President Barack Obama looked straight into the camera and said with a straight face that our Union is strong in his first State of the Union of his second term. However, is our Union really as strong as President Obama claims it is? The real answer to that question is an emphatic no it is not. In fact, there is probably a good argument to be made that our Union is at its weakest in its 236-year history, and President Obama’s executive actions circumventing the Congress and few legislative policies have only made things worse. As I see it, we have four major problems that are making the United States of America weaker, not stronger.

We have a weak culture that is throwing traditionalism and civil society under the bus. We used to be a country that believed in and live by Judeo-Christian traditional values that are the foundations to a flourishing civil society. Instead, we have Secular-Progressives (S-P’s) that are committed to destroying absolute moral truths, and coercing traditional Americans into embracing a morally relativistic utopia where there is no truth; everything is relative. The S-P’s are eroding away traditional Americans’ liberties and individual rights to run their lives and families as they see fit.

We have a weak economy with the same S-P’s that are imposing more controls and more regulations on individual Americans. They say these controls and regulations are necessary to ensure bad behavior doesn’t happen again. If we would promote traditionalism and absolute moral truths that we used to believe in and live by, we wouldn’t need a government controlling us. If traditionalism and absolute moral truths were taught and praised, we the people would take our economic business to companies that espoused and lived by those values. Bad behavior would be virtually non-existent. Don’t get me wrong, we live in a fallen and sinful world so there will always be bad behavior, but with absolute moral truths bad behavior is limited. All an economy is are people making everyday decisions. Therefore, when we have governments impose controls and regulations on the economy, they are really imposing controls on individual people and families. Those very controls and regulations are keeping individuals and families from the opportunity to flourish.

We have weak American leadership abroad. President Obama is committed to shrinking our world leadership and military strength, primarily so that he can expand his S-P ideas through expanded entitlement programs that are bankrupting this nation. When we do go abroad, it’s not really to promote American interests and the principles of liberty. We don’t support liberal democracy activists when it’s in our best interest to do so, we instead support Islamic fascist groups (the Muslim Brotherhood) that turn out to be enemies of us and Israel. If we do go into other countries to “help,” we tend to take a back seat to internationalism and let other countries lead in the efforts. However, none of those countries have a big enough economy and military strength to lead. The principles of liberty will never succeed if the strongest nation isn’t leading the effort to promote the principles liberty.

Big government is probably the biggest of the biggest problems that our Union faces. As I’ve addressed above, we have Secular-Progressives (S-P’s) in this country that are committed to destroying traditionalism, moral truths, liberty, and individual rights in this country because they know individual traditional Americans are a threat to their big government goals. A morally relativistic utopia that doesn’t recognize the liberties and individual rights of traditional Americans breeds dependency on one big, central government. Where there are no absolute morals in a civil society that doesn’t recognize the liberties and individual rights of traditional Americans, civil society decays and eventually collapses on itself (insert the Soviet Union here).

The S-P’s have two primary governmental tools that they love to use to impose their anti-traditionalism and anti-individual rights plans on traditional Americans. The expansion of the judicial oligarchy and the bureaucracy are the sacred cows of the collectivist utopians. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the left’s god in the expansion of government, is the prime example of the expansion of the judicial oligarchy when he pushed to expand the Supreme Court and stack the Court with S-P’s. It was the S-P influence on the Supreme Court in 1973 that allowed the killing of millions of innocent unborn babies when it usurped its Constitutional judicial authority and created law (the same thing happened in the recent ObamaCare case).

President Woodrow Wilson, with his art of public administration, I would argue was the father of a more activist (efficient, to use their word) bureaucracy to make law through regulation. The Secular-Progressives absolutely hate the Federal Constitutional Republican Government that our Founding Fathers set up because when the Constitution is followed, the Founding Fathers made it very difficult for the government to act. An efficient bureaucracy is a code word for a more activist government because what S-P’s mean by efficiency is a way for them to usurp the normal Constitutional systems of government in America. If we keep capitulating to the S-P’s, eventually our Congress won’t have any real authority, and all the power will be in the bureaucracy with one chief executive implementing the bureaucratic fiats. The bureaucracy will become our politburo or central committee that makes all of the decisions.

Can America return to her Founding principles that embraced absolute moral truths, traditionalism, liberty, and individual rights?

Trey Mays is an independent Conservative political commentator. Follow him on Twitter @TreyMays and Like him on Facebook @TreyMaysUSA