Reagan coined that phrase in 1980, he was campaigning in a country that had gone through a brutal existence psychologically since the assassination of the President in 1963. Through the 60s riots, Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, and culminating in the helplessness of the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan was NOT (as Trump has done) saying, "We're a terrible, horrible country, but I can fix all that's wrong with it." He was addressing that spirit that flared from time to time like when the US hockey team stunned the Soviet Union in the Olympics. He was NOT putting us down or saying we had been this great country but now we were terrible. Furthermore, he was saying THE AMERICAN PEOPLE with removal of some government encumbrance could do well ON THEIR OWN. He was NOT saying what Trump is using the same words to say, whether you like Reagan or not. He was campaigning as an OPTIMIST and tapping into the mythical America seen in Norman Rockwell paintings, etc. YES, he simplified. But Reagan was also a WW2 era vet, so he brought that to the table as well.
Most of our Presidential candidates, win or lose, tapped into that. Kennedy did, Nixon did, and as you go through the ads, Gerald Ford had "I'm feeling good about America," Dukakis said "the best America is yet to come", Clinton started with Reagan's phrase and then pivoted to saying (basically) "things are bad, but WE CAN make them better." Obama went with "change we can believe in" and "yes, we can." The only sort of pessimist who won, Carter, still was able to combine the spirit of both Abraham Lincoln and preacher Jonathan Edwards.
Then we get to 2016, and we have Bernie Sanders ranting about things and about how bad things are here, never mentioning that America has worked out pretty damn well for HIM. Liz Warren loved America so much, she wanted to pretend to be one of the "people who were here first." And then we have the Demagogue Don saying in the same hamberder breath that HE ALONE can make America great again and that all these other countries with brown people are conspiring to destroy what he also says is a bad country, to the point he says we're no better than Russia. RONALD REAGAN AND BILL CLINTON DID NOT USE THAT PHRASE TO EVEN IMPLY SUCH!!!
Thus, we have a Republican standard bearer who thinks America is only good when he's in office so he can avoid jail (that's the only reason he's there, folks) and the leaders of the Democrats whining about crap like "colonizing" and talking about a Jim Crow that ended long before they were even born as if it still exists. I swear, the next Democrat who opens a meeting with the words, "First, we want to admit we are holding this meeting on stolen land" needs to be mocked on every network within seconds. "Uh, unless you have a plan to give the land back, you should just shut the hell up."
I've rambled like the increasingly old geezer I am. What's funny is in some ways, I FEEL for these kids but at the same time, their 'struggles' aren't really all that different than any of us endured. As a friend of mine in Kentucky said last time we talked, "My Dad is 75, he's always been gainfully employed, and he's still terrified about what's next or if he can make it through without being forced out of his house or what's left of his earnings."
My sister-in-law, who does too much dope and not enough reading, wants to play victim with how they're being told to live in "a world that no longer exists."
I hate to break it to these folks, but they were ALIVE in 2000.
And the world of 2000 is as different from 2026 as it was from 1974, but we made it work.
And despite the shadow of Vietnam, there was another surge of patriotism in both the early 80s and the early 90s - and even early 00s.
I'll agree on all points but one. I don't think there was ever an easy way out of Afghanistan...
I won’t argue that point; l just think it along with other “let’s cut the cord and get out of here” American foreign policy debacles, it has contributed to the (seeming) decline in patriotism.
It’s a moment everyone can recall.
That we should have had a better exit strategy and defined mission beyond emotional engagement in 2001 is correct.
Let me put it like this:
Multiple guys in my grandfather’s generation served in the military.
My dad and both his brothers - 2 volunteers, 1 drafted - served.
I did, one brother did and my sister married a pilot in the USAF.
If my kid wanted to volunteer for service, I’d advise against it. Afghanistan withdrawal was merely the last vivid symbol of our tendency to put people in harm’s way and suffer a catastrophe.
Multiple guys in my grandfather’s generation served in the military.
My dad and both his brothers - 2 volunteers, 1 drafted - served.
I did, one brother did and my sister married a pilot in the USAF.
If my kid wanted to volunteer for service, I’d advise against it. Afghanistan withdrawal was merely the last vivid symbol of our tendency to put people in harm’s way and suffer a catastrophe.
If we had solely focused on Afghanistan and just cleaned the Taliban out there... It would have been very different. And we only went to Iraq because "They tried to get my Daddy..."
And here we are again with a group wanting to head into Iran.
