How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

There are three elements that make America America. First, American philosophy. The philosophy of the United States rests on three basic principles: first, the reality of natural rights, which preexist government, inalienable and precious; second, the equality of all human beings before the law, and in their rights; and finally, the belief that government exists only to protect natural rights and to enforce equality before the law.

Next, there is American culture. That culture is characterized by four distinct elements. First, a tough-minded tolerance for the rights of others,

Third, American culture has always carried a rowdy streak in defense of liberty: we must be willing to stand up for our freedom and that of others. Finally, American culture has always celebrated and rewarded those with a sense of adventure—the pioneers, the cowboys, the inventors, the risk takers.

American history, then, is a story of triumph of freedom over the tragedy of human nature, the victory of liberty over slavery and bigotry. These three elements—America’s philosophy of reason, equality, liberty, and limited government; America’s culture of individual rights and social duties; and America’s shared history—define our country.

Without America’s philosophy, reason collapses into tribalism; without America’s culture, individual rights collapse into collectivist tyranny or duties collapse into libertinism; without American history, the symbols that unite us divide us.

The Disintegrationist view launches direct, unyielding attacks on American philosophy, culture, and history.

Instead of equality before the law, or equality in individual rights, Disintegrationists seek equality of outcome.

What is uncommon—indeed, unprecedented in human history—are prosperity, peace, and freedom.

The philosophy of the United States centers on three central principles, as articulated in the Declaration: on the reality of natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that preexist government; on the equality of men before the law; and on the notion that government is instituted only to protect those preexisting rights and equality of men before the law.

The founding fathers, however, based their belief in rights in the framework of natural rights. Why? Because rights that spring from human beings aren’t rights at all—they’re privileges that may be dispensed with at any time. Rights that emanate from a higher source are indeed unalienable: they cannot be given away, taken away, or infringed upon, because they come from a source higher than power alone.

This is why the Declaration of Independence sources rights to the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Human reason, so the theory goes, can examine the character and activities of mankind and determine what mankind was meant to do—and what liberties mankind was handed in order to pursue those purposes. Thus, the natural law logic that prizes reason as the highest end of man results in liberty as the chief requirement of man. Man’s unique nature lies at the center of any rationale for human rights.

Jefferson’s original wording in the Declaration of Independence was more exact than the wording with which we are now familiar: he suggested, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable.”18 Equal and independent. Equal in creation

Locke stated, “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”36 Freedom, not virtue, is the goal of government; virtue is the goal of individual men, pursuing right reason—a task itself that requires freedom. And should government violate either the consent of the people or their unalienable rights, Locke stated, it would lose its mandate utterly: “whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. . . . [Power] devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty.”37

Lockean theory became “Don’t tread on me.”

which is why we have the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words: Government, stick to your job. And you have an extraordinarily specific job description.

Every schoolchild learns—or at least used to learn—that the three branches of the federal government are designed to prevent the other branches from superseding their designated authority. The legislature was supposed to be where laws are made; the president was supposed to execute those laws; the judiciary was supposed to interpret those laws.

Under the Constitution, the legislature was divided between a chamber represented by population (the House of Representatives) and a chamber represented by state (the Senate), creating an internal check on the most powerful branch of government. Because the Senate was originally designed so that state legislatures would appoint their senators, the Senate could represent state interests at odds with the deeper ambitions of the House. (The Seventeenth Amendment, which based election of senators on the popular vote, idiotically removed one state check on federal usurpation—now senators no longer had to fear the zealous guardians of state power in the state legislature, and could appeal directly to the population, mirroring the motives of House members, which tended toward expansion of federal power.)

The actual algebra of judicial review was supposed to work like this: the Supreme Court would declare a law unconstitutional; the executive could either agree or disagree; the legislature could either agree or disagree. The Supreme Court had no power to cram down its opinions on the other branches. It could only act on its own behalf, just as the other branches could. This theory—departmentalism—was widespread among the founders.53

American philosophy rests on three fundamental, eternal, unalienable ideas.

First, American philosophy rests on the belief that human beings have real, discernable individual rights. These rights cannot be given away.

