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Bernie's Brand of Socialism Too Revolutionary for Chris Matthews

February 05, 2016
Lori Hanes

Writer

The Context

Bernie's brand of socialism has MSNBC's Chris Matthews worried. The socialist senator's calls for revolution and promises of free stuff is a bit too much, too soon for Matthews' slower-paced progressivism. In a recent interview with Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, the Hardball host asked the former secretary of state how she can compete with a revolution.

Hardball or Softball

In the interview, Matthews set up the former secretary of state as the more sane option to Sanders' left-wing radicalism.

“The only person --- and I want to say this bluntly --- the only person between a confirmed socialist, who is calling for political revolution in this country, winning the nomination of the Democratic Party, which has always been more moderate than that, is you,” Matthews said.

Matthews went on to express his dismay over young people attending a Sanders rally responding enthusiastically to a call for revolution. Most importantly, he asked Hillary how she could win against someone promising everything --- free tuition, free healthcare, more social security benefits without a tax increase.

Oh, the Irony

Isn't that the same question the right has been asking for decades?

“The … question that is being asked here is so damn ironic,” Glenn said on The Glenn Beck Program. “That’s the question the right has been asking for the last 90 years. How do you possibly win when somebody says, ‘I’ll give you everything’?”

Glenn's answer: You don’t.

The Liberal Spectrum

What's in a name? A lot. As Glenn has taught over the years, paying attention to labels and words are important --- and telling.

"There is a Democrat. That's like a Harry Truman Democrat, that just believes in, you know, things that typical [Americans believe] --- my grandfather was a Harry Truman Democrat. Then you have the progressive, which is actually a slowed-down socialist, somebody who believes we have to take it step-by-step, but we're heading towards socialism. Then you have a full-out socialist, and after that, a communist. That's the real spectrum on the left."

What's Really at Stake

Hillary believes "we have an obligation to keep people focused on what's at stake in this election."

Thankfully, so does Glenn.

"Clearly the Constitution of the United States is at stake," Glenn said. "Will you truly have a First Amendment, a Second Amendment, a Fourth Amendment? Do you have those --- the Tenth Amendment --- at the end of the next presidential term? Those could be gone.

Glenn went on to explain the Supreme Court is also at stake, with likely four justices being appointed by the next president of the United States.

"If the Supreme Court is given to progressives that do not believe . . . the Constitution [is] no longer a valid document."

Common Sense Bottom Line

While Chris Matthews may find a revolution distasteful, progressivism is equally so. Both have the goal of controlling citizens lives through the government --- one more slowly and slyly, the other more aggressively and violently.

Enjoy this complimentary clip from The Glenn Beck Program:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors:

GLENN: Welcome to the program. So Chris Matthews has been having this conversation. He is fighting hard for Secretary Clinton. And he is at least open about it. He is not a fan of Bernie Sanders. He is a progressive, not a revolutionary. And there is a difference.

There is a Democrat. That's like a Harry Truman Democrat, that just believes in, you know, things that typical -- my grandfather was a Harry Truman Democrat. Then you have the progressive, which is actually a slowed-down socialist, somebody who believes we have to take it step by step, but we're heading towards socialism. Then you have a full-out socialist, and after that, a communist. That's the real spectrum on the left.

Well, we've been warning for a while that you can't put revolutions back into a bottle. Once you open up the bottle of revolution, you can't just take it back out and say, "Okay. Everybody sit down." So Occupy Wall Street and everything else, they've been asking for a revolution. They have been looking at, you know, let's take to the streets and let's have a revolution. This is why the progressives came into existence in the first place.

Socialism and a nonconstitutional and a non-US-constitutional-style government was the goal of the progressives and the communists. Woodrow Wilson is clear. He talks about how he loves communism and how communism was the future. This totalitarian regime is the future, with a strong man. But -- this is a quote -- nobody wants to see blood on the streets. And so you take it one piece at a time so we avoid revolution.

Chris Matthews is not a revolutionary and neither is Hillary Clinton. She's a progressive, so is he. So they talk about this on Hardball. And I want you to listen to what he said. I think we should start -- don't you think we should start with "revolution is not how it begins." Cut 641. Here it is.