But this is the thing - and I think this is what Earle is driving at:
What EXACTLY were we supposed to do in Afghanistan that was going to make a difference? Not only do we not tend to try to change cultures, it tends to fail when we do. Their form of government was going to be a fact of life regardless - whether we never went, left after one year, left after twenty.
Now, I'm with CA on the fact that we apparently did a rush job "let's just get out of here" and didn't do things in what most of us military folks would deem "the proper order."
Let's take a parallel example, Carter's rescue mission in April 1980 (Operation Eagle Claw). The part I've never understood beyond him desperately wanting to not look weak is, "What the hell was the plan?" For starters, there was no way to know that all of the hostages were in one place (and after the failed raid, they weren't). And the entire plan was seen EVEN BY THOSE DOING IT (according to Mark Bowden's book) as inevitably going to fail. What that failure did prove was that the service branches didn't communicate well amongst themselves and led to the formation of the Special Ops Command in the Air Force.
Part of the reason Reagan, who was thought to be so trigger happy, never got us into an actual shooting war was because SECDEF Caspar Weinberger didn't want to be in charge of another Vietnam and conceived of the Weinberger Doctrine, six tests of "unless you can answer all six, you don't invade." (He was overruled on the debacle that got 243 Marines killed in Lebanon). The only time anything met the criteria was Grenada, although that didn't stop him from doing other stupid stuff like selling arms to Iran and conducting a guerilla war in Nicaragua.
I always ask, "What WAS the plan?"
Even if the argument is, "Well, Biden got handed a bad situation," well, I'm sorry, but not only did he know this when he signed up to run but he was VP for eight years, which makes this all the more inexcusable. Did he not sit in on any of the meetings in the Obama administration about Afghanistan and why they didn't do what he did? Or worse, did he sit in on those meetings but have pudding brain and made the decision anyway?
====================
In another post, I think you're the one that brought up Carter a few days ago so let me say this. I've always assessed Carter as, "Jimmy Carter was a well-intentioned Southerner who spent four years in the wrong job." Historical revisionism is already trying to pretend Reagan made some secret deal with Iran but good luck finding evidence of that for the simple reason it never happened. (Much like the JFK conspiracy buffs, I have fun with them: "What happened was Bill Casey/John Connally/GHW Bush flew to Paris/Madrid/Algiers in March/July/October in a C-141/SR-71 Blackbird and met with (list of different people) and agreed to (list of non-specific often contradictory terms)."
Thing is: I'm not sure of that simply because killing the leader(s) is the EASY part.
You may wind up with something worse (Cuba, Vietnam, Iran).
I read a fascinating longform on the subject and the suggestion was that we could have focused on Afghanistan, cleared the Taliban, and the ongoing cost to prevent further terrorist resurgences would have been fairly minimal compared to the massive cost of Iraq and all of the secondary disasters from our misadventure there. The author was very blunt in stating that even then it was probably a no win scenario with no end game in site and no good answers other than maintaining a presence indefinitely.
I think that Carter's administration gets hit for the energy crisis and other issues for which we really didn't have an answer. I don't believe in the notion Reagan made a deal with the Iranians of course, that is just conspiracy theory laden drivel. He was handed stagflation, the energy crisis, the hostage crisis, etc. He did install Volcker, whose policies greatly set the stage for Reagan, although the upfront shock contributed to Carter losing. Carter also had already started deregulation in a number of industries which contributed to Reagan's economy, although you can make the case Reagan went to far.
To his detriment... Carter remained aloof from the mainline Democrats and missed an opportunity to consolidate power and was far too blunt and did not play the political game wisely.
Honestly, I don't know.
What I DID know in 2002 was, "Invading Iraq is a colossally stupid idea."
What is absolutely correct is that Carter was victimized by a ton of things that hit him all at the same time that preceded him, some of which could not possibly be known would get as bad as they did. And some of which were, "Look, this has to play out over time." The same thing happened to Bush 41. Kissinger of all people thought Bush 41 had the most traumatic Presidency (at that time) since Truman took over, and he also thought he did pretty well all things considered. But like Carter, he lost, so "he must have not been very good."
