Hardly any present-day political analyst dares say that the decadence of the current presidential debates in America is a reflection of Democracy, a form of government that was scorned by all political philosophers until Machiavelli.

Does democracy foster decadence?

Democracy is the religion of the modern world, and though it has liberated the masses from slavery and tyranny, it has not fostered virtue and loftiness of mind. Indeed, the highest end of democratic politics today is comfortable self-preservation.

Obama addresses a joint session of Congress about health care reform, 9 September 2009. Photo: Lawrence Jackson/E.O.P

How ironic! While the college-educated leaders of American democracy are preoccupied with nothing higher than comfortable self-preservation, America’s deadly enemy, Islam, exalts death! Indeed, the mantra of Islam is encapsulated in Sura 9:111 of the Qur’an, which exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain for Allah.” And lo and behold, some Americans, bored with the hedonism conspicuous in American democracy, have joined ISIS! I wonder whether any of them have gone to college where they imbibed the charming campus adage “I’m okay, you’re okay,” which in principle makes ISIS okay!

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Let’s face it: America is steeped in moral anarchy or nihilism, but you would never know of this from the presidential debates. These so-called debates are not only intellectually dismal, they display a shameless egoism. They constitute a commentary on the dismal level of higher education in America. This education has stultified the minds of one generation of college students after another.

We are witnessing this degradation in the current presidential debates. It would be a grave error, however, merely to single out a particular culprit, since none of the participants exhibits either the intellectual capacity or the moral courage to expose the pernicious pedagogical doctrines that have been corrupting the minds of college students for at least two generations, as I have documented in a 1968 article published in the Congressional Record, an article emphatically relevant to decrepit foreign policy of the Obama Administration.◙

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