CHRIS: -- Democratic Party, your party. Not Bernie Sanders. He's not a Democratic Party member. Your party has produced the New Deal. It produced the progressive income tax, came from the Democrats, from Wilson. Social Security, the greatest antipoverty program ever came from Roosevelt. And Harry Truman started the fight for health care and civil rights and all these good things that led to the Affordable Care Act.

But in every case, you had to battle Republicans who voted against it to the last person. And it's always been a tough fight. And you need 60 votes in the Senate; you need -- what is it -- 218 in the House. And if you don't have them, nothing gets done.

HILLARY: Right. Right. That's right.

CHRIS: Then the Bernie people need to be -- not him. He won't be taught. Can the kids behind him -- need to be told, "This is how it works in our system." You can call for revolution, but it ain't going to happen. There ain't going to be a revolution. There's going to be an election, an inauguration, and then there's going to be a Congress sitting with you, you got to do business with, no matter who gets elected.

HILLARY: Well, also --

CHRIS: Like -- you don't have to worry about logic anymore, just I'm going to have a revolution and pay for everything.

(laughter)

GLENN: He's just -- he's in there swinging. Okay. Again, you can't put the revolutionaries back into a bottle. You can't stoke the fires, which the Democrats did, stoke the fires of revolution and expect them to go back and go back to their home and expect, "Oh, well, it's nothing to worry about. We don't need revolution. We have Secretary Clinton." That's not what they're looking for. That's not what they've been promised.

PAT: Yeah, what was the book we talked about from France a couple years ago?

GLENN: It was the Coming Insurrection.

PAT: Coming Insurrection kind of outlines all that. They're not happy with that. They're not happy with the slow progress.

GLENN: Yeah. They're tired of being told that we're going to have this revolution when they know -- and this is the problem with Secretary Clinton, when they know the people at the top, the ones promising them this glorious revolution are just getting rich themselves. So that's why it doesn't connect with the people who are younger because they're seeing her make $675,000 from Wall Street for a speech, which they know is Wall Street -- that's the part of corruption that they're trying to get -- Occupy Wall Street. That's the part they want revolution on. He goes on. Now, listen to this question and this answer.

CHRIS: The only person -- and I want to say this bluntly, the only person between a confirmed socialist who is calling for political revolution in this country, winning the nomination of the Democratic Party, which has always been more moderate than that, is you.

So when you saw that -- that rally last night that the young people all around Senator Sanders -- when he yelled revolution out there and they all applauded like mad, how do you compete with a person who is coming along in the primaries, however, saying, I'm going to give you all the things you want: Free tuition, more Social Security benefits without an increase in your taxes, health care --

GLENN: Stop. Do you hear what he's saying. What's his question? It's two questions.

PAT: It's, how do you stop a guy who is promising these young guys everything they want? Free everything, where I'm going to give you whatever you want.

GLENN: Isn't that ironic?

PAT: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

GLENN: He's saying two things. There's two questions. How do you stop a revolution?

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Well, you don't start a revolution. This is what I've been saying since the caliphate. You don't start a revolution because they never end the way ours did in America. Never.

They -- the people who started and encourage the revolution are -- is the same Democrats that spoke highly of Occupy Wall Street. You know that Hillary Clinton spoke highly of Occupy Wall Street.

PAT: Oh, yeah.

GLENN: Barack Obama spoke highly of Occupy Wall Street. They all did. Those people are revolutionaries. We warned you at the time, you can't play with matches. And so these same people who were encouraging the revolution are now looking and saying, "Wait a minute. It slipped through the fingers."

What did I say about the Egyptian revolution? When they all said that this was going to be a glorious Jeffersonian revolution, I said, "It never ends with the people who start it." The people at the top that pour the gasoline and light the flames and use the masses, those people who pour the gasoline, except for the American Revolution, are never the people who control it in the end.

So now Chris Matthews who was all for the glorious revolution on the streets of Occupy Wall Street is now saying, "How do you stop it?" Because he's realizing the people like him who started it are not going to be the ones in control.

