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If Bill the Butcher were alive today, he would almost certainly say that it DID happen, and that America is now a corpse being animated to do the bidding of the Catholics, Jews, and Europeans who infest it.
Historical American reactionaries have been more or less vindicated, and it’s hard to imagine Poole or his contemporaries being impressed by your stock portfolio or the advances of modern medicine when the culture is so unrecognizable. The only thing separating them from the reactionaries of the 1950s is that Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler poisoned the Overton window badly enough that you can no longer join the American military without pledging to “defend democracy around the world.”
If history repeats itself, it’s reasonable to conclude that America as we know it will be more or less “dead” and replaced by something else in 200 years. Even if the new owners keep the old place’s name to save money on a new sign.
That is a claim that Western liberal democracy has led to "degeneracy." And if you define "degeneracy" as "change in moral values," I guess that is true. But what about the collapse part? That is the dubious part of the original claim.
So, the US asks its soldiers to defend their principles, not merely their self-interest? A very strange thing to complain about from someone who is ostensibly is worried about moral degeneracy; that seems like a moral step forward to me.
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