Local opinion: Restore the balance — reverse our decline

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, delivered a recent speech in Davos, Switzerland, that was a “shot heard around the world” as an epitaph for the old world order of American dominance. It was also a profound repudiation of an American bully. And now Carney says that America is “at war” with its previous friends — and with itself.

“America in decline” is on the lips of people worldwide. The breadth and depth of our decline appears proportional to the breadth and depth of decline in the quality of our leaders. And, by extension, a decline in the quality of those who pick the leaders.

Would it not be delightful if the simple, palpable reversal of our decline would be a dramatic reversal in the quality of our leaders? Just clean house and throw the rascals out — as many of them as possible, all at once, at all levels of governance, in all institutions. Oh, if the reversal of America’s decline were so simple.

A house in need of serious structural repair cannot be salvaged with a broom, a mop, and a little elbow grease. And, the problem may not be just the house itself. It may just be the people who live there. I think “we” the people are responsible for America’s decline. I think the “simplicity”, or not, of the key to the reversal of our decline appears proportional to the breadth and depth of our individual and collective willingness to “admit” our decline, and that our decline is in free-fall.

It’s in the air, the toxic air we breathe. It’s in the water, the diminishing water supply we over-consume but continue to pollute. It’s in the soil we continue to rip, and gouge, and scar, and contaminate. It’s in our declining birth rate, a rate attached to the demise of relationships that foster a nurturing environment for the planning and raising of children. It’s in the decline of the neighborliness we used to have where suspicions about “their politics” never entered our minds. It’s in the pervasive substitution of “money” for “debate” in our politics and our governance.

But the most serious evidence of America’s decline is in America’s “credibility” at home, to its own people, and abroad with our allies and enemies. Bombarding our own people with lie after lie after lie — offering inexhaustible menus of alternative facts, conspiracies, and manufactured data (from once-revered institutions and sources). Arrogant unilateralism abroad: abrupt withdrawal from treaties, agreements, and promises, on-again and off-again tariffs, offers and withdrawals of aid, threats of seizures of territory and uses of military force against allies and enemies alike. Is the handshake offered to a foreign leader the credible warm inviting hand of a leader of a shared-power democracy? Or, is it the cold, uncertain grip of an autocrat?

The list of examples of our decline is palpably inexhaustible.

Reversal? First comes the “admission” of decline. Only then can the reversal begin. Then, and only then, can we illuminate the difficult path and journey up the talus slope to the same pinnacle of power and credibility that America enjoyed throughout most of the twentieth century. We, as individuals, with our individual choices, are responsible for our mess, so reversal of our collective decline could begin with individual values clarification in our choices of leaders.

America in decline is proportional to the decline of American presidential leadership. We pick leaders whose age, stamina, and mental acuity seem to make our decline both predictable and inevitable. In every sense of the word, our “choices” are putting us in decline.

If we as a people are hell-bent on choices of leaders based on perceived “ideological choice”, irrespective of leader qualifications, we will likely cede our dominant-power status to China because China has far greater experience in “balancing” autocratic governance at home and projection of global power at the same time.

However, I think that reversal of our decline is possible if we can once again select leaders who can guide us back to the vision of our Founders — “democratic governance and power” requires “separation of powers” with “checks and balances”. Such leadership requires a profound understanding that the Founders knew to their individual and collective cores that man’s selfish lust for power, wealth, and status is the meaning of “liberty” itself. And also — that “liberty” for all requires a democratic “sharing and balancing of power”. The alternative is some form of “autocracy”.

In my view, it is pure rhetorical nonsense to say that you support the Constitution, yet undermine the very ideological “nature-of-man” principles upon which the Constitution is based.

Disagree with Founders’ view of man’s fundamental nature — you likely disagree with the Constitution itself.