Letter #145: What Comes Next

You can't stay in decline forever.

O Bald One,

I finished A Woman Underground last night. Impossible to put down. And there’s a lot in this latest Cameron Winter novel that speaks directly to our conversation. 

It’s not spoiling anything to say that the Winter series takes place in a collapsing America. You get the impression, though only indirectly, that the country has become one big chew toy for Communists, neo-Nazis, and dirty lawmen to play tug-of-war with in the mud, where they all belong.

I’m not saying that’s the future we’re headed for. I hope to God it’s not. But it vividly expresses the sense that we’re currently witnessing the death of something, some monumental but exhausted beast. Whatever comes next, the present state of affairs—torrents of debt and unaccountable migration, primitive color prejudice dressed up in the tattered rags of pseudo-intellectualism, hollow-souled would-be Stalinists cackling joylessly like ghoulish clowns—can’t go on indefinitely.

You can’t stay in decline forever, much as ours might feel interminable. You plummet toward rock bottom long enough, eventually you hit it. As Winter might say, that’s what the word decline means.

So all this uproar and destruction we’re now living through—the racial grandstanding and the sexual psychosis and the grubby little handouts—these are last gasps and fading embers. They are the death throes of “our failed leaders” who, as you say, “spend their days cosplaying Arthurian competence.”

They have no ideas left, not one, and those they championed in their prime are trailed by a century’s worth of ruinous failure. So they’re in free-fall. They might make quite a mess on their way out; they’ll certainly make a racket. But eventually they’ll go.

The question is whether they’ll take America down with them. Some people think, America produced them to begin with, so their failure is America’s failure: the writhing monster of progressivism sprang from the Enlightenment liberalism of the Constitution, and our mother country must die with her deformed child. Others maintain that the deformity is an unnatural one, inflicted on the country by mad scientists from Europe who perverted the original dream of ’76.

Myself, I can’t help thinking that it really does depend on whether we mean these four words literally: “endowed by their Creator.” I think God—the real one, whose children are free because he decrees it so—is the inescapable premise of the country. Only his existence, and our belief in it, can save our high-flown ideals from melting into corrosive utopian nonsense.

In fact the point of my own book is that everything—not just America, but the world—needs God as a first principle to make any sense at all. I think this is starting to dawn on people even as the death of the old order fills our ears with ugly noise. When the princes are finished raging against God and his anointed, we can get on with what comes next.

Love,
Spencer