Second, American philosophy holds it as self-evident that all human beings are created with equal rights. This does not mean that they have equal capacities or qualities, or that their results in life will be equal, or that they begin with equal opportunities. It does mean that law must treat men alike, not distinguish between them on the basis of characteristics beyond their control.

Third, American philosophy demands that government protect individual rights, not override them in the name of some greater good. Rights preexist government, and thus government must be limited in orientation.

Brown University assistant professor of the practice of behavioral and social sciences at the School of Public Health Lisa Littman released a study. The study focused on what it described as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”: gender dysphoria that was not present in early youth, but that manifested within days or weeks in teens and young adults. According to Science Daily, Littman’s study found that an extraordinary percentage of transgender girls were becoming transgender in tandem with members of their social group.

Segregation used to mean legally enforced discrimination based on race; now, according to the New York Times, students are fighting segregation by insisting on such discrimination.56

Step one in destroying America is convincing citizens that some people will have to sacrifice their existing rights in order for others to have new ones.

Government cannot change the hearts of human beings—it cannot make them that which they are not. Simply changing material circumstances does not result in man replacing his heart of stone with a heart of flesh. And placing government guarantees of particular privileges as the center of American life requires tyrannical overlordship, either in the form of radical redistribution, or in the form of outright coercion. Americans are thus divided between those who receive and those who are forced to give.

By ripping away the core components of Unionist government—delegated powers, checks and balances, and federalism—Disintegrationist government heightens the stakes of politics while reducing our common ground. It forces Americans to fight for the high ground of power, lest they be victimized by their opponents, who seek to dominate them using the mechanisms of arbitrary and unanswerable governmental coercion. Disintegrationist philosophy tears away at the values that have historically united Americans.

We’re a country of rights because, as Unionists believe, the American philosophy rests on the fundamental, self-evident truths that human nature exists, and that we have individual rights springing from that nature; that human beings are equal in their rights under the law; and that governments are instituted to protect those rights, and not infringe upon them.

The simple answer: culture is more important than the legal protections codifying that culture. When culture withers, legal frameworks become no more than parchment barriers. Rights preexist government, and so do the cultures from which rights spring.1

Social fabric—duty to one another—was to be provided by social institutions. Government was designed to protect individuals in their rights. Rights without duties devolve into chaos. Duties without rights devolve into tyranny. Rights and duties were, in the founding view, utterly inseparable. That balance of rights, protected by a virtuous citizenry steeped in dutiful thinking and action, was the goal of the founding fathers.

And it is why the founders enshrined a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution: to prevent tyranny. “To disarm the people,” said founder George Mason, “this is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” As David Harsanyi states, “In the writings and speeches of the American Founders, the threat of disarmament was always a casus belli.”20 That’s also why a huge number of Americans owned guns at the founding of the country, despite misreporting to the contrary.21

“In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”36 The collective power of individuals: individuals strong in their rights and confident in their duties, joining together when necessary to protect themselves and better the world around them.

Disintegrationist culture that sees individual rights as a challenge to collective power, and that treats government as the only institution worth protecting. The Disintegrationist culture warns that freedom is a rough business, cruel and unsparing. The Disintegrationist culture warns that social institutions that inculcate duty are in fact merely instruments for separating us from one another—that only a unified rule from above can instill a sense of true, broad duty sufficient to maintain unity.

That new woke religion comes along with the creed of political correctness, with the priesthood of media elites, with sin and absolution and sainthood defined by the mob. No longer does man labor to serve a father in heaven; now he serves to win the praise of his cultural betters. The new church persecutes heretics and rewards true believers. Those who dissent are subjected to witch trials or public confessions. Mob mentality actually provides its own ersatz social fabric—we find solidarity with one another in tearing down those who violate the ever-shifting lines of political correctness.

The mob doesn’t want to discuss an unpopular view; they want to silence it. The mob doesn’t want an explanation; excuses make them angrier. The mob doesn’t want an apology; blood in the water encourages a feeding frenzy.

