As usual, historian Victor Davis Hanson conveys the big picture:

Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.

Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.

The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.

There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come. The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance.

In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

It’s a bleak picture, and an ironic one given that, as Hanson notes, progressivism is meant “to improve the human condition.” It never does that, of course. As he puts it:

As a general rule, anytime anyone anywhere announces that he has a master plan to reorder society and “fundamentally transform” or “reset” it by creating larger government, more rules, and an elite hierarchy to oversee compliance for the recalcitrant, then run. You can rest assured ultimately the architect will change the language, demonize and marginalize new opponents, given the omelette always needs more eggs. They will subvert institutions, and, if need be, resort to violence to ensure change.

After recounting at length “The Progressive Scorecard” on immigration, crime and police, the “transgendered” sports debate, race, and vaccines, Hanson moves on to evaluate that big picture once again:

Progressivism is also at its basic level elitist. Sweeping reengineering of society, micromanagement of millions of lives, and elimination of individual pathologies require exemptions. …

As Platonic Guardians, progressives must have the time, the resources, and the multifarious exemptions to plan and care for the rest of us.

Think for a minute. … If illegal aliens now crossing the Rio Grande proved to be more right-wing than Cubans, the border would be closed tomorrow. If criminals focused their efforts on Presidio Heights, Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, or Newport, Rhode Island, there would be progressive outcries to fund more police. If transgendering muscular “female” teenage athletes demanded the use of women’s gym showers and restrooms in the nation’s top prep schools, progressives would likely recalibrate their new theories of trisexuality.

The new progressivism is not the old Democratic Party, or even 1960s’ liberalism. It is a cruel creed, a faith-based ideology that allows no apostasies. Progressivism envisions humanity as a marbleized abstraction, not incarnate humans. If need be, it will alter language, change names, cancel people, erase events, and destroy elements of existing civilization. It stereotypes both adherents and opponents as either useful or disposable. And the carnage it wreaks on the masses is always acceptable damage for these terrifying visions of the anointed.

Read the whole thing here.