Article by Deborah C. Tyler in "The American Thinker":
The far-left news chooser Drudge Report recently linked to an article in ultra-progressive Atlantic magazine, "Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?" The author is an über-prog who appears from his photo to have undergone the popular left-wing cosmetic surgical procedure called smirk-work. Eliminating any question about his political views, not to mention his rationality, the author identifies climate change as "the most important challenge before the U.S. and the world." The article attempts to explain why the leading presidential candidates ("[a]ll three white men were born in the 1940s") are so darn old. The author is perfectly clueless regarding the question he has chosen to address. Here is the real reason why the leading presidential candidates are in their seventies, why the left wing no longer produces national leaders at all, and why young people like the Atlantic staff writer are patronizing nincompoops.
America is a post-paradigmatic nation. Americans no longer share a functional, unifying ethos of national identity or purpose. America now has two oppositional and incompatible paradigms of national identity: the foundational paradigm One nation under God vs. the modern summative Our diversity is our strength. One nation under God encapsulates America's true, eternal, and viable understanding of identity and purpose. Though implicitly a statement of theistic faith, the identity "One nation under God" does not involve an individual test of religion or belief. It does imply an individual responsibility to maintain the unity of the nation as a constitutional republic. On the other hand, Our diversity is our strength (ODIOS) sounds virtuous, but it is a self-destructive and ultimately suicidal ethos of national identity. The word diversity comes from the same root as division, divisiveness, divorce. ODIOS is a godless formulation that literally means that the states and traits dividing us up are the most important thing about us.
Donald Trump was elected following eight years of relentless divisiveness and post-Americanism from the Obama administration. He won not only because Hillary was a deplorable candidate, but also because the American people were at least dimly aware of what they were losing with the planned obsolescence of national unity and godfulness. Trump was elected because he was the only candidate brash and bull-headed enough to single-handedly restore the socio-politically defunct ethos, "One nation under God."
ODIOS slithered quietly into American consciousness in the 1950s, years before it became the rallying cry of the pervasive hostility and unhappiness in American public life. Joe Biden exhibits undeniable neuropsychological symptoms of cognitive decline. Nevertheless, he is the Democrat frontrunner because he is sentimentally associated with the long-past heyday of ODIOS. Biden is the diversity nostalgia candidate, which makes him very old in more ways than one.
Because only government can enforce fairness among official diversities, Bernie Sanders represents the inevitable terminus of ODIOS in the ethos "One nation under government." That paradigm is the waste product clogging the lower entrails of the collective left, which the Dem establishment is trying to hold in. God makes America good, so there is liberty. Government enforces "fairness" upon America, ergo socialism. Every generation thinks it invented sex, but Bernie Bros think they invented socialism. One Nation Under Government (ONUGov) is the glorious dream of unenterprising "folks" who sneer at One nation under God. Most conveniently, they have little sense of duty to such a racist nation while expecting the "government" to provide for them.
The mighty hoax of "climate change" is the grandchild of ODIOS and the child of ONUGov. As the Atlantic writer clarified, the greatest problem facing the American people is exactly the same one facing people in North Korea, Lichtenstein, Burundi, and everywhere else. There are differences everywhere. We have no reason to defend what mitigates those differences for Americans, such as our sovereignty and Constitution.
Since the founding, American greatness derived from the ethos of God-given rights protected by the Constitution. This paradigm of freedom holds that America is a good and blessed nation. The good fortune of being an American carries the responsibility to learn the language, celebrate the culture, and follow the law. Most importantly, every American has a duty to preserve this indivisible nation and to protect its Constitution even at the risk of his own life. The original Pledge of Allegiance was popularized in 1892. It included the key phrase "one nation, indivisible." The words "under God" were added in 1954 at the urging of President Eisenhower, who believed they would "reaffirm the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future." Ike was too late.
The catastrophic shift from One nation under God to Our diversity is or strength came in with what sociologists call post-scarcity society. When physical survival is dissociated from work, material abundance seems unending, and disease is something that happens to bad people because they smoke, the need for national unity with its demands of sacrifice declines. We are witnessing a retrogression to ONUGod with the Wuhan flu crisis.
ODIOS arose as race and sex discrimination were ending in America. ODIOS re-segregates the nation along political lines. It grants to the vast government, education, and media syndicate first political power and then complete mental control over the gullible and godless in America. The left's psychotic hatred for Trump is a reaction to the terrible thing he did to them: he shattered their ethos of superiority and self-justified parasitism toward the patriotic deplorables on the other side.
The left wing has an age problem; the right wing does not. Trump's long, superlative career in business protected him from the full brunt of ODIOS, but he was elected not for his seniority, but for his Trumpness. Jeb Bush (b. 1953) was el candidato ODIOS del establecimiento. The other Republican candidates had to spend their careers kowtowing to ODIOS. Scott Walker (b. 1967), Ted Cruz (b. 1970), and Marco Rubio (b. 1971) were youngsters in 2016. After eight years of Trump restoring One nation under God, they will be among many middle-aged and younger Republican candidates.
On the other hand, ODIOS and ONUGov have no young political leaders because these are no longer a political movement at all. The left has become a slobbering cult of victimization, privileging, climate incantations, and repulsive anti-God rituals such as sanctimonious baby-killing. Its lipsticked loudmouths like Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and The Occasional Cortex are not political leaders; they are human designer drugs ingested for quick trips of egomania and rage, with no practical relevance to political problems at all. ODIOS and ONUGov resulted in a recent parade of Democrat candidates as pitiful farce: three fake candidates wearing false beards (de Blasio, Deval, and Bloomberg) and several younger candidates whose hypocritical preaching, extremism, or looniness forced the Dems to railroad in a demented "the way we were" candidate.
The Atlantic author cites "youth disengagement from politics" and observes that the median age of local voters is "nearly a generation older than the median age of eligible voters." He promotes a tautology of youth disengagement for why old people still run things. He lacks curiosity or intellectual capacity to explore why youths disengaged in the first place. Here's why. Most older people still feel gratitude to be Americans and are willing to serve their nation and community, whereas, after 60 years of ODIOS, many left-wing youths no longer believe in the goodness of America or accept responsibility to preserve their birthright of liberty, not even the basic civic duty of voting.
Why are the elderly still running things? Now you know.