How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

What holds America together? That question has, in recent years, taken on renewed urgency. Increasingly, Americans don’t like each other. They don’t want to associate with one another; they don’t want to live next door to one another. More and more, they don’t want to share the same country anymore. Red areas are getting redder. Blue areas are getting bluer. According to a November 2018 Axios poll, 54 percent of Republicans believe that the Democratic Party is spiteful, while 61 percent of Democrats believe the Republican Party is racist, bigoted, or sexist. Approximately one-fifth of both Republicans and Democrats consider the opposing party “evil.”1 A Pew Research poll from 2016 found similar numbers: 70 percent of Democrats say Republicans are close-minded, while 52 percent of Republicans say Democrats are close-minded; the same poll found that 58 percent of Republicans had an unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party leading up to the election, while 55 percent of Democrats felt the same.

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, particularly when we don’t like how others exercise their rights—we have to agree to disagree, and to get over it. Second, our culture prizes and cherishes robust social institutions, which create a social fabric that allows us to trust one another in the absence of compulsion from government. 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.

The simple fact of the matter is that since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the enshrinement of individual rights, and the advent of protection for private property—the roots of capitalism—global GDP has increased exponentially, in shocking fashion. In the year 1 BCE, global GDP amounted to $183 billion; in 1000, global GDP amounted to approximately $210 billion; in 1500, it was still just $431 billion; in 1700, $643 billion; as of 2013, $101 trillion. That is a 15 percent increase in the first millennium; a 105 percent increase from 1000 to 1500; a 49 percent increase between 1500 and 1700; and a 15,700 percent increase from 1700 to present.

It is similarly undeniable that the spread of peace has been a direct result of American hegemony. On a year-by-year basis, international war deaths have decreased precipitously since World War II, from a high of nearly 200 deaths per 100,000 people at the end of that conflict to a low of well below 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people at the turn of the twentieth century.10 Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900.11 Furthermore, America has become the most tolerant country on earth. According to the Washington Post, a new Swedish survey found that people from the United Kingdom, America, Canada, and Australia, as well as certain Latin American countries, were “most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor.” Other European countries aren’t nearly as tolerant.12 And none of those countries has ever elected a black man—twice—with more than 65 million votes each time, to serve as the leader of those countries.

None of this philosophizing ended the hypocrisy of a society that continued to tolerate slavery, of course. And this didn’t go without comment—Dr. Samuel Johnson famously quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But it is worth noting that when the Declaration of Independence was written, slavery was common practice across the world; as we will discuss later, slavery itself was not outlawed in Britain’s territories until 1833, and not in India until 1843. And as we will also see, the founders were well aware of the conflict between their ideals of equality and the institution of slavery. None of them claimed that blacks were not, in fact, human beings covered by the Declaration of Independence’s high ideals. In fact, as C. Bradley Thompson points out, the argument for the race-based inapplicability of the Declaration’s guarantee of human equality didn’t emerge in the United States until the militant proslavery movement got under way in the 1830s, in direct response to the abolitionist movement.26

Finally, the Constitution was designed in the belief that local governments govern best, since they are closest to their constituents. The national government would have the ability to protect individual rights of citizens against the gravest state usurpations—this, for example, was the intent of the Article IV restrictions against states abusing the “privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states,”54 as well as the grant of federal power to “guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” But the locus of government power would reside at the local level. As Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 10, “The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party.”55

Thus, Obama, in the same second inaugural speech in which he cited the Declaration of Independence, turned the phrase “all men are created equal” on its head, citing innate human equality as a rationale for pursuing equality of outcome.6 In this, Obama was following in the footsteps of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who stated, “We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. . . . To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.”7 In reality, of course, nobody in the United States or anywhere on earth has “the same chance to succeed,” because we are all born into different circumstances, with different qualities and different hardships; true equality of opportunity would require a nightmarish invasion of rights. But the reshaping of the founding ideal of equality of rights into justification for neo-Marxist policies is both attractive and clever.

This ever-expanding rubric of pseudo-rights comes at the expense of actual rights. For example, doctors have a negative right to control their own labor—no one can force a doctor to provide service. But if we all have a positive right to health care, someone’s negative rights will be violated: either the doctor, who will be forced to alienate his labor without his consent, or the taxpayer, who will see his own labor confiscated to pay for the doctor, or other patients, who will be deprived of their ability to obtain health care in favor of others. Similarly, landowners have a right to build and rent apartments. But if we all have a positive right to housing, someone’s negative rights will again be violated: either the landlord, who will be forced to rent out his apartment against his consent, or the developer, who will be forced to build more units, or the taxpayer, who will be forced to subsidize the landlord or the developer or the renter. How, in the absence of government compulsion, are these rights to be realized? Just because South Africa’s constitution promises housing, food, water, and social security doesn’t mean that South Africans actually receive these goods and services.

Disintegrationists don’t merely disagree with the proposition that human nature exists and that individual rights adhere to all of us by virtue of that nature. They disagree with the founding belief that “all men are created equal.” As we have seen, the Unionist founders never meant to contend that all human beings were made equal in abilities or talents, or that they were born into similar situations. They meant that men have species equality—we are all equal because of our membership to the species—and that therefore, we are equal in our inalienable rights.

A right to free speech, for example, does not result in equality for a man who cannot speak. A right to alienation of one’s own labor, for example, does not result in equality for the man whose labor is less valuable.

In 1950, fewer than 10,000 pages of regulations were published in the Code of Federal Regulations; by 2018, that number surpassed 180,000 pages.

