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.

2017 Washington Post poll found that seven in ten Americans thought America’s political polarization is now as severe as it was during the Vietnam War era, reaching a “dangerous low point.”3 A 2019 survey from American Enterprise Institute found that about half of Americans believe the other party doesn’t want what’s best for the country. That’s likely because Americans increasingly misperceive the nature of those who vote for the opposite political party: both Democrats and Republicans radically overestimate the secularism and radicalism of the constituency of the Democratic Party, for example.

According to another study from More in Common, 55 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that a majority of the opposing party believed extreme views; in reality, that number was 30 percent. So, for example, Democrats believed that only half of Republicans would acknowledge that racism still exists in America; in reality, the number was approximately 80 percent. Conversely, Republicans believed that just half of Democrats were proud to be American; the actual number was about 80 percent.5

All of this is having real-life bleed-over effects. According to Pew Research, 79 percent of Americans believe that we have “far too little” or “too little” confidence in each other, and 64 percent believe Americans’ level of trust in each other has been shrinking.6

Two weeks before the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, the intellectual thought leader and emotional avatar of young Democrats across America, gave a rally in Ames. The lines stretched around the block, thousands strong.7 The event opened with the popular rock band Portugal. The Man; one of the musicians, Zack Carothers, then got up and ushered onstage three Native American women, explaining, “the land that we are on is not ours.” The women then called for “land reparations” and explained that Iowa had been stolen from indigenous tribes.

After that, radical filmmaker Michael Moore took the stage to explain that America was built “on genocide and built on the backs of slaves,” that American racism had not abated, and added that America was a “system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”

Following Moore, Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a self-described democratic socialist, told a screaming throng that they were part of a “movement for social, economic and racial justice . . . a movement to transform our public policy so the United States can . . . finally advance 21st century human rights.” Ocasio-Cortez proclaimed, “We need fundamental change in the United States of America. . . . It’s going to require us ...

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

American philosophy is under attack, with Disintegrationists claiming that natural rights do not exist—that no rights are discoverable from human nature and reason, because neither human nature nor reason exists. Human nature is inherently malleable, and reason a mere tool of power, wielded by political enemies in order to suppress dissent. Likewise, equality before law is morally wrong, according to Disintegrationists—such equality merely reinforces preexisting hierarchies of power. Instead of equality before the law, or equality in individual rights, Disintegrationists seek equality of outcome.

American culture is also under attack, with Disintegrationists claiming that rights themselves are a threat to the common good. Free speech must be replaced by hate speech regulations, with hate itself left undefined. Freedom of religion must be replaced by secular universalism. Freedom of association and contract must be prohibited, so long as that freedom cuts against the appropriate standards of ethnic, racial, or sexual diversity (under this standard, for example, an all-black school is considered diverse, while a police department that doesn’t represent ethnic populations proportionately is considered discriminatory, even if that police department staffs based on meritocratic concerns). Due process must be supplanted with mob rule, private property with public need.

Disintegrationist culture claims, too, that Americans’ stubborn willingness to defend their rights represents a pigheaded defense of a corrupt and hierarchical system; Americans must be trained to accept diktats from their government before they can be cured of their individual heresies.

Finally, America’s history is under severe threat. The Disintegrationists claim that America’s traditional history is a myth: that the true story of America is a story of exploitation, that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were a self-flattering parody when written, that the Constitution of the United States was meant to enshrine power hierarchies, as well as bigotry of all forms. America has been an imperialist monster hell-bent on world domination, a propagator of rapacious capitalism, a faux democracy. In this view, there is no history to bind us—in fact, history separates us. The American flag itself represents nothing more than a cynical joke, in the Disintegrationist view.

In order to argue that America’s philosophy is wrongheaded, her culture diseased, and her history evil—to treat America as the great exploiter rather than the great liberator, wealth creator, and rights defender—Disintegrationists must engage in an extraordinarily selective reading of reality. They must home in in excruciating detail on America’s sins, which, in context, would be fine—but rob that history of all context or subsequent history. Exploitation is a feature of every human society, and repeated mistreatment by some groups of other groups is a similarly common feature. What is uncommon—indeed, unprecedented in human history—are prosperity, peace, and freedom.

The Strategy of Disintegrationism

So, how have Disintegrationists succeeded in convincing millions of Americans that America’s philosophy, culture, institutions, and history are all worth overthrowing? They’ve provided a subversive but seductive view of America as an evil actor—and provided an alternative Unionism rooted in intersectional solidarity. Intersectionality, in its original iteration, was perfectly plausible: it suggested that Americans may be targeted based on membership in more than one minority category. So, for example, a black woman might meet discrimination in a different way than a white woman. But intersectionality has instead become a rallying cry for Disintegrationists who aver that America is subject to unbending, rigid hierarchies that can be torn down only by uprooting the entire American system. Thus, membership in a historically victimized group serves as the glue to hold together an anti-Unionism coalition. In opposition to the system lies a new solidarity.

This argument is extremely seductive, especially given the underlying philosophical lie of the political left: that all disparity represents a form of discrimination. Since disparities have existed between all groups at all times, such disparities cannot disappear. But by convincing Americans that any unexplained disparity is the result of the American system—philosophy, culture, institutions, and ...

