Buchanan describes the result of Gramsci's successful March Through Institutions
What did Antonio Gramsci Teach Saul Alinsky?


The Collapse of American Competence
By Patrick J. Buchanan • October 24, 2014

When this writer was three years old, the Empire of Japan devastated Battleship Row of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Before I was seven, Gen. MacArthur was in an office in Tokyo overlooking the Imperial Palace, dictating to a shattered Japan.

In 1956, President Eisenhower, impressed by the autobahn he had seen in Hitler’s Reich, ordered a U.S. Interstate Highway System constructed, tying America together, one of the great public works projects in all history. Within a decade, the system was on its way to completion.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy said the United States, beaten into space by Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, would put a man on the moon and return him to earth within the decade. In July 1969, President Nixon, on the deck of the carrier Hornet, welcomed home Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins of Apollo 11.

What ever became of that America? What ever became of that can-do nation? What has happened to us?

This October saw the vaunted Center for Disease Control and Prevention fumbling over basic questions on how to protect Americans from an Ebola epidemic in three small countries of West Africa.

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Since the mid-1970s, the real wages of working Americans have stagnated as we have run uninterrupted trade deficits totaling more than $10 trillion. Under Obama the national debt has surpassed the Gross Domestic Product.

Our manufacturing base has been hollowed out with Detroit as Exhibit A. We outsource our future by borrowing from China to buy from China. We borrow from Japan and Europe to defend Japan and Europe, though World War II has been over for 70 years.

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“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote the poet Yeats.

Clare Luce put is another way. In this world, she said, there are two kinds of people — optimists and pessimists. “The pessimists are better informed.”

More:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/b...can-competence/