Dear America,
The United States has fallen—and We the People have failed.
Our culture’s story ended in Texas. At the Alamo. One final slap in the face.
Unending wars fatigued us. Global economic sanctions demoralized us. Drought and the naval blockade of the Gulf of America starved us. And then our enemies struck with the intent to kill. A United Nations peacekeeping task force comprised mainly of Chinese and Western European contingents attacked from the west and east, reinforcing the exhausted troops of the United Socialist American Democracies (USAD).
Sensing opportunity, the fledgling and theretofore neutral Confederación Sudamericana (COSA) supplied the UN and USAD with unlimited fuel and much touted, albeit nominal, manpower. I suppose they figured it never hurts to take the winning side in a major war. And they knew no friends were coming to rescue us.
The UK, Canada, and Mexico never even peeked out from behind the neutrality agreements with the USAD they were hiding behind. Signed during the so-called “American Freedom War” decades earlier, the treaties were now basically a tradition. Even piracy and the borderland black markets had quickly dried up when the UN swooped in.
The Freedom War, you say?
The second American Civil War. It left the territory of the former United States divided between two powers, USA and USAD. Both coasts and the Great Lakes region belonged to the latter, with the former owning the Gulf, Plains, and Mountains. Neither could hold onto Alaska. That was split between Russia and Canada. All other former US holdings were and are, I am sad to say, gone.
Without a superpower to back NATO and ASEAN, both gradually disintegrated in the years following the Freedom War, opening the door to Russian and Chinese expansion.
Argentina and its cohort of allies—the nemesis of COSA, which at its heart is a union of anti-American interests shared by Brazil and Venezuela—stayed out. They had too much to lose by becoming involved and too little chance of gaining anything, regardless of the outcome.
Israel was too far away and, having lost the political, financial, and military support of one of its only major allies, nervously eyed a growing list of possible nation-ending deathblows.
Everyone else hated or was apathetic to us. Our usefulness to them was merely a memory, and now even that was fading to black.
We had no funds, no food, and no friends. So, we fell—finally, quickly, and quietly.
And with the death of the USA’s decimated remnant, the West lost its last major nation state. Most of Europe viewed our demise similarly to the inevitable, sad end of a terminally ill, once mighty king. Passing is sometimes a mercy, they said. Our erstwhile friends who deliberately altered and erased their past to please new overlords. Regimes with traditions different from, but whose governance reflects the barely remembered monarchies of, the Victorian age and prior.
The generalized, collective European view of Western history, heroes, and traditions is now decidedly anti-Western in many cases, if they remember those things at all. Forgotten are Charles the Hammer, El Sid, the Crusades, Tamerlane, Constantinople, and the Gates of Vienna, where major battles against the horde were waged as late as 1683. To many of them, Western Civilization was left behind in tatters long ago. Ethnic tiffs and religious disputes are ancient history, they argue. They have evolved.
Small, often landlocked countries sustain Western traditions now. The golden age is gone. At least for a long, long time.
What’s that, you ask? How did we get here?
Simply, we forgot who we were. We spent more time entertaining ourselves than learning about the operation of our own government, our history, and our place in the world.
We held neither our citizens nor our immigrants to a gold standard of learning, living, assimilating into, improving, and passing on our shared culture. Not our many cultures—our singular American culture. We gave into cynicism. Our cultural schism and political deadlock materialized into geographical sorting and consolidation. Perhaps unintentionally, we divvied up our land as people “voted with their feet.”
We gave into economic desperation exacerbated by the deliberate inaction, incompetence, and nefarious machinations of those meant to govern us. The Trump era merely slowed the decline. As things worsened, we elected increasingly radical leaders until we found a truly evil one. We let our culture rot so severely that a strong wind could have toppled us. Our enemies merely needed to watch and wait.
Even the corrective measures we took were half hearted and lacked follow through.
We deported millions of illegal immigrants, yet we failed to solve the problem of Americans hiring illegal immigrant labor or address any root causes.
We blew up drug boats in Venezuela and raised tariffs to stop the flooding of fentanyl onto our streets, yet we failed to solve the problem of widespread illicit drug use, self-medication, and substance abuse.
We exercised strong force on behalf of our close ally and friend, Israel, yet we failed to stamp out the deepening antisemitism appearing on the authoritarian left and right, most of it propagated by members of the media and intelligentsia.
