The Decivilizing Of America

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/12/332875/

Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security.

In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented.
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It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern era, when there were no clearly defined or secure borders, and nomadic peoples migrated as they pleased.

Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded.

Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs.

Some 8,500 veteran soldiers were drummed out of the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccinations. Yet 10 million simply walked across the southern border into America, without a care from the Biden administration whether they were vaccinated, ill, or had criminal records.

Any American citizen pulled over for speeding with an invalid driver’s license, while trafficking eight illegal aliens without identification, would be jailed and charged with felony counts. Not Abrego Garcia—the violent spousal abuser, M-13 gang-member, and previously deported illegal alien. He was neither arrested nor even cited by the officers who pulled him over.

One of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization and subsequent Western civilization was its ability to create large cities by importing clean water, removing waste through sewers, and collecting garbage from the streets. Even in the age before microbiology, ancient and premodern city planners knew the connection between cleanliness and epidemics and how to lessen disease through sanitation.

But in the last two decades, our major cities have been de-civilizing. Citizens are told not to flush non-biodegradable plastics down their toilets, both to preserve the environment and to ensure municipal septic systems work properly. They are reminded to pick up their pets’ excrement on sidewalks and in parks. For purposes of collective health, they are taught not to urinate, spit, or defecate in public areas.

Is all that for naught? After all, our mayors and city councils in our biggest and most iconic cities simply destroyed centuries of such health protocols and allowed tens of thousands of homeless people with impunity to inject, urinate, defecate, and fornicate in or on storefronts, streets, gutters, parks, and sidewalks. The stench, flotsam, and jetsam have utterly transformed American inner cities. Central Seattle, Los Angeles, parts of San Francisco, Portland, and Washington, DC, now resemble medieval London or Paris—as if a millennium-long knowledge of basic public health was simply ignored or mocked. In truth, the centers of America’s big cities are spaces where public health protocols are no longer enforced, where all the ancient and hard-won rules of civilization no longer apply. It would likely be safer to walk through Dickensian London of 1850 than to take a nocturnal ride on the New York subway.

Another hallmark of Western civilization was the creation of a judiciary that gave the state the power to enforce laws, ensure justice, and deter criminals by swift punishment, unaffected by ideology, bias, bribes, and personal vendettas.

From the law codes of Justinian to the American Constitution, ascendant civilizations rose with a codified legal system applied uniformly, disinterestedly, and fairly.

Not any longer. Ideology has turned the American legal system into a commissariat of sorts in which relativism is now the norm. Vandalize a Tesla in a blue state and, like the South of old, the laws will be lightly if even enforced and applied selectively. No one seriously believes that Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis were interested in real crimes rather than concocting them to destroy a presidential candidate and thus warp the political system. In contemporary America, it was far more likely to suffer a jail sentence for walking peaceably but unlawfully in the Capitol than for torching a federal courthouse, historic church, or police precinct in the summer of 2020.

From the ancient world to the medieval city to the modern era, universities were catalysts for the advance of science, medicine, law, politics, and the humanities.

Their civilizing missions were predicated on two unquestioned assumptions. One, unlike prior superstitions, inductive reason would guide intellectual inquiry; examining all evidence would lead to general conclusions rather than cherry-picking data to “prove” predetermined dogmas.

Today, DEI, the Green New Deal, and the “critical theories”—legal, race, and monetary—in the university start with deductive reasoning and then warp evidence to support such faith-based dogmas.

If any of the current violent pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic campus protests were instead directed at reducing abortion, ensuring that biological men do not compete in women’s sports, or banning racial preferences, the protestors would have long ago been arrested, expelled, or deported.

Tribalism was a premodern obstacle to civilization. It remains so in many parts of the Middle East, where it is routine to hire, promote, retain, and reward on the basis of kinship and bloodlines. In America, we were supposed to have a singular meritocracy, civilization’s effort to ensure that those with the most expertise and experience were charged with the most important tasks and responsibilities to ensure the safety and welfare of the majority. Race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation were neither rewarded nor punished.

