Fewer young people are getting married or starting families.
Drug addiction is surging. The opioid menace has ravaged every sector, every age group, every geography of working people. And it’s not only pills. Heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, meth, and of course marijuana, have flooded our streets and our homes.
And everywhere, deaths of despair are mounting—among farmers, among the young.
Most shockingly, the young are the hope of our society, but in America today they are taking their lives in numbers never seen in our history. The well-off frequently note that our nation has never been richer, but the tragedy of youth suicide betrays a profound poverty of hope.
And is that really so surprising? Today’s youth must make their way in a society increasingly defined not by the genuine and personal love of family and church, but by the cold and judgmental world of social media.
The typical young person is bombarded by video games and violence and the relentless status-seeking imposed and modeled by our cultural elite.
There is no more shocking illustration of our cultural poverty, no more damning indictment of our cultural leaders, than these lost lives.
And the sum of it all is that too many Americans are losing their standing as citizens. They are losing their voice in the life of this nation. And with that, they are losing their liberty.
Because to be free is to have a voice, it is to have a say, it is to have the power of self-government.
The chattering class often tells us that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an excuse to do nothing.
But in fact, it’s not true.
Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite.
Big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age.