From the Prologue of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart.
[T]he American Project [is] not about maximizing national wealth nor international dominance. The American Project (I love that phrase) consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American was to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.
I don’t think The American Project, our civil religion, is unraveling. It’s being unraveled.
Churches, book clubs, little league baseball teams, small businesses, and neighborhoods are held together by powerful bonds, and you can’t pull them apart. No matter how hard you tug, they’re bound together, like two fabrics held together by a zipper. Ever try to undo a zipper by pulling on the fabric on each side of the zipper? Impossible. Sometimes, the zipper is even stronger than the fabric and rips. But, beware. We know that those fabrics can be separated from one another with a gentle, light pull on the zipper, one easy zip, zip, zip at a time. Take away community, take away fellowship, and it’s every man for himself, no bonds, no cohesion . . . nothing.
Recently, I made a comment about Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union, and a friend asked if I had noticed how similar that speech was to the 2019 version.
I replied that all of Obama’s speeches sound alike, since that’s how megalomaniacs talk. That’s also how one talks when he’s trying to unzip the fabric of America, trying with every move to undo The American Project. There is nothing new to state control of everything, so we should stop waiting for Mr. Obamaa to advocate for it with original words and formulas. He and his cronies know they are doing nothing new, and they know it has never worked before, so those criticisms are made in vain. See, they are convinced, they are positive – just like their predecessors Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot and Chavez – that state control has failed in the past simply because it has never been done right or by the right people.
Remember, in a 2008 election speech, when Obama said “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” (See below.)
It, state control of your life, has never been tried by them. That’s what he meant. Head leftie talking to the lefties. WE will get it right this time.
And they know where the zippers are and they’re pulling on every last one of them.