On May 11, 2024, Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump stated at a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, “For me, the enemies from within are more dangerous than the enemies from outside.”
Similarly, about 20 years before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln delivered a prophetic speech at a gathering in Springfield, Illinois, where he warned his fellow citizens, “And when is the danger to be expected? … If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Although often mistakenly attributed to this speech, the famous quote “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves” resonates deeply with many, illustrating the shared concerns of the 16th and 45th Presidents about the potential self-destruction of their country.
History has shown that internal discord poses a threat to a sovereign nation as significant as external aggression.
In 2013, prominent American author Diana West published “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character,” sparking a significant debate on modern American history.
West argued that the normalization of relations with the brutal communist regime of the Soviet Union by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt on November 16, 1933, marked the beginning of a prolonged assault on America’s democratic security. This decision allowed Marxist radicals and communist spies to infiltrate the U.S., colluding with domestic sympathizers to harm the nation.
In the following decades, progressive scholars, journalists, writers, artists, and performers lauded the socialist utopian ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to West, even American businessmen were “eager to buy Lenin a rope.”
The viewpoints of West regarding the influence of communist thinkers on American politics faced ridicule from some prominent literary figures in the U.S. and Canada, while other brave scholars, like the late Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov, stood up to defend her.
Bukovsky, a Russian-born writer and human rights activist who endured 12 years in Soviet mental hospitals, prisons, and labor camps during the Brezhnev era, and Stroilov, a Russian Christian exiled abroad to the UK due to threats against his life and freedom for his scholarly work, co-authored an article asserting that West’s work would be historic. They believed that despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact Organization, America never truly won the Cold War.
Like West, they insisted that the conflict between America and the Soviet Union went beyond military confrontation. “It is an ideological warfare by socialist totalitarianism against our civilized world. Optimistically, this war is still ongoing,” they wrote.
Through extensive research and experience, West, Bukovsky, and Stroilov demonstrated how America’s elite intellectuals surrendered the nation to a hostile socialist culture, leading to its institutional occupation and the ultimate decline of the free world.
Few scholars can convincingly explain the sharp decline of Western democracy in the 21st century.
For over 150 years since the signing of the American Constitution, Americans viewed their country as a beacon of freedom and a model of representative democracy.
After abolishing slavery, President Abraham Lincoln referred to the American republic as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
The American people established a premier system of citizenship. The 1964 American Civil Rights Act extended the country’s fundamental commitments to all citizens.
Currently, the woke Left is dismantling America’s heritage, purportedly in the name of democracy but truly to retain power. They witnessed how true democracy operates in 2016 and wish not to see it again.
As for ordinary American citizens, they become victims of what French philosopher Julien Benda called “the treason of the intellectuals.”
Benda condemned European elites at the turn of the 20th century for advocating aggressive imperialism, military expansionism, and racial discrimination. Today, the elite betraying America support resurgent globalism, technocratic bureaucratic power, and reverse racial discrimination.
Both Benda and West argue that a leadership class rejecting objective reasoning and blurring the line between truth and falsehood may jeopardize a free society.
From Roosevelt’s New Deal to Bidenomics, from sham trials in the Soviet Union to corrupt courts, from national sovereignty to open borders, from education to indoctrination, from freedom of speech to censorship, from honest elections to ballot harvesting, from religious freedom to faith suppression, the survival of American democracy is more tenuous than ever.
This is the “danger from within” that Presidents Lincoln and Trump feared.
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