What Makes America Great, and Is it Lost Forever or Is There Still a Flicker of Hope?

At the very end of his talk to Hillsdale College that I link in the previous post, Ian Rowe quotes DeToqueville, in Chapter 13 of America:

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

Yes. Those who object to the MAGA slogan for instance, who grumble that America hasn't been great for everybody, totally miss the point of what makes America great. Everybody has a story of struggle and unhappiness even in America. It's not about human fallenness that will always tend to some form of injustice and sinfulness, it's about the ideal that's always there if we remember to come back to it. Somehow those fallen men who put it all together back there in 1776 got it right enough to produce the greatest prosperity for the most people AND produce the most morally effective nation on the planet that has extended its influence around the world. Yes MORALLY, despite bad stuff we've exported too and despite the the misguided ignorant moral indignation of the Marxist Wrecking Crew. The current Marxist effort to destroy it all because humanity isn't perfect is only going to worsen that imperfection bring on the tyranny that the American founding aimed to prevent. That's what utopian dreams always end up doing in a fallen world. Self-righteous blind perfectionism only destroys, ends up in the mass murder of hundreds of millions by tyrants, but they never learn.

A great failure to educate us all in the principles that have sustained us for so long, a great failure to recognize the destructive trends and unravel them in their early stages, a great failure of vigilance and a great failure of the Protestant perspective that was the core of the system that made it all possible.

Benjamin Franklin wondered if we could keep the Republic they had just created. It looks like we couldn't. It looks like it's lost. UNLESS the means of repair still flickers and could still be kindled into flame even now. I don't know and I don't hear much hope from most watchers of the scene out there. I vacillate horrifically these days between total despair and surges of hope. I see the country being destroyed without any apparent checks on it, destroyed in the streets, destroyed in the highest offices of the land, and it's made me more aware than ever of what we are losing. There's still a flicker of hope but it's just a flicker.

The Lord could come for us at any moment and the global tyranny could just take over everything. But that would be the Great Tribulation and the return of Jesus would be just seven years away. I'd be happily freed from it all but for the unbelievers it would be all over. The end of the world, the beginning of the reign of Christ. Greatly to be desired. But as long as we're here we have two jobs: spread the gospel and try to preserve the best that's possible in a fallen world? That's what it means to be salt and light isn't it?