A sneak peek at Schlichter’s new book, We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America. All boldface in the excerpts mine, by the way.

Will America Fall With A Bang Or A Whimper?
Radio host and writer Kurt Schlichter’s latest book, ‘We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,’ games out many scenarios that could lead to the country’s collapse with illuminating and even amusing results.

Although entertaining on its own, Schlichter’s crash course in classical history has a deeper point that applies to today. Like Rome, America will fall, but this fall won’t be anything sudden or even perceptible to most people. He explains that America’s fall will probably “be a transformational change. … The old ways can simply stop meeting the needs of the present, and something different replaces them.” For the past three decades, Schlichter charts the mounting corruption of the American government, the departure from constitutional limits, and the growing unrest among Americans, particularly conservatives. Even if these problems are fixed, the system will be different than it was in the early ’90s.

Even though President Trump turned away from this apparent trajectory somewhat, Schlichter acknowledges that Trump’s administration suffered from personnel issues for his first two years, and then was sunk by Covid-19 and trusting the experts. Now, “when Biden was sort-of elected, the Democrats pushed hard as they could to the left even though the voters had seen fit to literally provide them the barest imaginable legislative majority.” Consequently, certain checks on political abuses like the Electoral College, election integrity measures, the filibuster, and the authority of elected officials (vs. unelected technocrats) are being challenged or eliminated.

This brings Schlichter to today’s precious present in which an ascendent leftist elite imposes its will on a resistant population. Indeed, the global response to Covid offered a taste of this, as national governments stripped populations of most of their freedoms in the name of public health. What distinguishes the U.S. from other nations, however, is that Americans have the right to bear arms. For Schlichter, this is the ultimate check on power: “They [Americans] understand that the decision to allow or disallow any act by the government ultimately resides with themselves.”

Americans like to tell themselves that cozy lie, but absent a credible and somber threat to resort to those sharply-curtailed 2A rights if and when they must, all the guns ever made add up to no more than empty bluster, easily laughed off by our tormenters as just more hot air expelled by unserious, contemptible blowhards.

This leads him to think that a time will come soon when violence breaks out. He grants that quite a few things will need to happen before this happens: “What this [a civil war] means is that for America to reach a state of tyranny, there must not only be massive and systemic violations but, simultaneously, the elimination of any meaningful ability to address those wrongs, either under the Constitution or otherwise.”

Um. I really don’t have to point out the gaping hole in the premise here, do I?

It’s at this point that Schlichter’s role as polemicist turns into one of a prophet, forecasting a variety of outcomes in the near future. First, he describes an America captured by the hard left, which brings tensions to a breaking point. Unfettered by the constitutional checks and balances, the Democrats would wreck the economy with uncontrolled deficit spending, permanently restrict individual freedoms, and refuse to enforce laws on protected classes. Any modicum of prosperity, peace, and stability would immediately be lost in an anarchic frenzy.

Huh. Maybe I do at that. Kurt speaks as if those “massive and systemic violations,” the intentionally rubbled economy, uncontrolled deficit spending, &c are mere grim but as yet unrealized future possibilities, instead of having long since come to pass, every last one of them.

Assuming none of these prognostications come to pass and the center holds for a little while longer, Schlichter concludes that Americans will have three choices: restore the constitutional order, elect a right-wing authoritarian leader, or elect a left-wing authoritarian leader. Since he discussed the last option already, he spends some time on the second option, the conservative authoritarian. He likens this to the reign of Augustus Caesar, which, at least in the beginning, had many things going for it. In one fell swoop, an authoritarian leader could fix the problems of crime, immigration, woke indoctrination, energy and water shortages, and people like Ilhan Omar holding office. However, as Schlichter concludes, “Yes, an authoritarian can make the trains run on time for a while, but that kind of regime has to derail eventually.” A few decent emperors may have succeeded Augustus, but none of them were quite as effective.

I’ve been leaning towards Option 2 for a good while now myself, albeit reluctantly. The wise old quip about socialism—you can vote your way into it, but must shoot your way out—holds equally true for all other flavors of authoritarianism. That stipulated, in order to undertake any truly serious effort to restore American Constitutional liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we must first rid ourselves of the insidious threat to freedom and individual self-determination posed by our “Enemies, domestic” on the Left. And there’s only one sure way to achieve that most laudable of goals: by suppressing Leftists and Leftist cant ruthlessly, ferociously, every time and everywhere they dare to rear their ugly heads.

I’ve often stated that I have no good or easy solutions to propose for this crippling conundrum; this is not an admission of intellectual shortcoming or inadequacy on my part, mind. It’s simply because it’s become my firm belief that, at this late stage of the game, there ARE NO good or easy solutions left to us. Henceforth, every choice will be difficult, costly, and damaging in one way or another.

At each and every turn, we readily descry a path fraught with hazard, uncertainty, pain, and wretchedness. Through a perfectly natural human reluctance to confront the ugly reality of our situation, to relax into comforting fantasy about where we now are and what we now must do, we have painted ourselves into a very tight corner indeed.

One thing is certain: carrying on under the delusional fiction that we still live in the America we grew up in—a stumbling but still essentially sound America with a badly warped but still basically functional system—will get us noplace we want to be, and gain us nothing worth having. No matter which way we finally jump or what we finally decide to do, there’s trouble up the road for sure.

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