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While politicians rightfully focus on the pressing threat posed by a rising China, intent to reshape the current liberal rules-based order according to her values and interests, they risk ignoring a more pernicious domestic danger.
America’s unique strengths derive from her culture, not simply from abundant natural resources or fortuitous geography. This culture results in the prosperous free market economy, military superiority and functioning democracy that have made her a superpower. This culture is not genetically encoded or automatically passed down but must be renewed with each generation. America’s greatest challenge is not overseas, but comes from liberals at home eroding that cultural heritage.
First, liberals are undermining the rule of law that prevents the arbitrary exercise of power and protects law-abiding citizens. While liberal prosecutors refuse to enforce laws against open-air drug markets, retail theft, semi-permanent homeless encampments on public sidewalks and parks, and illegal immigration, liberal politicians propagate restrictive permitting rules and regulations that render unwitting home and business owners vulnerable to selective enforcement.
Calls to defund the police and catch and release criminals for increasingly serious crimes leave many urban dwellers wondering if the state will fulfill its first responsibility to protect keep them from violent harm.
Second, liberals are undermining the ideal of meritocracy that frees society from inherited privilege and petty corruption. America’s founding rebuke to hereditary aristocratic European powers was its insistence that advancement should be based on accomplishments resulting from striving, talents and good fortune.
While talents are distributed unequally, conservatives work to increase the equality of opportunity through reforms like school choice. Conservatives respect the individual’s right to keep the fruits of his labor, and recognize doing so increases society’s productivity and wealth, producing the surplus that funds a strong national defense and safety net welfare state.
Whereas they once joined conservatives in lauding “Horatio Alger” rags-to-riches stories celebrating the ideal of the self-made man, liberals now denounce achievement as individual accomplishment. Rugged individualism has been replaced by a collectivist “you didn’t build that.
