Degenerate America?

If the following passage is correct, we can see why the destruction of the constitutional order in the U.S. and the attack on all that is best in our traditional culture continue almost without protest. Our fundamental law and our traditional culture are part of the dead hand of the past, an impediment to license, self-indulgence, and expropriation.

Do Americans, does Modern Western Man, want liberty from arbitrary and overweening government . . . or libertinism? An orderly, predictable society or complete freedom from restraint?

“It is a piece of stupidity,” as Spengler writes, “to want to substitute something else for the social structure that has grown up through centuries and is fortified by tradition” because “there is no substituting anything else for Life” and “after Life there is only Death.” When “wastrel nobility… shipwrecked academicians, adventurers and speculators, criminals and prostitutes, loiterers, and the feeble-minded” rouse the rabble in the cause of “Liberty” what they really mean, as Spengler writes, is: “Liberation from all the bonds of civilization, from every kind of form and custom, from all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior.”

* * * *

. . . According to Spengler, “liberty,” as the term signifies in its recentest usage, “consists in breaking loose from the Culture and its society” – that is, through the radical gesture of destroying the Culture and its society.^[1]

No one can tell another what to do. That would be "judgmental." No one can set a standard. No line can be drawn, certainly not one between citizen and foreigner or between citizen and criminal.

Notes
^[1] "Oswald Spengler On Democracy, Equality, And 'Historylessness'." By Thomas F. Bertonneau, The Brussels Journal 5/31/12