America Has No Political Problems
I. The Great Disguise
What we call political crisis is cultural collapse wearing a mask.
Every news cycle offers a new crisis. Another scandal, another protest, another bitter exchange in the halls of power. The headlines tell me that America is on the brink, that politics has reached some final boiling point. But I do not believe it. Not because the signs of collapse are false, but because the collapse they describe is not political. It is cultural. What we call dysfunction in Washington is a symptom. The disease lives deeper—in the way Americans live, what they believe, what they tolerate, and what they celebrate.
Politics has become the theater of denial. A place where we pretend the machinery still works, if only the right gear were turned, the right lever pulled. But no machinery can function when the foundation beneath it has crumbled. We speak of institutional failure as though it comes from corruption at the top. In truth, it mirrors a society that has forgotten what it means to live well. A society without discipline, without direction, without anything higher than the self.
The arguments we repeat are distractions. Left versus right, red versus blue, conservative versus progressive—all rehearsed scripts. Beneath them is the same emptiness. The same refusal to admit what has truly been lost. We do not suffer from poor governance. We suffer from cultural decay so profound that governance itself has become meaningless. And we know it.
We dress our spiritual poverty in political language because it hurts less than telling the truth. But the truth waits beneath the surface, unchanging, undeniable. And soon, inescapable.
II. The Myth of the System
Good systems cannot save bad people.
We were raised on a simple faith: that systems shape outcomes, and good systems ensure good results. We were told that democracy safeguards freedom, that checks and balances contain ambition, that rights once written down will endure. So we built our hopes on paper and process, forgetting what the founders knew: that no system survives a people who no longer deserve it.
They understood that virtue is the precondition of liberty. That laws are powerless when the citizen has no internal law. That the Constitution cannot restrain a man who has already cast off restraint. This truth was once obvious. Now it is offensive. We speak of policy when we should speak of character. We demand reform when we need repentance.
It is easier to believe in the myth. Easier to blame Congress, or the courts, or the deep state. Easier to imagine that a different president could fix what we ourselves have broken. But the system reflects us. It is not an alien force—it is a mirror. And what it reveals is ugly.
The system falters because the people falter. And the people falter because the culture has eroded every form of discipline, humility, and reverence. We are ruled by appetite and distraction. And so we elect leaders who flatter our illusions and multiply our dysfunction.
Good systems cannot save bad men. But good men, even with flawed systems, build something worthy. We have reversed the equation. And now we reap the result.
III. When the Soul Goes Silent
He votes for change but refuses to change himself.
The sickness is not abstract. I see it in the eyes of strangers, in the slouch of their shoulders, in the way they stare into screens as if hoping something sacred might emerge. They are not enraged so much as disoriented. They drift. They grasp at headlines, slogans, hashtags—anything to anchor them to meaning. But meaning does not come through noise. It comes through silence, ritual, and sacrifice. And those are the things we have forgotten how to seek.
The modern American is not entirely blind to what’s missing. He feels it. In the hollow rituals of consumerism. In the emptiness of casual relationships. In the loneliness that festers even in crowds. He senses that something vital has been stripped from life. But he cannot name it, and so he misplaces the blame. He rages at institutions, rails against systems, accuses politicians. As if they, too, are not lost men clinging to hollow forms.
Politics becomes the chosen battlefield because it allows for distance. One can fight a senator without confronting one’s father. One can blame the Supreme Court without looking at the crumbling church down the street. One can scream about rights without asking what those rights were meant to protect. It is safer to play at politics than to admit that the family is broken, that the soul is silent, that the community has become a memory.
And so he votes harder, posts louder, screams longer. Anything but sit still and ask: what have I become?
IV. A Culture Against Itself
Liberty has been twisted into a weapon against order.
Once, we built customs to restrain the worst in us and elevate the best. Now, we do the opposite. Our culture rewards transgression and punishes virtue. We exalt the vulgar and mock the noble. We grant influence to the shameless and silence those who speak with reverence. There is no neutrality here—only inversion.
