OLD AMERICA vs NEW AMERICA: WHAT IS AT STAKE IN THIS ELECTION
By Professor
Steven Yates
November 5, 2016
NewsWithViews.com
A recent Los Angeles Times column raises issues I wish to discuss here. While painting the contrast between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in usual corporate media fashion as Trump the villainous remnant of ages past and repository of the frustrations of the “deplorables,” vs. Hillary the vanguard and wave of a multicultural, cosmopolitan future, the concepts of “Old America” and “New America” are interesting and worth exploring.
Yes, there is a sense in which Trump represents an “Old America.” And in the same sense Hillary represents the “New America,” as do Barack and Michelle Obama. What matters is the substance behind those expressions, as opposed to politically correct (PC) propaganda.
The “Old America” embodied easily identifiable values: Christianity, Constitutional controls on government, responsible freedom, family, involvement in one’s community. The “Old America” valued work. It understood enough economics to know that wealth must be produced. Wealth isn’t created by government handouts any more than it falls from the sky. The “Old America” didn’t see economics as the end-all, be-all of human existence, however. Money was not an end in itself but a means to other ends. Sometimes the “Old America” struggled to define those other ends. I do not believe it solved the problems created by the increasing secularization of civilization, which were causing it substantial problems with some of its offspring as early as the 1950s. “Old America” as not Utopian in its outlook, however. It had more things right than it had wrong.
The “Old America” was socially conservative in the sense of valuing what had passed the test of time insofar as ensuring social stability and domestic tranquility. While not opposed to change absolutely, change agents had to make a compelling case. The “Old America” disapproved of change for the sake of change. It disdained social experimentation. The “Old America,” now accused of being too white, too rural, and too “uneducated,” was more in touch with the land. It understood that food does not originate on grocery store shelves. It valued making and building things (i.e., manufacturing).
What does the “New America” embody? It now calls itself progressive (liberal having left a bad taste in too many mouths). It speaks of the Constitution as a “living document,” which tells us that in practice the Constitution will mean whatever the Supreme Court and other opinion-makers want it to mean, not what it meant to the Founding Fathers. In truth: the “New America” has no use for Constitutional controls on government. It describes the “Old America” in hateful, loaded language as racist, sexist, homophobic, you know the PC litany.
It ignores the fact that America’s blacks are better off than their African counterparts, and that the past 50 years have seen programs designed to give them special advantages (affirmative action, set-asides, racenorming in law school admissions, speech codes, race-specific cultural centers, etc.), programs that would have been impossible without the support of a lot of well-intentioned white people. The “New America” ignores the damage such policies have done to relations between the races, and the damage radical feminism has done to that between the sexes, to the family generally: not just to men and boys but to women as well (as philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has shown in her books The War on Boys and Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women). Today the “alpha male” is out. Feminized “metrosexual” men are in unless they are nonwhite.
The “New America” ignores the clear sociological fact, documented all over the world and understood by the “Old America,” that groups with different cultures and incommensurable values cannot be forced together into the same communities without the result being dislocation, tension, and potential outbreaks of violence if some suspect others are getting more government freebies.
The “New America,” it is said, appeals to youth and to the “educated.” It presents itself as urban, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking. It appeals, that is, to millennials who grew up never having known a world without PC. And who have attended schools including their universities which have failed utterly to educate, so that whatever their ease with the latest gadgets, they cannot identify all the rights specified in the First Amendment or, in many cases, write a coherent, grammatically correct paragraph. Almost a third of millennials recently surveyed believed George W. Bush killed more people than Communist dictator Josef Stalin! How is that for “education” these days?
“New Americans” have entitlements instead of rights, employ groupthink, and have an irrational obsession with image instead of substance and actual accomplishment. They are products of longstanding dumbing down of the schools at all levels. Their mindset, that is, pseudo-intellectual rather than valuing, promoting, and dispensing real wisdom, whether in thought or action. “New America” thus plays right into the hands of globalists spread across government and corporations who advancing corporate-controlled world government. The bogus “free trade” deals Donald Trump fiercely attacked, starting with NAFTA and leading to the TPP, are key instruments of globalist-state architecture, as its own advocates have stated openly: according to Henry Kissinger, NAFTA “[was] not a conventional trade agreement … but the architecture of a new international system.”