This is an emotionally resonant pitch. Traditional Americanism suggests that while our system has never been perfect, it has grown increasingly so—and this means that it should be easier to succeed today, without the obstacles of bigotry that have plagued our history, than ever before. That worldview places an awful responsibility on individuals: if you fail to succeed, you can certainly blame personal disadvantages, but it becomes difficult to blame a miasmatic, existential, systemic, flag-draped boogeyman haunting your dreams. Additional freedom means additional responsibility.

If, however, all disparity can be chalked up to the system, then personal responsibility becomes a secondary concern. Failures are no longer individual, but systemic. In fact, every failure becomes an additional brick in the wall of evidence against America. The only solution, again, rests in coalitional politics designed to rewrite the American bargain.

Disintegrationists have categorized culturally unifying symbols like the American flag as inherently divisive. If America, as a concept, is polarizing, so too is the flag.17 Kneeling for the national anthem ackshually represents more authentic unifying behavior than standing for it (Beto O’Rourke suggested, “I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, in any place”).18

Scientific investigation is deemed bigoted, and meritocracy itself derided as discriminatory. Belief in free markets—even opposition to nationalized health care—is evidence of America’s roots in slavery.20 Adherence to American institutions like federalism and the Electoral College is castigated as inherently discriminatory.21

Disintegrationists leverage the power of cultural institutions to target and destroy those who stand in their way. Disintegrationist strategy relies on a simple rule: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In the world of social media, this means targeting corporations who are too risk averse to stand up for either free speech, or for their own values.

Unionism suggests that despite our differences, we are, at root, Americans. Disintegrationism suggests that despite our American passports, we are, at root, different. The dirty little secret of Disintegrationism is that there is no unity at the end of the destruction. There is only more destruction. The revolution will eat its originators. No new world will be rebuilt after the razing of America’s philosophy, culture, institutions, and history. Tribalism will simply replace national unity. The glue of opposition that currently binds together the disparate factions of Disintegration will simply melt away. All that will be left are polarized groups, seeking their own interests.

Abraham Lincoln saw in the Declaration of Independence the philosophical axis mundi of the United States: Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.2

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.

We Have Individual, Natural Rights The Declaration of Independence posits that rights are self-evident, and that all individuals are bestowed those rights by Nature and Nature’s God. But what are our rights, and how can we know them? Why should human beings have rights?

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.

Natural law philosophy was rooted in two traditions that gradually fused into the belief system of the founders: Judeo-Christian morality, or Jerusalem, and Greek reason, or Athens. Judeo-Christian morality posited that human beings had inherent value; the Bible’s ringing statement of human equality in Genesis 1:27 provided fruitful ground for the most basic rebuke of caste systems: “And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This language served as a direct contrast to other ancient civilizations, which invested leaders alone with the image of God.5

Meanwhile, Greek philosophy suggested that what made man unique was his ability to use reason. Human beings, the Greeks believed, were not innately malleable or changeable. We were crafted by nature to use our minds; it was that capacity that separated us from the animals. Plato asserted that the purpose of the human soul was “managing, ruling, and deliberating.”6 Aristotle suggested that “the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason.”7

Church. Famed theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141 CE) stated, “Learn everything, later you will see that nothing is superfluous”8; Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) explained, “An error concerning the [science of creation] ends as false thinking about God.”9 Religious conflict didn’t tarnish the draw of natural law—it burnished it, providing the basis for a universalism absent in religious sectarianism. No wonder Hugo Grotius, the famous philosopher and jurist, appealed to natural law in the aftermath of the barbarous Thirty Years War, and in the aftermath of the transformative Peace of Westphalia, praising the “dictate of right reason which points out that an act, according as it is or is not in conformity with rational nature, has in it a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity; and that in consequence, such an act is either forbidden or enjoined by the author of nature, God.”10

Natural law thinking led to the development of natural rights. If human beings had a nature, and if that nature was reason, then man had a right to exercise his reason—and to exercise his will so long as he hurt no one else. As Hugo Grotius stated, “God created man free and sui iuris [under his own dominion], so that the actions of each individual and the use of his possessions were made subject not to another’s will but to his own.”11

Natural rights thinking reached its apex in the writings of John Locke (1632–1704). Like Grotius, Locke believed that because human beings have the ability to reason—because that is our nature—and because we all have inestimable value as creations of God, we have rights. Locke argued that in a state of nature, human beings had certain rights, rights that preexisted government. As he stated, “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”

So, what were man’s rights under the laws of nature? The rights to life, liberty, and property. Human beings have a right to self-defense inherent in their very survival; they have a right to liberty of thought and action so far as they do not violate the rights of others; and they have a right to the property they accrue through their labor.13 Adam Smith, widely considered the philosophical expositor of free markets, took this view as well:

[T]he obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. . . . 14

This is, to be clear, not entirely obvious. To declare, as the Declaration of Independence does, that all men are created equal in their rights seems incredibly counterintuitive. After all, we may all be human beings subject to similar dictates of human nature, but we are deeply unequal in a variety of other ways: some of us are smart, some foolish; some tall, some short; some athletic, some nerds. So how could the founders suggest that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal in our rights?