PAT: Right.

GLENN: They now want something different than his goals were. So there's your first question. And I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so. And I want to say something else. Right now, I know that there are people that literally go in and out of lockdown. They are news people who literally are going into lockdown because of the threats against their lives.

This goes back to something I've warned when I was at Fox. You people in the press better pay attention because a revolution is coming and people are going to be so angry at what's going on and so angry at the press, that they will pull you out of your seats. Do you remember me saying this?

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: They will pull you out of your seats in your own studios and kill you in the streets. We are getting very close to that. There are news journalists right now that have to have massive security. I know, because I've had massive security for quite some time.

Most people cannot afford the kind of security it takes for a journalist or somebody who speaks their mind to be able to actually be secure and not have to worry about it. There are journalists that are in that situation. So you're ratcheting up revolution on both sides of the aisle.

Now, the second question that is being asked here is so damn ironic. Chris Matthews: How do you run against somebody who is promising the world, that I'll give you everything free? That's the question the right has been asking for the last 90 years. How do you possibly win when somebody says, "I'll give you everything?"

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Answer: You don't. You don't.

PAT: Interesting that they're experiencing exactly what we've experienced all this time.

GLENN: Yep.

CHRIS: To death. All the government pain. How do you compete a revolution -- a revolution of promises, really?

HILLARY: I do think that we have an obligation to keep people focused on what's at stake in this election.

GLENN: A revolution of promises. Okay. Stop. What's at stake in this Constitution, Pat?

PAT: The Constitution is at stake in this.

GLENN: Clearly the Constitution of the United States is at stake. Will you truly have a First Amendment, a Second Amendment, a Fourth Amendment?

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: Do you have those -- Tenth Amendment -- at the end of the next presidential term, those could be gone. What else is at stake? Kind of related to that. Supreme Court.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: If the Supreme Court, because there are four justices, if the Supreme Court is given to progressives that do not believe -- no matter what anybody says, look the history up yourself, do not take my word for it. Look at the history of progressives. Hillary Clinton calls herself and she makes pains to point out, "I am an early 20th-century American progressive." She says it that way almost every time.

Those early 20th-century American progressives felt that the Constitution was no longer a valid document. It -- the rights of man did not -- are not held by the creator. They are more in line with Darwin than Newton. So they are not hard, fast, gravitational laws, but they are more like -- they are more along the lines of evolution. So they evolve. That's what a 20th century believed. And that's how she identified herself.

If you put those people on the court, you will lose the Constitution. Also at stake, ISIS. Our very lives are at stake. If we continue to behave like we did in Benghazi, like we have in the Middle East for the last eight, nine years, where we betray all of our allies, where they can't trust us, we won't admit the truth of what Islam really, truly is, and we don't have somebody who really understands the full might and power of the United States military and respects it. And they respect them. You've also lost the country.

Also at stake, the culture. Yesterday, the president came out and said, "By the way, stand up down at the border. Stand down at the border." Do you know why California is red now -- I'm sorry -- is blue now instead of red?

Who was it that did -- I believe Wilson is the one that everybody gives the credit, that he's the one that turned it from Republican to Democrat. It wasn't Pete Wilson. It was a guy who had that same name in his though.

PAT: Woodrow?

GLENN: Nope. Guy named after him. Guy named after Woodrow Wilson.

Ronald Wilson Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan and his amnesty. The thing that he said was the biggest mistake of his entire presidency that changed California from red to blue.

PAT: It sure was.

GLENN: Changed it from a Democratic republic, changed it from a conservative state, to a liberal state. Because there was no -- it flooded new voters in. And it never came back.

With what this president is doing, he knows now, the amnesty thing is in trouble. I've got to flood this country with people. So now he's telling people, "Stand down." And he's flooding our nation. Our culture is at stake. But what does she say is at stake? It's not that. We'll share it with you here in just a second

Featured Image: Democratic presidential candidates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during their MSNBC Democratic Candidates Debate at the University of New Hampshire on February 4, 2016 in Durham, New Hampshire. This is the final debate for the Democratic candidates before the New Hampshire primaries. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.