The End of America?
Our country’s founders, knowing the nature of fallen humanity, may have predicted how our country would come to its end.
Regardless of your political persuasion it is not hard to see that America has entered a downhill spin toward its own destruction. Despite what secularists today will tell you, our founding fathers were almost all godly men who understood the broken nature of the human soul without God. Knowing this, from the very beginning they were able to see the scenarios that could very well end our nation as we know it. On this day after the celebration of our nation’s independence I offer this warning.
Benjamin Franklin, when giving his assent to the new Constitution made this revealing statement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787:
I agree to this Constitution … and I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
Franklin hinted that the success of the Constitution and the country it was to guide would depend on the moral condition of the people. Knowing that a republic is dependent upon the people, he warned that its probable end would come when the people shall “become so corrupted as to need despotic government.” The founders were serious students of their recent history and they knew that almost all governments had failed when the moral condition of the people demanded a despotic government. He saw this Constitution working well for a “course of years” and then it would begin to fail as this despotism destroyed the republic. Have we reached that time? In forsaking faith in God and the morality it produces, have we developed into immoral people who can only demand a despotic government that fills their godless needs?
George Washington in his farewell address foresaw this end of our republic coming as a result of government ignoring the Constitution and making changes to suit their political desires. This is what he said in part:
If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpations; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, could be the weapon that destroys our free nation.
As he came to the end of his two terms as president he had already seen that usurpations, or wrongful seizures or exercise of authority, “could be the weapon that destroys our free nation.” He suggested that any changes of serious nature be affected by amendments to the Constitution, not by wrongful seizures of power. In our age of executive orders and other actions that bypass the founding document and end up in court long after they have done their damage, we are beginning to see the wisdom of our first president. He knew that there would arise issues that show the need of change in the Constitution but warned that the change must not come from executive fiat but by the amendment process made available in the founding document.
Today we have people from the far left arguing that the Constitution is an outdated document that needs to be bypassed to accomplish certain favorite goals. Even when these people appeal to the Constitution they refer to it as a “living document” that should be interpreted based on newly developed mores. Mr. Washington predicted this time in which the great document is replaced by people who see their political ideas as more important than the document meant to guide us.
Thomas Jefferson warned that the judicial branch of our government could become too powerful for a balance of power to remain intact. In his letter to Judge Spencer Roane in 1821 he wrote this scary prediction:
The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.
To put it in today’s terms, Jefferson was saying that the federal courts could gain more and more power and would never relinquish the power it gained to the detriment of the republic. Is this sounding familiar? Have our courts, from top to bottom, relinquished their responsibility to interpret law according to the Constitution in favor of political expediency?
James Madison, referring to a bill to subsidize the cod fishing industry in 1792, sounds like he is describing the financial overreach of the federal government we are witnessing today:
If Congress can employ money indefinitely, for the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare… it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.
How much power should be granted to the government for providing for the “general welfare” is a primary issue in modern American politics? President Biden is spending so much money that we can’t keep up with the totals. Is he buying the support of the people using the “general welfare” as his incentive?
Long before he became president, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, saw a dangerous rising of lawlessness in society. Speaking in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois he pondered how long our political institutions could survive the growing “disregard for law.” His words could well apply to the growing violence in our modern major cities and the rampant disregard for the institutions that guard our safety:
There is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean that increasing disregard for law which pervades the country — the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passion in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.
Tragically, Lincoln was right on lawlessness and we are witnessing this primarily in Democrat controlled cities of America in recent years. Violence has been steadily increasing for decades but has largely been ignored by those in power. The false accusation of systemic racism has created a divisive, Marxist-oriented atmosphere that in Lincoln’s words, are causing a trend toward savage mobs replacing the “sober judgment of courts” with lawlessness.
We have reached an absurd moment in history when the National Archives advises that celebrating the founding fathers of our nation is an example of “structural racism.” This divisive, unfounded rhetoric is a form of violence by itself and it is unleashing physical violence across our county as another warning of our nations coming demise.
How much more time do we have? Is the moral condition of the country too far gone to return to moral sanity? Have we lost control of the balance of power provided by the Constitution? Has our populace become so corrupt that a return to government of, by and for the people is impossible? Has lawlessness become so rampant that it has caused the rise of the “ill omen amongst us” that Lincoln regretted? It’s time for serious reflection on these questions and our answers. I believe in miracles but they depend on our acceptance of the God of miracles. May He have mercy on our once great nation.
