Gloom-and-Doomers Wrong on U.S.

The United States has displayed a remarkable and long-standing tendency not only to tolerate, but to honor and reward, those who decry the nation’s morality and predict its imminent and inevitable doom.

Consider Pat Buchanan’s new bestseller, “Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed are Tearing America Apart.” This magnum opus follows his similarly cheerful (and successful) releases, “State of Emergency” and “The Death of the West.” In the opening pages of the most recent book, “Pitchfork Pat” dramatically declaims:

“Truly, America faces an existential crisis… It is the belief of the author and the premise of this book that America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and that the likelihood of her survival as one nation through mid-century is improbable- and impossible if America continues on her current course. For we are on a path to national suicide.”

Buchanan hardly stands alone in announcing the upcoming destruction or dissolution of the republic. John F. MacArthur, the influential California pastor, President of The Master’s College, and author of some fifty books on the Bible and contemporary life, recently declared: “There comes a point in God’s dealing with men and nations, groups of people, when He abandons them….Sin is so rampant in our country, it is so widespread, it is so tolerated by people in leadership and even people in the church, it is so widely tolerated it is pandemic: it is endemic; that is, it is in the very fabric of our life that I believe God has just taken away the restraining grace that might preserve our nation, and has let our nation run to its own doom.”