Instead, we here, too, returned to premodern tribalism and race quotas, regressing to precivilization ideas that we owe our allegiance first to those who share a superficial appearance rather than to the body politic at large.

Finally, civilizations were often judged by their physical infrastructures—whether iconic, like the Parthenon, the Pantheon, medieval cathedrals, or modern towering skyscrapers, or practical by their roads, aqueducts, government buildings, and water and sewage systems.

But by that standard, too, we are decivilizing. Future generations will be amazed at California’s decaying high-speed rail to nowhere. Tens of billions of dollars and over a decade after the start of construction, there is still not a single foot of track laid, but instead only half-finished massive concrete overpasses that now resemble half-destroyed Mycenean palace walls. The nearly one-billion-dollar, half-finished, five-year-old Obama library resembles an oversized Stonehenge monolith.

In California, we do not just blow up dams, the brilliant work of a now-forgotten earlier generation. Instead, we use public bond funds, voted by the citizens to build new dams and reservoirs, to destroy them.

The more California requires lumber for new homes, fuel for its 31 million vehicles, and energy for its 15 million homes, the more the governor and legislature decivilize the state by shutting down timber companies, forcing oil refineries to flee the state, and closing nuclear power plants and fossil fuel generation, while witnessing replacement, new-age battery-power generation plants blow up into flames.

When preventable fires consume whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a paralytic government has no clue how to rebuild the work of past generations. The city government of Los Angeles proved uncannily efficient in ensuring such conflagration—canceling preventive brush clearing, the mayor junketing in Africa during fire season, reservoirs left empty, hydrants that did not work—but cannot rebuild, only destroy.
Why is America decivilizing?

In part, our mediocre schools have not produced competent stewards to maintain and expand the sophisticated infrastructure and ethos of a prior, far more capable generation.

In part, the sheer richness of our inheritance lulled our Lotus-Eater generations to consume what they inherited rather than reinvest it, given that since birth they had been insulated from the elemental and unchanging human and natural challenges to civilization.

And in part, a nihilism arose that despised the hard work of civilization and instead romanticized the wild—clueless that natural man, without the bridles of civilization, is a very dangerous beast, as we so often and lamentably see today.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...decivilizing-america

TRVTH!!

What took Gibbon six volumes to write about Rome’s Decline & Fall, VDH has done the same about America in one column.

VDH is an incredibly brilliant man. He is always spot on with his work. Thanks for posting this.

VDH always hits the mark but more civilizations/kingdoms than I can count have collapsed due to lack of fiscal responsibility. If you cannot even manage a budget how the heck are you going to do infrastructure.

I believe a Brit would say, “Brilliant!”

quote:

Originally posted by fischtown7:
VDH always hits the mark but more civilizations/kingdoms than I can count have collapsed due to lack of fiscal responsibility. If you cannot even manage a budget how the heck are you going to do infrastructure.

You are right.

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence.

I despise that “quote”, as it is often attributed to Cicero. It’s from a novel written in 1965, and Rome never sent “assistance to foreign lands”, rather, they imposed a tax quota on each land under their control as well as client kingdoms and allies.

There’s a member here that has it as a signature line, it’s up there with Abraham Lincoln’s quote of “never believe anything you read on the internet”.

quote:

I despise that “quote”, as it is often attributed to Cicero.

I learned that it was not Cicero, but I still appreciate the message.

I like the quote as well, but the inclusion of Rome is quite silly. Replace it with “America” and it makes sense.

It would be like quoting “China, land of the free and home of the brave”. It just doesn’t fit at all.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:


Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded.

Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs.

This is the exact reason why I refuse to get this so-called "REAL" ID.

It's such a poke in the eye to every American citizen

I'm perplexed why the Trump admin never brought this up and shut the whole charade down, these ID's are completely obsolete already as they took 20 years to implement them.

quote:

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence.

The passage is from Taylor Caldwell, A Pillar of Iron (1965)

quote:

I refuse to get this so-called "REAL" ID.