For most of human history, the wisest of men suggested precisely the opposite. Plato, for example, posited that in order to maximize the possibility of philosophers guiding society, society ought to be ordered from the top down; he recommended that “the philosophers rule as kings,” that the community be rigidly ordered into castes of workers, warriors, and philosophers.

Aristotle promulgated a rather similarly striated notion of human inequality, arguing that the “relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled. The same must of necessity hold in the case of human beings generally.” This, Aristotle argued, justified natural slavery: “those who are as different...

The Bible makes clear that in God’s eyes, we are all valued equally. Leviticus 19:15 dictates, “You must not pervert justice; you must not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the rich; you are to judge your neighbor fairly.” That theme is made more explicit in Christian theology: Galatians 3:28 dictates, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Human equality is the presupposition of Judeo-Christian thinking.

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. They do not come from the collective. They adhere to human beings because they are part of human nature: human beings hold inestimable value, and because they have been endowed with the unique capacity to reason. Man’s will is free, and his ability to choose is sacrosanct, and cannot be violated. 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. It is not the job of government to usher in a reworking of mankind, but to protect mankind’s nature—and to militate against conflicts between the rights of men. These philosophical principles were put into practice by the Constitution of the United States, the most effective governmental founding document in world history. A government of enumerated powers, checks and balances, an...

Shortcomings in man were therefore shortcomings in institutions.

Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson, a devotee of German philosophizing and believer in the perfectibility of man by better government, suggested in a speech before the American Bar Association in 1914, “We are custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself.”17

Similarly, philosopher John Dewey championed the “indefinite plasticity of human nature,” which had only been fossilized by “habit”—habit that could be changed. In fact, said Dewey, “If human nature is unchangeable, then there is no such thing as education and all our efforts to educate are doomed to failure. . . . The assertion that a proposed change is impossible because of the fixed constitution of human nature diverts attention from the question of whether or not a change is desirable and from the other question of how it shall be brought about.”18

In the Disintegrationist view, to believe in boundaries on human nature is to be repressive, intolerant, constraining. Thus Disintegrationists portray recognizing baseline biological truths as bigotry, and state that unwillingness to chalk up all disparity to society flaws represents retrograde narrowmindedness. Even the processes of science that lead to conclusions at odds with Disintegrationist philosophy must be thrown out.

As Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker writes: The dogma that human nature does not exist, in the face of growing evidence from science and common sense that it does, has led to contempt among many scholars in the humanities for the concepts of evidence and truth. Worse, the doctrine of the blank slate often distorts science itself by making an extreme position—that culture alone determines behavior—seem moderate, and by making the moderate position—that behavior comes from an interaction of biology and culture—seem extreme.20

For the most radical, this means attacking the scientific process itself, robbing it of its objectivity, and deriding objectivity in science as a fanciful notion. Computational biologist Laura Boykin recently told Wired magazine, “Science at its core is systematically racist and sexist.”21 Donna Hughes in Women’s Studies International Forum, for example, stated, “The scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world.”22

In 2018, a lawsuit by wrongly fired Google employee James Damore revealed that the company had distributed a memo labeling “individual achievement,” “meritocracy,” “we are objective,” and “colorblind racial frame” as mind-sets connected with “white dominant culture,” and suggesting that managers should promote the idea that “everything is subjective.”

Science, as Heying writes, has been supplanted with the politics of grievance, wherein results that do not meet with the approval of the Disintegrationists are simply shouted down, and their purveyors blackballed. How prominent are the politics of pseudoscientific grievance?

Yet Disintegrationists, maddened by the reality of human nature’s inflexibility, see those who maintain the reality of biological sex differences as a threat.

This madness has even reached into the medical establishment. Increasingly, doctors across America are instructed to write patients’ self-identified gender rather than biological sex on their medical charts. Dr. Deanna Adkins of Duke University School of Medicine claims that gender identity is “the only medically supported determinant of sex,” adding, “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.” This would be shocking news to doctors, who routinely use just such indicators to classify by sex—or, for that matter, the fetal testing industry, which can use DNA tests to determine prenatal sex with near-perfect accuracy.

To doubt this received wisdom—that a man can be a woman, and vice versa, all based on subjective self-identification—is to violate the precepts of decency, according to the Disintegrationists. However, they don’t just think that doubt is rude. They say it’s a form of violence. To write that perhaps gender dysphoria should be classified as a mental disorder is to risk your career.

Marcus issuing a letter to the entire “community.” The letter explained, “The spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence. At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work. . . . The School’s commitment to studying and supporting the health and well-being of sexual and gender minority populations is unwavering.”33 In other words, inquiry itself was dangerous. Human nature does exist. But the very existence of a fixed human nature threatens the utopian visions of the Disintegrationists. If human nature is unchanging, and if it is based in reason, then individual rights exist, as the founding fathers suggested. And if individual rights exist, then starry-eyed visions of a remolded humanity implode. If the individual rights stand in the way of systemic change, the individual must give way.