“Old
America” wants nothing to do with such deals, not just because they
destroy millions of jobs but because they undermine U.S sovereignty. “New
America” under Obama has delivered a pathetic “recovery”
of part-time jobs. It couldn’t care less about U.S. sovereignty.
“Old America” is suspicious of corporate media and of some
of the technology millennials have grown up with. For one thing, “Old
America” remembers using technology to send men to the moon and
return them safely. “New America” uses it to take selfies.
“Old America” sees that in the environment “New America”
has created, anyone running for office is going to have his/her entire
life put under a social media microscope, as its leering denizens seek
evidence of departures from PC or anything sensational (sexual improprieties,
perhaps). “Old America” recalls that when we didn’t
have all this techno-voyeurism we had better candidates and better leadership.
“Old America” was politically decentralized, however. It wasn’t especially interested in politics. It looks back wistfully to a time when politicians and bureaucrats didn’t have their fingers in everything.
“New America” is highly centralized. It is controlled from five centers: New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Hollywood, and Silicon Valley; and from two places overseas: the City of London and Tel Aviv. The powers in these centers cooperate closely with one another. Like it or not, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, etc., are all in bed with the Deep State.
The “Old America,” that is, was about the real America: government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”! The “New America” is not truly American at all, but a cover for (among other things) globalism!
This has not stopped spokespersons for the “New America” from denouncing the “Old America” as “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” terms Hillary has used to express her hatred for millions of her countrymen (and countrywomen) outside those power centers.
“Old America,” if you go back a few decades, built that once-great country called the United States of America. “New America” is pulling it apart! In the guise of “Stronger Together” (Hillary’s soundbite), it actually divides group against group. “New America,” it should go without saying, is staunchly pro-abortion (“pro-choice”). While defending a “woman’s right to choose” on the grounds of cases where carrying a pregnancy to term will endanger a woman’s life, its writers do not inform you that these number well under one percent of abortions. The rest are abortions-of-convenience.
What about sex-ed, as a means of reducing teen pregnancies?
The “Old America” recognized that our nature as sexual beings had to be controlled by morality or it would undermine civilization little by little. The “New America,” with its pseudo-morality of don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-I’m-gonna-do-as-I-please-it’s-my-right, recognizes no meaningful controls on sexuality aside from PC ones. Hence, e.g., teen pregnancies, “comprehensive sex education” with its mixed message (“Don’t do it, but here’s how”), abortions, gay marriages, and “gender” confusion.
The “New America’s” actual view of human life, in accordance with the secular materialism at its core, is that it is expendable if it is inconvenient. This explains how easily Hillary hopped onto the pro-war bandwagon long ago, and how she was central in turning Libya and Syria into war-scarred wastelands, breeding grounds for terrorism and ISIS-sponsored brutality, the latter a flashpoint that could trigger a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
So yes,
this election is about more than just Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
It is about two utterly different ways of looking at the world —
two incommensurable worldviews. This explains the unprecedented hostility
between the two camps. Neither sees the other as legitimate. The mutual
hostility will survive this election no matter who wins.
So whose worldview is closer to the truth?
The “Old America” gave us the highest civilization anyone had ever achieved if that counts for anything. It was not perfect, just better. The “New America” has given us division and destruction. In its Orwellian worldview, hatred for dissent is masked by nice phrases like stronger together.
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It has wrecked education at all levels, and could ruin many more lives before it runs its course. It would effectively end the real America as it ushers in corporate-controlled world government. The latter, by the way, won’t care about black lives mattering or about women’s rights or gays — which explains the globalist Clinton Foundation accepting money from donor nations where women are treated like property and gays are thrown off tall buildings.
That is what at stake in this election. If you like the “New America,” then by all means knock yourself out voting for Hillary Clinton. But if you believe the “New America” is a cultural train wreck in progress, vote for Donald Trump on November 8. It is true that with Trump there are no guarantees. It is late in the game. But this will be your last chance to stop the derailment of the “Old America” and reverse the march to corporate-controlled world government.
© 2016 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
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Steven Yates has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of Four Cardinal Errors: Reason for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) and Philosophy Is Not Dead: A Vision of the Discipline’s Future (ebook, 2014). He blogs occasionally at WorldPress.com. He lives in Santiago, Chile with his wife and two spoiled cats, and is working on his own online education project, the New Lyceum Academy for Philosophical Studies (website forthcoming).
E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
