It took an election of a President who started his political career in the 1970s to bring back all the gifts of that wonderful decade for a whole new generation of Americans to experience.  The list in the four short months President Biden has been in office affecting history is eerily familiar .  Gas shortages. Inflation.  Poor job growth.  Race tension. Drugs poring over the border.  Middle East on fire. Communist dictatorships on the ascendance. American withdrawal from an overseas military debacle. Cratering American confidence in its institutions. The difference this time is all of this was on purpose.  What would possess a country with the natural abundance of materials, talent , and freedoms of America to willingly subvert its own innate proclivity for success?  The simple answer is leadership exhaustion, requesting we simply learn to accept that maintaining exceptionalism is too daunting. It appears it has taken a leader in obvious personal decline to show the rest of us how we can find happiness in a national decline.  As the left sagely informs us with its post modern weariness for personal initiative, Buck up comrades. Soon it will be curtains, and no one will feel left behind.

The malaise of the 1970s, was officially named by President Carter as the country’s pathologic diagnosis towards the end of the decade.  It appeared the American experiment was out of ideas and out of energy.  This was not an entirely unpredictable outcome of the awesome responsibility the conclusion of World War II forced upon the United States, to have a traditionally isolationist people take on the mantle of leadership of the free world.  This uncomfortable responsibility was as a consequence of exiting the war with the country’s massive manufacturing infrastructure intact, fully 50% of the the world’s economic capacity.  The cold war for dominance between the Soviet Union and the United States forced a perpetual state of proxy wars as a direct confrontation in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. The constant pressure to address external challenges left the US vulnerable to internal restlessness and contradictions given its own long standing inequities in civil rights, environment, and infrastructure.  The solitary injection of self esteem coming from  the spectacular accomplishment of the national crusade of landing a man on the moon and returning the crew safely within a single decade of the sixties, left the nation surprisedly bereft of energy for the next technological leap forward.  Assassinations of political leaders and an excruciating political debacle in Watergate that took down a President and left the assumed Constitutional stability wobbly and bruised, was followed by ignominious loss of Indochina despite the painful investment tens of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars.  The country seemed lost from its moorings, friendless,  and feeble against an ascendant Soviet empire.

Gas prices soared along with interest and jobless rates.  Cities became dens of uncontrolled crime and pollution. A generation of young people had seen the American promise of a better life with each succeeding generation a hollow facade.  The President of the United States in his frustration stated the obvious.  The problem was with people and their malaise, and his only advice was to …hunker down.

The amazing, recurring characteristic of America since its 1776 has always been its stubborn counterintuitive resiliency at times of apparent mortal peril and despondency.  The winter of 1777-78 found the American army in frozen taters at a point of virtual collapse at Valley Forge while the greatest military power in the world inhabited all the major cities.  1781 saw the spectacular reversal of Yorktown  with Cornwallis surrendering his entire army and with it the last tendrils of hope of maintaining the British dominance of the colonies.  The British took their revenge on a helpless United States in 1812 burning the White House down humiliating the fleeing US President Madison. 1814 cumulated in the obliteration of the British at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and the removal of British influence forever between Mexico and Canada. By 1861, an irreconcilable view of the country’s reason for being and the core rationality the founding documents led to a horribly violent schism and the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans.  Massive loss and destruction, and the martyrdom of a President proved insufficient to prevent the eventual hard one reconciliation and the inexorable forces that finally corrected America’s great flaw a century later. The spectacularly horrific thirty years of two brutal world wars bracketing a world wide depression seemed to risk the very existence of the American experiment against massive economic and totalitarian forces.  Yet by 1948, the American Colossus stood economically unique in the world, and opportunity for every American seemed to have finally attained the wildest dreams of the genius founders.

The culmination of the events of the 1970s were similarly  felt by the elites to have finally positioned America in a post modern position of having its destiny determined by others, and many of the elite felt America deserved its fate.  Yet, once again, from an entirely unexpected source, a so-called second rate film actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan, an American renaissance was borne so great that it was to last almost 40 years, the tide incredibly bringing down the Soviet empire, freeing hundreds of millions of people, and restoring the American capacity for risk and innovation, birthing and developing the Information Revolution.

The past ten years seem to reflect how this tendency for American rebirth sticks in the craw of the American elite.  President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” struck at the heart of America’s seeming providential awakenings.  For socialist ideology, a history of repeated massive failure on the world stage only deepens the resolve of the leftist need to destroy American exceptionalism, for as long as it exists, the narrative to simply accept the delivered justice to the masses by the terminally educated who know better about the appropriate societal strata.  The flaming orange comet that was Donald Trump only incited a great desperation to destroy American resilience once and for all, and get it line with the other countries that had left striving for greatness behind for simple co- existence. Trump had to go, and with each unbound, irrational success he had in somehow restoring Americans taste for the hard work of recovery, the elites task became more determined, and more deadly in targeting.

Succeed they did, and now the Presidency is in the hands of a shell of a husk of a carton of a man who in his prime was sub-prime, and in his deteriorated state, simply a blank canvas upon which the agenda can be painted and the narrative to be guided.  This time, they hope, it really is over.  Gas lines, exploding interest rates, unbounded debt, existential crises, and a floundering flounder of a leader.

This time, they got us beat, don’t they?

Could America achieve one more Awakening from this debacle?