On September 17, 1787, 81 year old Benjamin Franklin sat in a room in Philadelphia with a speech in his hand that he was too weak to deliver.
A fellow delegate read it to the Constitutional Convention for him.
Franklin had reservations about the draft Constitution. His speech admitted there were “several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve.”
He knew the other delegates each harbored their own concerns. There had been vigorous debates over state versus federal authority, over representation for large and small states, and of course over slavery.
But Franklin implored his colleagues to focus on where they had common ground… and be gentlemen enough to compromise on the rest. Otherwise there would be no Constitution at all.
In the end, almost everyone signed. And that’s because the delegates at least agreed on the basics: America would be a republic, not a monarchy. The republic would honor its debts. And its government would answer to the people.
That’s the basis of political compromise: finding the areas, however few, where you agree, and putting the good of the nation ahead of the areas where you don’t.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about America’s problems. Many are gargantuan. Most are easily solvable.
For example, Social Security’s retirement fund will run out of money in just six years— which is an enormous problem. But it’s easily fixable if Congress would simply follow the published recommendations of the program’s administrators.
Immigration is another huge problem for the US… though it too can be easily reformed with just a pinch of common sense.
America runs $2 trillion budget deficits each year… but everyone can see there’s plenty of fat to trim. The government loses up to $500 billion each year just to outright fraud, let alone waste and inefficiency.
Federal regulations run past 188,000 pages, and tens of thousands of them could be cut tomorrow to jumpstart the economy, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
All of these are easily fixable challenges. Yet very little reform happens.
Congress displays an extreme level of intransigence, an outright refusal to act. Whenever the White House tries to cut spending, activist judges block the cuts. The media vilifies the effort. Professional agitators and paid protesters show up to cause havoc.
And any attempt at compromise is met with division and hate.
It’s clear to me that nothing ever gets fixed because America (and the West in general) no longer agrees on the basics… and that’s because there are no longer any shared, core values.
“Shared values” doesn’t mean “no disagreement”. Benjamin Franklin’s delegates disagreed vigorously on several issues. But they were at least in lockstep on the basics: liberty, personal responsibility, equality before the law.
Superman used to famously stand for “truth, justice and the American way.” He was an immigrant, born on another planet and raised on a Kansas farm, and that was the whole point: anyone could adopt the American way.
But what does “the American way” even mean anymore? Far too many Americans now believe their own nation is toxic, evil, and irredeemably racist.
Across the West, people are ashamed of their own culture, believe it needs to be cleansed, and are working to make that happen.
It would be one thing if the ideological disagreements were rooted in real issues. But they’re not. Social divisions today are absolutely absurd.
Americans can’t even agree on “what is a woman”, and it goes all the way to the top. At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked that same question. Yet she claimed that she could not because she’s “not a biologist”.
When Lindsay Clancy went on trial in Massachusetts this summer for strangling her three children, Americans couldn’t even universally condemn this woman as heinous and evil.
The list goes on and on. And it matters.
Shared values aren’t about race, religion, of immigration status. It doesn’t matter where someone is from, what god they worship, what food they eat, what traditions they keep, or who they sleep with.
Shared values are the most basic fundamentals of a civilization. And if you come to a country and can’t share those values, you certainly should not be agitating to change them.
Multiculturalism, as practiced by the woke left, dilutes their own culture and civilization.
Mass migration has largely meant bringing in people who share absolutely nothing with the culture they’re joining and never intend to try.
The reason this is so critical is because values dictate priorities, and priorities dictate which problems get solved. So if you dilute the values, you derange the ability to solve problems.
When Americans tear each other to pieces over ridiculous basics (i.e. what is a woman), it means they not only disagree on basic values, but they hence disagree on priorities.
And that means nothing will ever be solved.
In his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist Joseph Tainter concluded that civilizations from ancient Rome to the Mayan people ultimately collapsed because they lost the ability to solve complex problems.
Every new layer of government that they created ended up costing more and delivering less, until the society could no longer fix anything at all.
That’s America today. It’s why Congress can’t even cut blatant fraud. And it explains a lot of how COVID went down the way it did.
Empires don’t fail because people suddenly become stupid. They fail because they can no longer solve problems.
My own conclusion is that this is happening because people no longer agree on basic values.
Maybe things turn around, and I certainly hope so. But given the trend, it would be crazy to not have a Plan B.
P.S. A Plan B means your savings, your retirement, and your options don’t depend on a Congress that can’t agree on anything.
Plan B Confidential, our flagship research service here at Schiff Sovereign, covers how to build one: legal residency abroad, foreign bank accounts, legal tax strategies, and real assets like gold that hold their value when the currency doesn’t.
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