There is a profound symbolism here. Our energy crunch is the direct result of Biden’s reversals of established policy. Without having any viable alternatives in place, he chose to discourage domestic oil production while simultaneously alienating our chief foreign suppliers. Having thus created a crisis by rejecting the policies of his predecessors, he then seeks to solve the crisis by spending down the petroleum reserves accumulated by those predecessors.
The English language provides an adjective to describe such behavior: childish. Children lack the wisdom to follow the advice of elders who have learned from life experience. But when their folly leads them to troubles, children are quick to exploit the resources—from basements to bank accounts—these elders have acquired.
It may seem strange to call our oldest president “childish.” But like so many frightened university presidents and newspaper editors before him, Biden long ago abandoned his actual beliefs. He’s now in full-speed pursuit of his woke political base. And this base comprises students, activists, and others who share one outstanding characteristic: their disdain for our civilization’s accumulated wisdom. They excel at pulling down statues and eroding foundations. But they have not yet been tempered by the humbling work of building something new.
Usually, children can do limited harm because they’re not entrusted with family budgets or traditions. But now, this reckless class wields unprecedented control over our federal government and much of the broader culture. And they are quickly spending down the capital—economic, strategic, and cultural—that prior generations stored away, thanks to their accumulated wisdom and extraordinary effort. These children may well keep going until they run out of savings to bail them out.
But why stop there? The national debt now stands at an unfathomable $31 trillion. Both Republicans and Democrats have contributed to this massive sum. But prior administrations were at least responding to real crises when they proposed trillion-dollar spending packages—namely, the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID crash of 2020.
Biden’s tragic error is that he continued to promote unprecedented spending packages well after the economy bounced back from COVID. Biden has added trillions to our debt at a time when our main economic challenge is spiraling inflation. Silly spin to the contrary, more spending cannot ease inflation—it can only exacerbate it. We are now burning through the capital of future generations to make our present problems worse.
The most troubling example of capital being squandered, however, is the least concrete. Our reckless youth are rapidly spending down our accumulated stores of cultural capital. Actually, they have set the stores on fire.
One need not idealize the past to note that America was once a society that widely embraced certain fundamental Judeo-Christian values. A large majority of children were born in homes with two married parents. Christian leaders from Lincoln to MLK helped us overcome the sin of racism and live up to the biblical insight enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. Crime and violence against innocents were recognized as evil no matter the identity of the perpetrator or the target.
But the children’s crusade has little regard for the Founders, the Bible, or the arc of Western civilization. They no longer believe in original sin or its Jewish cousin, the evil inclination. They no longer recognize that we live in a fallen word and thus revere our ancestors for the progress they made. They instead imagine a utopia and blame those who came before us for the flaws that inevitably remain.
As we spend down our cultural capital, we find ourselves returning to our lowest common denominator: tribalism. What was most disturbing about the summer of 2020 and subsequent events is that powerful people began ignoring and even excusing theft and violence so long as a perpetrator belonged to the “right” tribe. But when tribes have differences, they typically don’t debate or vote—they fight. It is a most dangerous disintegration.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve doesn’t hold enough oil to solve our energy problems. American giants from Lincoln to MLK cannot teach a generation that has turned its back on them. Once you start drawing down reserves rather than building them up, you quickly deplete your supply. Entropy plays the long game. Things can, and will, fall apart. We must pray that the velocity of the fall has the power to awaken.
David Brog is the president of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the annual National Conservatism Conference. He can be followed on Twitter: @DavidKBrog.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