We surged ahead in the artificial intelligence race with China and the Middle East, yet we failed to realize until it was far too late that allowing our people to become thoughtless machines benefitted our adversaries’ social systems and economies more than ours.
Had our culture been stronger, we could have overcome these things. We could have remained invincible. But that was not what happened.
The end.
***
And now that this pessimistic vision of a possible future has been put forth, I ask you, the reader: Is this vision too negative for you? Is it too farfetched? Does it sound too contemporary—too grounded in current events—to be plausible or even possible?
So thought the fools in Constantinople at the end, I am sure. Or the Zoroastrian priests in Persia.
To you, I respond with a question: Do the details really matter when your entire world has crumbled and fallen?
And we Americans are fools. Albeit not for the reasons we give ourselves credit. For example, Americans are not exceptional or unique in the world for our geographical ignorance, ethnocentrism, or obnoxious politics. A Christian might argue these things have been part of the human genome since Babel.
We are fools because we do not respect our place in history. If the American Culture and American System fail, Western Civilization will become a regionalized phenomenon sustained by small and vulnerable nations.
We are fools because we believe tomorrow is a certainty. It is not. Sometimes, Rohan does not ride to Gondor’s aid. Sometimes, the White City falls. Sometimes, the lights go out and never come back on—ushering not a Dark Age but a Dark Terminus. Always, a civilization’s collapse is preceded by many of its people convincing themselves they cannot or should not do anything to stop the inevitable, perhaps deserved, grisly end.
We are fools because we cannot discern the true friends scattered among our allies. Western Europe, especially now as the light of the West wanes, cannot be trusted to ride to our aid as we have theirs. But this was true even in the past. The Byzantines in 1453 and the Greeks in 1921 serve as excellent reminders why Western European governments should be trusted cautiously.
As with our most trustworthy leaders and politicians, our closest friends are unlikely to have a deep vested interest in the ossified power structures of the post-WWII era and the Petrodollar. Unfortunately, most of our real friends are therefore unlikely to have great military might, global influence, or deep pockets. In short, if America turns coward and goes belly-up, the golden age of the West might be done forever.
We are fools because we do not take our most serious enemies seriously enough. And our greatest enemy—the one that makes us vulnerable to all other threats—is the segmentation, erosion, ruin, and rot of our own culture.
Decay and death are not beautiful. A crumbled and fallen world is not easily reassembled. Wouldn’t you agree?
If you wouldn’t, I suggest learning about Thebes and Judea, about Alexander and Rome. About Medina, Meccah, the unification of the Arabian Peninsula under Islam, and the relentless pursuit of unity and sameness through force and death by its proponents, not just in the West but in Persia, India, and throughout the Eurasian Steppe. About the Crusades and how they were a reaction to centuries of terror, rape, and enslavement. About how Western colonialism, although fueled by technological advancement and religious zeal during the post-Reformation and Enlightenment, was in part a response to this same aggression. About the dark, anti-life, anti-Christian roots of Marxism, Communism, National Socialism, and their supposedly secularized cousin called democratic socialism.
The truth is that We the People need to stop waiting for someone—some leader, some politician, some key piece of knowledge found through science, some act of divine intervention—to save our culture. The truth is that we must save it and ourselves with the agency God has given us.
We must accept that we have powerful, aggressive, and relentless enemies that demand respect and who cannot be appeased. And we must stop pretending that by distancing ourselves from Western Civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition we can trick said enemies into being kind to us. Our American System and American Culture are so inextricably linked with those older beliefs that our foes will always mark us for death. Even those who do not actively seek to kill us and erase our culture quietly enable, or at best ignore, those who do. These dark forces can only be placated if we truly and fully join them—assuming they will allow it. But based on history, even if we did, we would be slaves and prisoners of some kind.
We need not hate our enemies, but we must identify, respect, prioritize, and guard against them.
The truth is that we need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking there is a painless, costless, bloodless road back to a less divided, more peaceful era of America. Blood has already been shed, and it seems clear many people are thirsty for more. The only road lies ahead and takes us directly into the fire. There is no way around, below, or above. To restore our culture, we must go through the blaze. For those of us that believe in the one American Culture and its roots as described in these letters, we must prepare ourselves for a great reckoning. Whether it comes in 10, 50, or 200 years, we must remain ever ready and alert. As with the End of All Things, our great trial may come like a thief in the night.
God bless, America,
Finch Fries