How ̶p̶r̶o̶g̶r̶e̶s̶s̶i̶v̶e̶s̶ mainstream media have convinced us America is evil — and must be destroyed
By Ben Shapiro
The following essay is an excerpt from Ben Shapiro’s new book, “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps”
The philosophy of division is a philosophy that derides any notion of American unity as a lie, and bathes that which links us — Abraham Lincoln’s “bonds of affection” and “mystic chords of memory” — in acid, disintegrating our ties and casting us all adrift.
I call this strain of thought “Disintegrationism.”
In order to argue that America’s philosophy is wrongheaded, her culture diseased, and her history evil, 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.
It is simply undeniable that capitalism, founded on protection of property rights — the ideology of the Founding Fathers — has been uniquely successful in spreading peace and prosperity both domestically and around the globe. 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 was 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, 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. Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900. 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. 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.
Finally, it is perfectly obvious that global freedom has expanded wherever American influence has expanded. According to the Polity Project at the University of Maryland, democracy is actually at a global high, and has been in particularly steep ascent since the death of the Soviet Union — a collapse brought about, of course, by America’s willingness to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” as John F. Kennedy put it in his inaugural address.
The bar for Disintegrationists, then, is high. To surpass it, they must employ a clever, seductive, and deeply vicious strategy....
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