We Thought We Were Free

The America we live in, our nation, our people, our society, is not the America most of us were born in at all. The uniquely American forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the football games, the local bars, the movies, the concerts, and the holidays. But the spirit, which most of us never noticed because we made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, has been fundamentally transformed. The transformation has occurred through the slowly creeping separation of not only the government from the people, but the people themselves from their country. It has taken place so gradually and so insensibly that the majority of Americans, preoccupied with the latest crisis happening in their own lives, have failed to see the slow motion underneath of the whole process of our government and the spirit of our country growing more and more remote. Yet, replace the word America with the word Germany and you’ll find that the parallels are hauntingly similar to the conditions in which Milton Mayer described in his book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.

For the most part this shift has occurred due to the culture itself in our society collapsing in the name of equality with little to no resistance or opposition from a populace who chooses to remain indifferent to the nature of the threat we are facing. This indifference in America to cultural issues and government lawlessness that we believe are seemingly unimportant and non-connected is akin to the appalling fascination of watching a man being hanged with the slowly dawning realization that it is a reflection of ourselves in a mirror. The effect of remaining indifferent while we ourselves tighten the noose is compounded by our nation’s steady departure from the ideals upon which we were founded. Freedom, liberty, the Constitution, and limited government have given way to dependence, decadence, censorship, and despotism. Growing out of the personal misconduct, gross neglect, and habitual disregard of public interests by our elected officials, our nation has degenerated from a constitutional republic, ruled by equality before the law, into a benevolent democracy, ruled by a mixed mob of corrupted autocratic elites.

The productive and self-reliant America is quickly vanishing into the past as we enter a new era of equal poverty, one-party rule, and systematic bureaucratic corruption.

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