Liberty was never meant to be license. Freedom was not freedom from all constraint, but the freedom to pursue the good. But we have turned from that standard. We no longer ask what is good. We ask only what is permissible. And if it is permissible, we celebrate it. We celebrate abortion as empowerment, divorce as liberation, porn as harmless. We praise the strong who abandon their duty, the weak who deny their responsibilities, the idle who demand reward. We do not stumble toward this—our culture insists on it.
This is not the product of a few radicals or a captured media. It is the result of countless small choices, reinforced every day by entertainment, advertising, education, and habit. It is the air we breathe. Even the opposition absorbs its categories and vocabulary. The conservatives conserve nothing because they too seek relevance within a framework that despises reverence.
So the culture rots, and the people rot with it. And then we ask: why are our schools failing? Why are our cities dangerous? Why is the state growing tyrannical? As though these were causes, not consequences.
A people cannot fight for life when it worships death.
V. The Death of Civil Society
The algorithm replaced the father.
A culture does not live in theory. It lives in the things that form a man before the state ever touches him. The local church, the family table, the neighborhood watch, the trade guild, the fraternal lodge. These were the institutions that trained ordinary people in the habits of order, duty, and reverence. They taught the young to honor the old. They taught men to sacrifice for their households. They taught women to pass down wisdom. They built trust—not through laws, but through love.
All of it is gone.
Not all at once, but gradually, and then completely. Replaced by screens, bureaucracies, chains, and brands. A man no longer knows his neighbor. He knows the pundit, the celebrity, the influencer. He has no local allegiance, only national outrage. He does not gather with others to build something lasting. He consumes alone and votes for someone to fix it.
Civil society was the immune system of the nation. It fought off cultural infection before it reached the bloodstream. But it has been dismantled in the name of efficiency, progress, and personal freedom. And so we are defenseless. Against decadence. Against division. Against despair.
The state now tries to do what these little platoons once did. It cannot. It was never designed for it. The state cannot teach virtue. It cannot teach love. And yet we demand it act as father, priest, and friend. We ask it to do everything—except remind us of what we lost.
VI. The Fantasy of Reform
Reform has become theater for a people too fractured to repent.
Every election comes with the promise of restoration. Each candidate claims to be the one who will set things right. Voters speak of returning to sanity, restoring norms, fixing what’s broken. But they cannot agree on what was good, or what has been lost. They cannot even agree on what a man or a woman is. And still, they speak of unity.
There is no reform without repentance. But repentance would require an admission of guilt. It would require humility, a confession that we have wandered from the truth. Reform without this becomes delusion. It becomes a fantasy in which different laws or leaders will solve the crisis of the soul. But laws cannot build what culture has razed. Politics cannot restore what habit has destroyed.
Reform once meant returning to a standard. Today, it means inventing new language to conceal failure. It means reshaping every institution to accommodate dysfunction. It means turning away from what worked in order to chase what flatters.
The parties do not truly oppose each other. They perform opposition while both serve the same decay. One sells indulgence, the other sells nostalgia. One feeds the appetite, the other feeds resentment. Neither speaks to the soul. Neither restores the moral center.
There is no political answer because there is no political question. The crisis is not of governance—it is of meaning. And until we are ready to ask what life is for, every solution will serve the very forces that hollowed us out.
VII. Complicity and Cowardice
We are not oppressed; we are addicted to our own decay.
It would be easier if the average American were innocent. If he had been led astray by forces beyond his control, seduced by elites, deceived by media. But this is not the truth. The truth is so ugly it could only be American. The truth is that he prefers the comfort of decay to the burden of discipline. He senses the rot and partakes in it. He complains of the consequences while clinging to the causes.
He wants change that does not cost him anything. He wants revival that does not touch his vices. He wants order but not sacrifice, community but not obligation, virtue but not repentance. So he votes for men who flatter his illusions. He blames enemies, foreign and domestic, but never looks inward.
He knows that something is wrong. And he knows, if he is honest, that he is part of what is wrong. He knows that he raises children with no authority, that he spends his evenings in digital stupor, that he worships money and attention while pretending to long for meaning. His life is a protest against everything he claims to want.
