by Edward Ring
It’s easy enough to blame Democrats for everything, but as a rapidly increasing percentage of American voters have realized, Republicans share the blame. These politicians are controlled by their donors, and in America today, the big donors are in agreement regardless of which party or which candidate gets their money.
This, then, is what has become dubbed America’s uniparty. And while wealthy elites have always exercised disproportionate influence in American politics, and, for that matter, the politics of virtually every nation that has ever existed, what is happening in 21st century America is unique.
To begin with, for most of American history, elites have competed for political power and influence, with the differing agenda and interests preventing one faction from acquiring absolute power. But today, on the issues that will have the most profound impact on our future, America’s elites are perfectly aligned. Also today and without precedent in American history, the goals of America’s elites are in conflict with the interests of the American people.
There are two broad, interrelated areas where the uniparty consensus currently aims to break the American people, destroying our coherence as a nation along with our prosperity and individual freedom. They both relate to how we are handling immigration. America’s de facto immigration policy is to invite millions of people per year to enter the United States. Because this policy also effectively excludes immigrants who have the means and the integrity to attempt legal entry, the millions who cross our borders each year are the most desperate people from the most failed nations.
America’s immigration policy, in practice, admits people whose life experience is to barely survive in nations ruled by thugs and fanatics. They are accustomed to endemic corruption and extreme poverty. As for the small fraction of immigrants who enter the United States legally, the criteria for their admission is more of a lottery than a merit-based criteria that might arguably be in the national interest.
But immigration—even the uncontrolled, meritless, flagrantly illegal, massive wave that Americans are now experiencing—would probably not be enough to break our unity and our freedom. It would be a challenge, but absent two other nihilistic factors, both driven by America’s elites, we might eventually assimilate the new arrivals and continue to thrive as a nation.
The first of these factors is the obsessive promotion of the climate “crisis.” Anyone even slightly skeptical of the alleged urgency of this crisis can immediately see what’s really happening: blatant propaganda being sold to the American people in a coordinated fear campaign. In every classroom, every newscast, every political speech, and every corporate marketing blitz, the message is the same: adapt or die. And adaptation, expressed in countless laws and regulations from the local city council to the U.S. Congress, the federal alphabet agencies, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, is almost invariably the same: stop developing land, depopulate rural areas, densify the cities, and engineer scarcity of every essential resource—land, water, energy, and food.
If America’s population were stable, this cramdown would be tough. But when we push our existing population out of rural areas and into cities at the same time as we’re also directing millions of immigrants every year into our cities, at the same time as we’re preventing our cities from expanding outwards and preventing construction of new, cost-effective sources of fresh water and cheap energy, what might have been merely tough is instead a recipe for disaster.
This engineered scarcity makes the second nihilistic factor all the more destructive because it puts the entire population under financial stress, which is a precondition for civil unrest. The second factor pushed by America’s elites is an obsession with race, and the incessant message on that theme—white Americans are oppressors, colonizers, purveyors of systemic racism, perpetrators of unconscious racism, beneficiaries of unwarranted privilege. Insofar as an estimated 85 percent of first generation immigrants living in the U.S. are nonwhite—it’s probably much higher in the last few years—training them all to view white people as the enemy is, again, a recipe for disaster.
These two factors, representing the consensus policy of America’s elites, are both inherently destructive. You can’t fill a nation with new arrivals at the same time as you make it nearly impossible to build any new housing or enabling infrastructure. You can’t fill a nation with nonwhite immigrants at the same time as you teach them to view all white people as their enemy. You can’t do this unless you are consciously trying to destroy a country. And that is exactly what America’s elites are doing.
For America to remain a successful nation, to the extent that immigrants are expanding the population, we must expand our cities, expand our production of energy, and expand our industry and infrastructure to guarantee abundant, affordable essentials. And to the extent that immigrants to America are nonwhite, we must invite them to adopt our culture and encourage them to assimilate, instead of feeding them a pernicious lie by telling them they are living in a hostile, racist society.
Why have America’s elites, for the first time in American history, decided it is in their interests to destroy the nation that gave them the opportunity to rise to positions of power and wealth? Some of the reasons are understandable, even if they’re fatally flawed. Some of them truly believe there are Malthusian and ecological limits that prevent global prosperity. Lacking faith in the power of innovation and free enterprise, they make the decision that managed decline is the only equitable path for America.
Others among America’s elites have concluded that the detriments of European colonization have outweighed the benefits and therefore feel ethically and morally bound to deconstruct European civilization and culture. These people are perhaps projecting personal guilt at having unearned or fortuitously earned personal wealth and privilege. Or perhaps they hold a suppressed personal vendetta against the culture that gave them everything. And some of them, perhaps, are simply overwhelmed by misplaced, hyper-emotional compassion for the less fortunate and lack the clarity necessary to realize that the only path to an equitable society is via the implacable gauntlet of immutable, colorblind standards, and the only culture that has ever come close to achieving that optimum ideal is European.
But there’s another reason for America’s elites to agree on policies designed to destroy America. Pure, naked, unmitigated greed. Masquerading as concern for the planet and compassion for people of color, America is being broken as part of what leftists—before they were blinded by green and woke corporate marketing campaigns—used to deride as “trickle up” economics. It’s fairly obvious once you take off the green blinders.
When resources are unaffordable, thanks to a punitive regulatory environment, only the wealthiest, most powerful corporations can still compete. Drive small farmers out of business, cut production, consolidate ownership, and make more profit. This is happening in every industry, and its justification is purportedly to save the planet. As for the woke element, the synergy is absolute. Fill the nation with people for whom the impoverishment they experience in America is undreamed of bounty compared to where they came from. If they nonetheless struggle to afford the essentials offer them government benefits, and encourage them to vote for those politicians who not only demonize the privileged whites but also promise to keep the government benefits coming.
That’s what America’s uniparty stands for. Political fights over other issues, while of genuine urgency, must be recognized in many respects as distractions peripheral to fighting the overall plan. The contradictions inherent in green and woke policies, institutionalized today in America, cannot stand. They will be discredited and broken, or they will break us.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
