Bryan Fischer: Detroit, California show: U.S. headed for dictatorship

By Bryan Fischer

People naively think it can't happen here. But it can. Just as surely as Germany went from the Weimar Republic to the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany in one generation, so can we.

The path starts in California, passes through Detroit, and winds up in the Third Reich.

The whole thing begins, of course, as all societal descent does, with moral deterioration. A people become morally and spiritually hollow, faith in government replaces faith in God, and welfare replaces self-reliance and charity.

Soon, as Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote, the number of takers exceeds the number of makers, more and more citizens squabble over a shrinking pie, and the whole thing collapses in on itself.

Conn Carroll has written that California, once an almost mythical land of opportunity, is turning into a virtually feudal society, with elites along the coast and peasant serfs toiling in the hot sun in the interior:

"California is rapidly becoming a near-feudal society. On one side is an older, educated, landed, wealthy elite that lives on California's beautiful coasts. Then there is a much larger, younger, less-educated, indebted mass living inland, many of them working farm jobs at subsistence wages."

People who can are fleeing California in droves, leaving an aging population and a low-skilled, under-educated workforce to support them. This state is destined for collapse. It is only a matter of time.

To see where California will end up, take a gander at Detroit, which is in such horrible financial shape that the state is going to take over the city and send in an "emergency manager," who will have virtually dictatorial powers for a minimum of 18 months.

Here's the kicker: the Detroit News thinks this is a great idea. This move represents the utter abandonment of any notion of representative government, but the editors think this is just peachy:

"Nobody likes the idea of lost democracy, but an emergency manager is a necessary step to rescue Detroit."

In other words, we're not particularly excited about the process of living under a tyrant and a dictator, but what's the alternative?

This is a truly astonishing admission for the press to make in one of America's largest cities. The editors are perfectly willing to suffer the loss of democracy – their own words, not mine – in order to concentrate power in the hands of one man whom they are perfectly willing to trust to fix things.

This is just how Adolf Hitler rose to power, on the ruins of a failed republic and in a time of financial desperation. Inflation was so rampant that when people got paid in the morning, they rushed to the store on their lunch hour because things would be more expensive by the time they got off work.

Hitler was voted into power by a fiscally desperate people blindly willing to give almost total power to a savior who would deliver them from the mess that politicians had created, the politicians they themselves had elected to office.

Most of these politicians were likely corrupt, buying votes by promising to deliver more goodies than their opponents. Some politicians likely had standards, but were too spineless to stand up for them at crunch time.

And so a noble people were reduced to abject servitude, despotism and eventual self-immolation.

Don't say it can't happen here, because it is happening, right in front of our eyes, in California and Detroit.

Now people can leave Detroit, and they have. People can leave California, and they have. But where do we go when the U.S. falls? As AFA's president Tim Wildmon says, there's no place left to sail to.

© Bryan Fischer