So he chooses politics not to fix what is broken, but to excuse it. He seeks a cause to shout about, a scapegoat to punish, a policy to signal that someone else is to blame. But beneath the noise is cowardice. A refusal to change. A refusal to live well.
Until that is confronted, all action becomes performance. And all reform becomes fraud.
VIII. The Theater of Outrage
We perform resistance while consuming the very thing we curse.
Politics has become our great national drama. We do not attend church, but we watch the hearings. We do not sing hymns, but we chant slogans. We do not fast, but we boycott. Every man becomes a prophet, every woman a revolutionary. And yet none of it leads anywhere. The outrage rises, and the emptiness deepens.
We have replaced repentance with performance. The performance of caring. The performance of justice. The performance of urgency. But performance is not transformation. It is spectacle. It feeds the ego while starving the soul. We scream into voids, retweet curses, share videos of chaos—and we call this engagement. But it builds nothing.
We protest what we have already accepted. We rage against the machine while living comfortably within it. The corporations we denounce are the same ones we depend on. The platforms we blame are the ones we cannot abandon. Our fury is commodified, our rebellion is monetized, our discontent is sold back to us in branded packaging.
No society can sustain that contradiction. A people cannot pretend to care about justice while rejecting virtue. They cannot demand peace while applauding division. They cannot pursue truth while worshipping the self.
The theater of outrage serves one purpose: distraction. It shields us from the stillness that would force us to examine ourselves. Because if we did—if we stood in silence and asked what we have become—we might realize that no enemy has done this to us.
We did it to ourselves.
IX. Where the Blame Belongs
I hate them because I know them.
It is easy to point upward. To say the rot begins in Washington, or Wall Street, or Silicon Valley. To believe that somewhere above us, puppeteers pull the strings. But the truth is more intimate. The blame does not float above—it grows beneath our feet. It is not concentrated in a ruling class. It is diffused in the habits, appetites, and silences of ordinary people.
Elites do not create culture. They harvest it. They profit from the decay that already exists. They amplify what we already tolerate. They sell what we already crave. The vulgarity of Hollywood reflects the vulgarity of its audience. The cowardice of politicians mirrors the cowardice of voters. The cynicism of media is not imposed from on high—it is fed by our demand for distraction.
A society does not fall from the top. It falls when the base erodes. When fathers abandon their duty. When mothers scorn their role. When teachers stop teaching and pastors stop preaching. When neighbors stop knowing one another. When worship ends and consumption begins.
This is not a new tyranny. It is the slow suicide of a people who no longer want to be a people. And so we fracture into tribes, brands, and identities. We seek meaning in ideology because we lost it in our homes.
The mirror is a harsh judge. But it tells the truth. We cannot outsource responsibility any longer. We are ruled by what we tolerate, and what we tolerate is killing us.
X. What Still Can Be Rebuilt
The world revolves on an invisible axis.
The disease is cultural, not political. So the cure must be cultural. No president can redeem a people who do not wish to be redeemed. No law can restore what the family has abandoned, or what the church has forsaken. But that does not mean the end is inevitable. It means the path forward is smaller, quieter, slower—and more real.
I no longer believe in national solutions. But I believe in neighborhoods. I believe in the sacred work of rebuilding what politics cannot touch: reverence, duty, family, ritual, place. These are not slogans. They are disciplines. They require patience. They begin with silence. With meals shared. With vows kept. With children taught to kneel before what is holy. With men who choose work over distraction, and women who build homes that nourish the soul.
There is no glory in this. It is invisible work. It will not trend. It will not win elections. But it can heal.
Because culture is not made by politicians. It is made by parents, pastors, neighbors, craftsmen. By men and women who live what they believe, even when no one watches. Especially then.
The political frenzy will continue. The empire will keep churning. But at the margins, something else can grow. A people not defined by slogans, but by shared sacrifices. A nation not reborn through revolution, but through repentance. Not all is lost. But everything must be rebuilt.
And the work begins in the soul.