Letter to the Editor: A Much-Needed Reality Check

In his January 12th Merion West essay “What Ails Us?,” Thomas Koenig warns Americans that their republic is not only in decline but on the verge of collapse. In trying to diagnose what ails the United States, Koenig uses Joseph F. Johnston, Jr.’s recently published book The Decline of Nations as a vessel and seeks to identify the root causes of the anomie and alienation that are so prevalent in the United States. Johnston and Koenig both invoke Rome and Great Britain, two once-great societies gone down. In doing so, they discuss the decline of each state’s aristocracy as an integral part of the overall social collapse. They, then, extrapolate this to suggest that something similar is happening in the United States.

Appearing to borrow an idea from a 2018 New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat, Koenig displays a nostalgia for the rule of the WASPs, the elite group that dominated American culture and politics for most of its history. However, in seeming to suggest a return to this sort of elite rule as a remedy to our current problems, Koenig appears ignorant to the actual realities on the ground. What we are seeing right now in the United States is a rebellion against everything that the WASPs stood for. Perhaps Koenig and Douthat should attend the next Black Lives Matter protest and pitch the idea of noblesse oblige, the return to Camelot, and the restoration of the WASPs to their former glory to the protestors who prefer to suggest that white people should “give up” their homes. Perhaps only then will they realize the naiveté of this preposterous idea.

Next, Koenig resorts to the predictable and unimaginative view that all roads to the United States’ demise lead to former President Donald Trump, conspiracy theorizing on the Right, and populist nationalism. Nowhere to be found in Koenig’s diagnosis is the Left’s complicity in our arrival at the current state of affairs. There is no mention of left-leaning news organizations that seek to create news rather than report it or the increasing (and downright eliminationist) calls to ostracize those who have supported President Trump.