In truth, the Disintegrationist desire for a dominant federal government leads to Disintegration itself: if we don’t allow Texans to live like Texans and Californians to live like Californians, why should we remain part of the same country? As the federal government becomes bigger and more powerful, local communities lose control over their own lives, and must fight harder and harder to prevent domination by those who dismiss their values and concerns. The alternative to federalism isn’t national unity, but dissolution.

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. It is not enough, the Disintegrationists will have to say, that the historically marginalized now be treated equally by the state. The state must step in to enforce equality of outcome in every interaction.

We are not gods, and simply do not have the capacity to rectify imbalances of innate individual qualities. We have the ability to treat everyone equally under law; we have the ability to create governments to protect individual rights. But we don’t have the ability to guarantee that even two kids the same age living on the same street will start from the same point; two children growing up in the same family don’t even start from the same point. We certainly don’t have the ability to ensure that everyone ends at the same point. Setting up all Americans as either purveyors of a hierarchical and discriminatory system or as victims of that system, we disintegrate the ties that bind Americans together.

Occidental College historian Thaddeus Russell avers, “One of the great untold stories about the civil rights movement was that it required violent resistance from blacks to be effective.”24 Historian Charles Cobb similarly contends, “Time and again, guns have proven pivotal to the African American quest for freedom.”

To see how rights in property and economics matter to societies, merely contrast the experiences of North and South Korea. The countries are divided only by an artificial political barrier; the population is ethnically identical. Yet six decades of central planning in the North has resulted in a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $1,214 as of 2017;29 in South Korea, the same period has resulted in a GDP per capita of nearly $30,000.30 North Koreans are said to be some three inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts, thanks to food shortages; North Korean life expectancy trails South Korean life expectancy by more than a decade; 97 percent of North Korea’s roads are unpaved, compared with 8 percent of South Korea’s.

We cannot determine the price of a product by calculating how much labor is “worth”—this gets the process exactly backward. After all, how do we know how much an hour of labor on a widget is worth without knowing what consumers are willing to pay for the widget? If a widget is worth $100 by the labor theory (ten hours of labor worth $10 per hour), but nobody wants to buy it, that worker’s widget is actually worth precisely zero dollars—which means the worker’s labor is worth precisely zero dollars. Consumers determine the value of a product by how much money they are willing to trade for that product. Few consumers—approaching zero—sit and calculate the work that goes into making a product before determining whether to buy it. Furthermore, if indeed profit-driven capitalists were greedily exploiting labor, in the true sense of exploitation, we would never see wages rise—and yet we do. If profit-driven capitalists were capable of maintaining endless profit margins by squeezing profit from labor alone, products would not become more inexpensive and better quality—and yet they do. So, what do these capitalist “exploiters” actually do? They take all the risk. They invest their own capital; they hire the laborers; they pay for the production and the marketing; they bear the brunt if the widgets never sell; they buy the raw materials and invest in the machinery and staff the HR department necessary to sell the widget. Often, they invent the widget itself.

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.

Jefferson was quite correct when he predicted that slavery would eventually end in cataclysm, with slavery judged morally evil by God Himself: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”22 The failure of Americans to live up to the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence would bear bloody fruit.

Bush gave way to President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who pledged that the “era of big government is over.”95 Indeed, Clinton, despite his vast differences with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich—author of the “Contract with America,” which pushed everything from welfare reform to anti-crime measures to a cut in the capital gains tax—worked to balance the budget and end deficit spending. Free trade, which had already begun to work its magic during the Reagan administration, gained more ground with the creation of the World Trade Organization. Eastern European countries, freed from the heavy hand of communism, began to engage with the market. Even China, a communist country, began to experiment with capitalistic measures. Wealth grew; home ownership grew; the stock market skyrocketed. Clinton’s own personal foibles could not dent his popularity due to the strong economy.

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.

The third and final step in destroying America is convincing citizens that America represents fruit of the poisonous tree: that America was founded in evil, and that there is no arc to history. Rather than a story of ever-expanding freedoms and prosperity rooted in the true seed of eternal and good values, America become a story of internecine warfare and brutality, with only the victims changing.

Obama attorney general Eric Holder complained, “When I hear these things about ‘Let’s make America great again,’ I think to myself: ‘Exactly when did you think America was great?’. . . . It takes us back to, I think, an American past that never really in fact existed with this notion of greatness.”2 This viewpoint does not only suggest that America’s history is replete with sins; every nation’s history is. This viewpoint suggests that American greatness can never be achieved. It sets perfection as a goal, and then attributes failure to meet those goals to the very nature of America and Americans. This is Disintegrationism at its finest. It sets a standard that can never be met, then blames the greatest country in history for failing to meet it.

Stewart says that while his fellow Americans may not have appreciated black Americans, all color disappeared in the sky. When the Red Tails pulled up alongside the B-17 and B-24 bombers, Stewart says, white bomber pilots breathed a sigh of relief. “We were like their guardian angels,” he explains. Stewart helped make hell into heaven. In doing so, he stood with George Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.; he stood with Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan; he stood with the American people. On the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, the president of Congress, supposedly stated, “there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.” Benjamin Franklin replied, “yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” In 244 years, nothing has changed. Yes, we are flawed. Yes, we are cruel and generous and brutal and gentle and cynical and idealistic. But most of all, we must not be enemies. We must be Americans—Americans together—and we will be so again, when we are touched by the better angels of our nature.