This is the general assessment of Cannon's biography of Reagan. Deregulation was already a big thing but being a conservative, Reagan didn't bother to learn there's a difference in TRUCKING and AIRLINE deregulation and S AND L deregulation where only the investor could get hurt so badly. Of course, Cannon also points out that the S and L crisis (just like the later housing crisis) was BIPARTISAN in that Republicans favored deregulation and Democrats were taking money from those guys for their campaign coffers, too.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but one early episode destroyed Carter with the Democrats despite them having (IIRC) 62 seats in 1977. His first economic program had a thing called "the rebate," basically the same thing Democrats (and sometimes in a different way Republicans) do when they first take office (Democrats call it stimulus, Republicans call it a tax cut). I don't recall the specific amount of "the rebate," but I believe it totaled around $8 billion across the board. A bunch of Democrats who didn't favor this got on board with it, willing to swallow their pride for party unity, but its passage was iffy. Then Carter got taken to the woodshed by George Meany of the AFL-CIO, who argued just as pathetically stupid as you can imagine a union guy would (it's a bad idea because it's not enough for the poor and then when you lift the poor, you have to give a break to the middle class guy yadda yadda. Someone - forget who at the moment - demanded an amendment to give a break to the New England shoe industry that was being destroyed by Formosan imports). All this went on from January to April.
Then, all of a sudden, without even meeting with leaders of either party, Carter pulled the "rebate" from the package and all hell broke loose. Politicians being politicians, they all began reacting publicly, accusing Carter of cooking the books or not knowing what he was doing and how dare he ask them to support something they didn't really want to but now do this. Howard Baker (R - TN) told him if he ever pulled anything like that again (announcing a change without at least telling the congressional leaders), "I'll burst your balloon!"
Carter never recovered within his own party. He only survived the primary in 1980 because even the hardcore leftists can read poll numbers and Ted Kennedy was going to get clobbered worse in the fall.
Carter came from a one-party fiefdom in Georgia and didn't know any of this coaxing, persuading, etc.
Reagan came from a two-party state in California where (for a time) the other party controlled the legislature.
And I think that had more to do with the success of one and the failure of the other than anything else.
I would suggest one decision made by the president was catastrophic: the decision to not allow contract support to the Afghans. The US, when tasked to create a new modern Afghan military capable of fighting its own battles against the Taliban, for good reasons or ill, tried to replicate itself. A series of combat outposts, linked together by aircraft transport. When the Biden Administration removed the military remaining in country, it also decided to end the contract support (which did a lot of the air mission planning, maintenance, etc., things the Afghans were not yet capable of). This meant the collapse of the air support enabling the COPs, who now had to rely on ground transport, which is easily ambushed. One by one, the COPs were overrun or the Afghan forces holding them simply deserted.
Contractors were generally based on major bases which were secured by base security. I can only imagine that President Biden just wanted a clean break of it, and when withdrawing the few military still in country also wanted the contract support out so all Americans would be out of danger. That decision was catastrophic, however. One thing about Afghans is that they usually keep a moist finger in the breeze and, if it looks like Kabul was about to collapse, they did not want to go down with that ship. This dynamic was what happened in 2001. When it looked like the Talibs were going down, Afghans country-wide deserted them, gradually and sporadically at first, then in an avalanche. The same thing happened in reverse in 2021.
Near the end, you got around to what underlies my earlier remarks. To call that place a "country" is a travesty. It's an area of loose confederations of tribes. That's all. The people in the north can't even talk to the people in the south without an interpreter. Once Doha was firmed up (by Trump, extended by Biden), all the local chiefs and warlords had cut their individual deals with their new lords and masters (which happened to be the old ones). There simply is no "clean" way out of that situation. Why should the Afghans, with their very loose alliances fight a rear guard action for the Americans? What happened was completely predictable, at least to me, and not only that, it was totally, completely unavoidable, given that "country." OK, I've opened that discussion up. I'm open to hearing all this "easy" and "clean" ways out. TW has one helpful suggestion, although it puts more American lives at risk, which I think Biden was loath to do. I really think his advisors believed Trump would get the blame for Doha. Didn't work...
Yep... It went quickly and we probably did have the strength needed even when Biden assumed office. We were down to 2500 in country at that point and less when things fell apart.
"Invading Iraq is a colossally stupid idea."
This... The Neocons bit off more than they could chew. And based on false data. But you couldn't buck the trend at the time without being called an American hating commie... I remember watching the first news footage on the couch as a resident late one night thinking we would deeply regret it.
Trending content
Latest threads
-
ESPN: Michigan AD Manuel to step down at end of year- Started by TideFans Reporter
- Replies: 0
-
-
-
-
ESPN: Duke players say Mensah's transfer 'surprising'
- Started by TideFans Reporter
- Replies: 0
-
ESPN: Texas Tech, Galaxy deal offers NIL opportunities
- Started by TideFans Reporter
- Replies: 0