One can sit and imagine one of the later, incompetent Roman emperors telling his subjects to lower their expectations much as Jen Psaki recently did.
“Lower your expectations,” Elagabulus might have said. “I have more important things to focus on than grain shipments from Sicily meant for you mere peasants.” Such things did not concern the emperors.
Ensconced in power by the Praetorians, defended by the (paid-off) legions, tyrants like Elagabulus didn’t concern themselves with such petty matters, matters that better men like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius had focused upon.
Slow Joe, ensconced in power by his FBI and MSM Praetorians, his seat of power protected by that “blue line” conservatives are so quick to defend, also couldn’t care less. Don’t ya know that the ice cream supply hasn’t been delayed, Jack?
Trump, however, the Augustus to Joe’s Elagabulus, did focus on those petty matters. His trade war was for the benefit of the provincial peasants Joe couldn’t care less about, his economic and monetary policies meant to help them out. He cared, as did his advisors, and his care secured our supply chains and prosperity. Buttigieg, Biden’s man with a plan, is busy playing mom. Big Late Empire Vibes, as one of my friends says about leftist insanity and degeneracy.
Jen, for the record, expressed scorn at the idea anyone might want the treadmill they ordered. It might have been a fair enough point had she been attacking the idea of ordering consumer products from the Red Chinese, as ordering goods from a nation that we might end up in a nuclear war with seems dumb, but no; she was just scornful of the peasants and their high expectations.
And therein lies the difference in mindset, which is the real problem.
Under Trump, greatness was the goal. He might have not had enough time to leave America clothed in marble as Augustus famously did for Rome, but he sure as hell tried. He tried bringing the factories back, the jobs back, the military’s winning attitude back, and the nation’s vision of glory back. The vision was there, if not the time to affect it.
No such vision is discernable when one looks at the Biden regime. It’s after power and means to attain it, but that power isn’t meant to help the common man. It’s meant to enrich the elites (just look at what Hunter has “earned” off his father’s fame) and to be the soothing aloe for egos irritated by Trump’s victory over Killary.
In fact, their idea that we shouldn’t care about such things as treadmills is reminiscent both of the worst of the late emperors and the nihilistic vision of the looters in Atlas Shrugged. What do the tyrants in power care about the wants and needs of the peasants? Their goal is power for power’s sake, not to build anything great. Does this passage remind you of anyone, Joe’s team, perhaps?:
Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems…
She saw what they wanted and to what goal their “instincts,” which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation—and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow.
America’s decline is not just an economic problem. Factories can be rebuilt, as can the military and supply chain. Those crises are solvable when great men like Trump and Augustus are in charge.
But the spiritual rot is much harder to fix.
Would the great men of the past have sat idly by as a communist enemy gobbled up their nation? Would Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller have shipped their operations to the enemies of the day? No. Whatever their flaws, they were proud Americans.
Would Augustus or Charlemagne, William the Conqueror or Robert Guiscard sat by as feminized metrosexuals pushed their realms ever farther down the path of degeneracy Epstein and Hunter Biden represent? Would they have built ugly buildings, laughed at the idea that the common man might be upset that he couldn’t buy bread, and dismissed with a contemptuous snicker the thought that their job was to be great and make their realms great?
No! They were titans. Their glory, the glory of their empires can be seen in the pro-family policies of Augustus, the massive monuments to all-time found in the Eternal City, and the campaigns of William, Charlemagne, and Guiscard that we still study. Their spirits propelled them to greatness.
And as such spirits have disappeared in American life, so has the prosperity that was built on a shared vision of glory. Now, rather than have spiritual titans like Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and even Donald Trump, we’re stuck with petty bureaucrats and eunuch-like schemers that lust after the grey, depressing, total power of the Soviet premiers. Greatness has been replaced with “lower your expectations,” a phrase that wouldn’t seem out of place on the lips of Elegabulus or the flabby face of the rajah of India described by Ayn Rand.
So, want to make America great again again? Well, the spirit of greatness is required. So build it in your soul!
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
