Patrick J. Deneen

Why America needs regime change

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - JUNE 28: U.S. President Joe Biden unveils his economic plan during an event in the lobby of the old post office building on June 28, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. He is also scheduled to attend a fundraising event during the visit. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing. Massive economic inequality and the breakdown of family formation have eroded the very foundations of society. 

Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair. The older generation has betrayed the younger by saddling it with unconscionable levels of debt.

Warnings about both oligarchy and mob rule appear daily on the front pages of newspapers throughout country, as well as throughout the West. A growing chorus of voices reflects on the likelihood and even desirability of civil war, while others openly call for the imposition of raw power by one class to suppress the political ambitions of its opponent class. Unsurprisingly, the louder the calls for tyranny, the more likely the eruption of a civil war; and the more likely a civil war moves from cold to hot, the more likely it is ultimately resolved through one or another form of tyranny.

What we are witnessing in America is a regime that is exhausted.

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