Do people matter more than ideology?

 Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Traditionalists and conservatives always assumed that the military, the intelligence and investigatory agencies, and the prosecutorial industry were at least above politics, defenders of traditional and constitutional norms, and completely professional in their service.  

No longer. There is now a new military-industrial-intelligence-legal complex. Its hierarchy is politically weaponized, and amply renumerated. The careers of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, General Mark Milley and a score of retired 4-stars officers, Robert Mueller and his dream team, and the Department of Justice are characteristically determined and calibrated by politics rather than competence."

..."America does not quite know what will follow from the first months of the Biden Administration. Already, it has managed to destroy the idea of a border, with an anticipated 2 million entering the country illegally over a 12 month period. It demolished the idea of the police and prosecutorial deterrence curbing crime. It is ending the trajectory of America’s natural gas and oil renaissance that enriched the country, and freed it from Middle East entanglements. And it killed off the notion that government should seek to ensure that race is not how we collectively define the content of our individual characters."  

"Meanwhile, our enemies and rivals—China, Iran, and Russia especially—are giddy at what America has become. The American Left, they believe, has done a much better job of denying Chinese culpability for a Chinese-engineered virus than had the Chinese communist media."

"When billionaires, such as Michael Bloomberg, see China as essentially democratic (“The communist party wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public . . . Xi Jinping is not a dictator.”), when Charles Munger applauds their clampdown on outspoken capitalists like Jack Ma (“I don’t want the, all of the Chinese system, but I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country, . .  . Communists did the right thing. They just called in Jack Ma and say, ‘You aren’t gonna do it, sonny.’””), and when Bill Gates believes that in the midst of the pandemic, a lying China had done “a lot of things right in the beginning,” we can conclude America’s richest are placing their bets on a Chinese-Communist controlled 21st century, and will adjust accordingly.

Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, to see its cities burned, and looted, to weaken its economy and currency, to erode the unity of its once feared military, and to entrench the most effective critics of America in America—not in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Tehran, but in corporate boardrooms, campuses, newsrooms, Hollywood, Wall Street and the Pentagon—they could not have improved on what has happened in 2020-21, the era of our collective meltdown."

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/04/the-genesis-of-our-american-collective-meltdown/