I don't really understand this. It's still a state issued driver's license. The "REAL" ID stamp in the corner simply means that they scanned your birth certificate. The Feds already have a copy of my birth certificate because it was required for a passport.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

I refuse to get this so-called "REAL" ID.

I don't really understand this. It's still a state issued driver's license. The "REAL" ID stamp in the corner simply means that they scanned your birth certificate. The Feds already have a copy of my birth certificate because it was required for a passport.

I'm not jumping through 17 hoops to produce all these different required forms of ID to get that when they let illegals walk right onto planes with no ID at all.

I just got my DL renewed here in PA and it's a regular old non-REAL-id version and it took me all of 5 minutes to get.

Did mine long ago, in FL the renewal process to get the Real ID is simple, you need three things,

1) Proof of Identity ie Birth Certificate or Valid Passport

2) Proof of SSN: SSN Card, Paystub, Mil ID

3) Proof of address: a Utility bill will do.

In and out in the normal time to get a DL done.

Biden was the one circumventing ID rules, he's gone, that's done, this was started in 2005 and 20 years later it's now being enforced.

Eventually travel ie by air won't be allowed for those without it...

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
Did mine long ago, in FL the renewal process to get the Real ID is simple, you need three things,

1) Proof of Identity ie Birth Certificate or Valid Passport

2) Proof of SSN: SSN Card, Paystub, Mil ID

3) Proof of address: a Utility bill will do.

In and out in the normal time to get a DL done.

Biden was the one circumventing ID rules, he's gone, that's done, this was started in 2005 and 20 years later it's now being enforced.

Eventually travel ie by air won't be allowed for those without it...

I agree completely. I got my "Real ID" (driver's license) shortly after relocating from CA where (state issued/unreliable) ID and driver's licenses are routinely issued to illegal aliens, with the barest of verification. The state registers everyone getting these IDs to vote, regardless of citizenship status and (suggests) that those who are here illegally self-report their ineligibility, so they can be removed from the voter registration lists. TOTAL BS!!! If this isn't enabling voter fraud, what is???

BTW: The rationalization provided by those enabling state issued (fraudulently obtained) licenses and ID cards was that illegal aliens ("immigrants") would be far less likely to flee the scene of traffic collisions, that was a rampant problem in places like Los Angeles City and county. The enablers also claimed the "immigrants" would then more likely to buy automobile insurance.

The actual result of making these IDs and licenses available wasn't what was promised. Hit and run collisions increased if there was any change, and the local authorities hid the problem by changing law enforcement policies to discourage or outright prohibit officers/deputy sheriff's from investigating all but the most serious collisions (deaths or great bodily injury), and the victims were left to contact their insurance companies, who merely increased rates to put the burden back on those who obey the law(s) in effect.

I believe the ONLY way to ensure that our elections are credible is to have a nationally recognized ID, and/or state driver's licenses that meet GOOD/VERIFIABLE nationally set standards. What went/is wrong in California is an excellent example of why such standards need to be established and enforced.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
Did mine long ago, in FL the renewal process to get the Real ID is simple...

Unless if you're a woman with a few marriages

quote:

Originally posted by TRIO:

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
Did mine long ago, in FL the renewal process to get the Real ID is simple...

Unless if you're a woman with a few marriages

It is so difficult to get copies of marriage, divorce, and death records, isn't it?

I don't personally know how hard it is to get those records.

A friend thought only her latest was needed. She wasted hours waiting just to be sent away.

I had to come back after waiting in long line and getting sent home, because the "N" vs "North" and "Dr" vs "Drive" and "Rd" vs "Road" for my address didn't match between the various documents. They said it was their rule, I could hardly believe it. I wrote the Governor about it, that their "rule" was inconvenient to the point were some citizens would not be able to get their real id if they didn't have enough combinations of matching address in their various allowable documents, and whoever came up with said rule should be tarred and feathered. Oh yea, your middle name as well, whether it's present or not, or abbreviated with a capital letter, or not. I kid you not.