Twice before, Western civilization has collapsed utterly, triggering half a millennium of darkness. At Blade of Perseus, Victor Davis Hanson wonders whether our current iteration, which delivered “constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets,” is due for its own catastrophic fall. “Salad-bowl tribalism replacing assimilation” is among the issues gripping Hanson, as is that “fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
