"This coup against the Constitution" "Are we a nation of sheep, or only asleep?"

Stephen Balch writes in part in American Greatness,

...The scientific “experts” come off even worse than the politicians, pontificating grandly from half-baked models and inadequate data, myopic about everything outside their purviews and not particularly wise even there, more dispensers of fright than information. Modern civilization requires the scientific mind, but its limits, arrogance, and overreach have never been so grotesquely on parade.

Hysteria: America has become a place of recurrent panics and manias, though none till now sufficient to implode it. Some have been launched “to get” Trump—Russia collusion, the Kavanaugh furor, and the “Ukrainegate” impeachment. But quite besides these, nonstop existential alarms also have been sounding over climate change, “Me-Too,” transgender discrimination, pervasive racism, sexism, etc. Our public squares are now lynching grounds for Twitter mobs. Habituation has made us a nation exquisitely easy to spook.

...This coup against the Constitution, though largely the work of minor-league pols, has nonetheless been revolutionary in sweep, purging owners from their businesses and workers from their trades.

Our loyal opposition and its media confreres have treated COVID-19 as a political opportunity and weapon, holding emergency measures hostage to their ideological wishlists. Worse yet, America’s political and cultural establishment is using the crisis as its last pre-election chance to bring anti-Trump hostility to a boil, relentlessly attacking the president for whatever he does or doesn’t. Exhibiting shades of Russia’s 19th-century radical intelligentsia—history’s most consequential class of sociopaths—their motto seems to be “the worse the better.”

A nation of sheep, or only asleep: Is the citizenry’s docile response to these unprecedented abrogations simply the quiet preceding a storm? Of all the questions raised by the “great reveal” the answer to this one is the least certain and the most important.

There are growing rumblings of mutiny, but on the whole, acquiescence reigns supreme. This is to be expected perhaps from authority-addicted Europeans, but not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. In describing these days will future historians employ as metaphor a pressure cooker about to explode or sheep being led to slaughter? The jury is still out.

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