Societal decline is best imagined as a drunk man falling down a long flight of stairs, maybe a long spiral staircase. He begins at the top, the peak of the society, then carelessly makes the wrong steps and begins to tumble down the stairs. It is not a rapid or steady fall to the bottom. Instead, he hits a landing, rights himself for a bit, but regaining his confidence he makes another wrong step and takes another tumble.
Some of the landings are long and he is able to function at that level for a while, thinking he is still at the place he started. Maybe he takes a few tentative steps back to the old position higher up the stairs, but eventually it is another misstep, and he falls back down past that landing to another landing farther down. This is societal decline. It is periods of decline punctuated by periods in which it feels like the decline has been arrested.
This is useful to keep in mind as we watch the new regime come to grips with the new reality they face….link
One might characterize the adoption of Modernism by the ruling class elite in the 1920s as the first big misstep of the current age — particularly, the focus on self-actualization, consumerism, materialism, abandonment of identity, and adoption of egalitarianism. Then the Great Depression & WWII arrested things for a bit; the masses were bonded together. Then another huge misstep and tumble: the 1960s. The 1980s represented another arresting phase. Nothing was reversed, but at least it didn’t grow worse. Things got wobbly again in the 1990s, but those years were still fairly tolerable — paradise by today’s standards.
Then 9/11 hit and we’ve been rolling down those stairs ever since. We’ve seen the steady erosion of our freedoms, an ever growing surveillance state, endless war, creeping censorship, increasing political correctness, an explosion of debt and multiple economic crises, contentious elections, and hardening of partisan lines.
The election of Barack Obama, particularly his 2012 reelection, is the equivalent of that point in the fall where you land so hard you break a leg, meaning you can never get back up again to right yourself. A point of no return has been crossed and you will continue tumbling until you hit the ground. Thus, the explosion of cancel culture, wokeism, monument destruction, anti-White pogroms, and societal unrest in an almost unimaginably quick succession.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was simply a desperate grab at the railing as the force of gravity inevitably carried you down the stairs anyway. It wasn’t even a respite but more of a very slight slowing of the fall, but the fall continued nonetheless.
Of course, it’s much more involved than that. Missing is any context surrounding those events. But the general timeline is about right. The next step is to hit the floor and pass away from the fall. Then the guy who pushed you sells the house and claims he had nothing to do with it.
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