It Was FDR, Not the 60's

 

Just today, on a Tucker Carlson interview, the nice lady again voiced the warning from John Adams that, “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, it is unsuited for any other,” and then, when the question of when the morality of the American people started to decline was asked, the answer was, “In the 1960's”.

This is wrong, because the real moral decline was initiated in the 1930's, under the rule of FDR.  The way we can see this is to realize that the corollary of that Adams quote, about how our system of free self government will work only if the people are moral is also true; that only a people who are truly free and self governing will tend to be moral.  So when FDR suspended the Constitution in 1933, and by doing so then usurped from the states and communities almost all the powers and responsibilities of self government, he started the process of decay.

It is not so much that the changes in government forced the people to become immoral.  Rather, the case is that by taking all those powers and responsibilities away from the people in their communities, the change allowed immorality to grow.  Since the people no longer felt that they had to assert their moral values in local meetings, to ensure that their community was safe, cared for and healthy, they no longer bothered to do so.  In very short order the reasons for maintaining personal morality also became lost to our minds, with religion being shifted from being a vital aspect of community health to becoming just another personal hobby.

This cancer of immoral thinking was not pushed from the elites, at least at first.  Simply by removing from our communities that vital link between government and morality, they didn't have to.  All that had to happen was the passage of time and natural human nature, with its selfishness and laziness, did most of the rest.

That natural tendency to moral decline was abetted in 1947 when the Supreme Court ruled that a separation of church and state had to suddenly and magically be applied to the states.  Even then, that ruling and its implications was allowed to sit dormant for more than a decade before being hauled out to be the basis for throwing prayer, and other moral education, out of public schools in the early 1960's.

So it is transcendentally important for us to see that our moral decline, while it does appear to have begun in the 1960's, actually started decades earlier.  It is like a cancer was planted in the early 1930's, and then metastasized in the 1960's.  It didn't seem like a problem until the late 60's, but it was one.  The reason this is such an important point at this time is that if we are to revive our nation, and that will necessarily entail reviving ourselves morally, it is not going to happen if we think we need to simply reverse the indoctrination of the 60's and beyond.  The even worse course we might take, which some are flirting with, is if we think we should simply replace the totally illegitimate Secular federal establishment the Court mandated in 1947 with some kind of Christian federal establishment.

No, the important truth is that the only way to revive our morals as a nation is to return the powers of self government, including the powers of moral self government, to the people in their communities.  It might be a messy and long term process, but that is the only, THE ONLY, way to revive our national morality and our experiment in popular self government.