Welcome to The Crisis

I call this The Crisis because it is a succinct and descriptive term. I considered names like “American Reset,” and “The Time of Troubles,” a reference to the period of social upheaval in Russia between 1598 and 1613 when the Romanov Dynasty was established, but I wanted something simpler, and something with an American connection. The Crisis reminds me of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, with its observation that “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and its allusion to “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot . . . .”

A crisis is both a time of great danger and a time of great opportunity—if we can seize it. In our time we are living through the possible collapse of the American experiment in individual liberty and self-government. With the fall of the Soviet Union, most Americans thought that communism was was dead, but the revolutionaries of the late sixties were not daunted as they launched their “long march” towards a new cultural revolution.

As a young man I participated in the turmoil of the late sixties. At the time I couldn’t imagine how the nation could possibly survive the trials it faced. Yet it did. The American people are remarkably resilient. Still, since the onset of the Sino-virus, “Covid-1984,” as some rightly call it, and the subsequent installation of a man who is unquestionably the worst president in American history, I can’t shake a deep sense of foreboding. Every morning when I awaken, I check the news to see what new assault on their institutions and way of life the American people must endure. This is certainly our “time of troubles.” The current tsunami of woke nihilism threatens to drown the liberty of the American people and wash away the most successful experiment in self-government humanity has ever attempted and replace it with our own version of China’s cultural revolution, replete with our own “red guards.” As Lincoln put it in his annual message to Congress in 1862, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

I am now an old man, but I cannot sit back as a mere observer like a “sunshine patriot,” or a “summer soldier,” while the battle rages. The future of human liberty is at stake. “If we fail,” as Winston Churchill put it in 1940, “ . . . all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister . . . . by the lights of perverted science.”

Accordingly, I will post intermittently, what I hope will be useful analyses of contemporary issues informed by history, in an effort to ensure that in the future mankind “move(s) forward into broad, sunlit uplands,” as Churchill put it in that same speech to Parliament when humanity faced another great crisis.