According to a poll from the Campaign for Free Speech, 59 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 said that the First Amendment should be updated to curtail “hate speech” and to “reflect the cultural norms of today.” More than six in ten people in that age bracket agreed that the government should have the ability to “take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false.” More than six in ten also agreed that universities and social media should restrict speech that has the “potential to be hurtful or offensive.”20 Social media companies have taken up the call, issuing regulations on “hate speech” without defining the term, and banning a wide variety of nonapproved opinions on supremely vague grounds.

Karl Marx recognized that church and family represented obstacles to societal reordering. He therefore proposed the destruction of family structure and religion as preconditions for that reordering. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness,” Marx suggested.27 The Communist Manifesto called for the abolition of family in order to “replace home education by social,” and castigated the institution of family as “bourgeois,” a place of “exploitation of children by parents,” and a place of degradation for women.28

“At the root of the most significant problems America faces at home is the weakening of our core institutions—family and community, church and school, business and labor associations, civic and fraternal and political groups.”53 Government has grown consistently throughout American society over the past few decades; our social unity continues to collapse. It’s no wonder that we find ourselves joining nasty Twitter mobs just to find other people to give us a sense of belonging.

We can redistribute the benefits of the market for some, destroying those benefits for others. Every interference in the market represents a trade-off. That trade-off may occasionally be worthwhile. But trusting an elite caste to determine which groups ought to benefit at the expense of other groups cuts directly against a rights-based society—and in the end, against both individuals and the success of the nation. Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation. The success of free markets rests precisely on the fact that it reflects truths about human nature: about our desire to create, to acquire, to own, to control the environment around us.

Economic freedom encourages us to forge forth, to create, to follow our dreams, to becomes entrepreneurs, to compete and overcome.

A culture of economic freedom is being replaced by a culture of economic expectation. And a culture of economic expectation inevitably results in a culture of economic tyranny.

Step two in destroying America is undermining our culture of rights in favor of a culture of protection by government. Once again, this means supplanting trust in each other individually and societally for a culture of roving virtue-signaling mobs, advocating top-down government controlled by some at the expense of others. And that culture makes every hot issue feel like a breaking point, and every political decision feel like life-or-death.

Our culture is like a marriage: it will succeed only when the partners respect one another, and when the partners expect more from themselves than from their counterparts. If Disintegrationist culture wins, the result will not be a new culture, but a national divorce.

But FDR’s policies did accomplish one great success: they convinced Democrats that class warfare was effective politics, that government was the solution to every problem, and that a vast restructuring in the very framework of American rights was necessary.

The story of America is one of the great stories in human history. America was founded on great principles; America has struggled to live up to those principles, but with each step toward those principles, America has magnified its own greatness. The world is better off for America. We ought to understand the shadows and curses of our history; we ought to understand how history affects the present. But we all ought to understand, most of all, that we are part of the same history, not rivals in a country divided by identity or class. Yet, as we will soon see, Disintegrationists have reworked American history to do just that.

Today, Disintegrationists claim, just as Davis and Calhoun did, that America was based on a power arrangement, not on fundamental principle. Ironically, Disintegrationists make such claims on the basis of defending the same minority groups Davis and Calhoun targeted. But their larger point—that the entire American system is a hierarchy of power, not a system based on equally applicable principles—perversely reflects the secessionist view of American history.6

Disintegrationist history relies upon three fundamental principles: first, that America was born in sin; second, that America has always reflected divided sects and hierarchies of power; and third, that America’s role in the world has resulted in poverty, death, inequality, and injustice.

Disintegrationist history truly began with the rise of American progressivism. In the attempt to rewrite the bargain between the American government and the American people, progressives had to retcon the philosophy of the American founding. In doing so, they relied on historicism—a philosophy suggesting that all institutions and ideas are products of time and place, and thus completely fungible.

To do away with the founding conception of rights and government, then, would require the rewriting of history. That rewriting would need to be justified, in turn, by a shift in the philosophy of history: instead of focusing on the reality of the past, it would focus on the past through the lens of the present.

Obama’s mantle was picked up after his presidency by the thought-leaders of the New York Times, who declared in 2019 that America’s true founding had taken place not in 1776, but in 1619.33 As Adam Serwer correctly diagnosed at The Atlantic, “The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste.”34