Perhaps the most obvious driver of American decline—which has accelerated markedly during the stupefyingly incompetent presidency of Joe Biden—is the degree to which irresponsibility is now rewarded and responsibility is punished.

This destructive experiment in undermining the fundamentals of a healthy and productive society is rooted in social justice theories that claim almost all personal achievement is actually an artifact of entrenched discrimination that unfairly benefits some at the expense of others. Therefore, we are compelled by Leftists to live in a bizarro opposite world, one where those who succeed are penalized and those who break the rules benefit.

Recently, for example, we learned that the Biden administration is planning to charge those with good credit more for their home mortgages in order to subsidize the mortgages of those with bad credit. This move is, of course, being justified as a way to aid those who have been harmed by the discrimination that is claimed to pervade our nation, but this reasoning seems both implausible and insulting. Given that maintaining a good credit rating is based on simply making your required payments on time, it seems we are now content to discriminate against those who work and sacrifice to pay their bills—who will now discover they are being compelled to give their money to our nation’s deadbeats.

Responsibility is for suckers, apparently.

This latest affront to responsible Americans is but another in a long series. The billions upon billions of dollars being handed out every year by the Biden administration to the millions and millions of border jumpers who are encouraged enter our country illegally is another obvious instance of rewarding those who eschew responsibility. The largesse now raining down upon illegal immigrants includes free medical and dental care, free food, free transportation, free clothing, free education, and even free extended stays at luxury hotels with room service. This obviously makes anyone who is eating ramen noodles in order to make the payments on their child’s orthodontia or is trying to eke a few more months out of their rundown car wonder why they should bother to work that extra shift when those who have broken our nation’s immigration laws are given red carpet treatment. 

Who is the loser here? Those who behave responsibly or those who act irresponsibly. The answer is clear.

Education is another fantastically destructive Democratic experiment in privileging the indolent and rewarding the incapable. Because meritocracy itself is now considered a cruel form of discrimination, graduating high achieving students is no longer the primary goal of our schools and colleges. We are instead supposed to embrace a dull mediocrity in the name of equity, and academic achievement has been de-emphasized (if not discarded altogether in many cases) in favor of a focus on identifying one’s degree of victimization in order to better blame others for educational and personal failures that are generally attributable to a deadly combination of lazy and irresponsible teachers and students who are even more lazy and irresponsible than their incompetent instructors. 

Speaking as a retired educator, I am gobsmacked every time I observe just how little actual learning now occurs in the diploma mills that masquerade as our schools and colleges. It is little wonder that many employers are rapidly ditching educational requirements such as four year college degrees in favor of targeted training that demonstrates job skills and job readiness. 

The questionable value of Bachelor’s degrees in our Brave New Academic World of Wokeness is becoming too obvious to ignore. Combine this with the escalating expense of obtaining these empty credentials and we now find that many responsible young adults are seeking their their futures outside of a college campus. This trend will accelerate as long as the Pronoun Wars and the insane denigration of American history and values continues to supplant academic rigor and free speech on many college campuses.

The astounding criminality that now infects our nation’s largest (and typically most Democratic) cities should, in a logical world, be considered another facet of irresponsibility—albeit one here combined cruel and uncaring maliciousness—that must be met with arrests and prosecutions. However, the preferred legal response today is to hold no one responsible and insist on excusing the mugger, looter, or thief. Given that Leftist groupthink holds society wholly accountable for creating criminals and deems policing unnecessary, the irresponsible surrender to the chaos that results from shameless shoplifting, public drug use, and armed robbery will continue unabated and convince more and more responsible and hardworking adults to flee our urban dystopias—as quickly as possible.

After all, so the pretzel logic goes, the thug is today the true victim, so any insistence on accountability and consequences is bigotry incarnate. Our widespread public disorder is a small price to pay for social justice. Got that?

The breathtaking disinterest of Leftist prosecutors and judges in arresting and incarcerating those who prey on the innocent is born of the irresponsible belief that crime is actually a form of acceptable social protest, so we should not be surprised at the exodus of Americans from states such as New York, Illinois, and California. The irresponsibility of those Democrats now running many of our criminal justice systems is leading responsible Americans to make the only responsible choice: migration to Republican-run states.

When it was exactly—and for exactly what reasons—irresponsible people became a protected class in America is open to debate, but the harsh fact of the matter is that stupidity and selfishness is now a life choice that is protected and rewarded by our government, our schools, and our courts. Whether we can long survive as a nation if we continue to pursue this course is also debatable, but the daily consequences of rewarding irresponsibility are beyond any question. We are destroying our great nation by pursuing policies that are, to paraphrase George Orwell, so stupid that only an academic or Democrat could support them.

One cannot, of course, leave this topic without mentioning the irresponsibility (or is it plain stupidity?) of the voters who are apparently content with leaders who are wreaking havoc upon our nation. Although it would be responsible to stop voting for the politics of division, discord, and destruction, it seems—for reasons that surpass all rational understanding—that irresponsibility has a fanatical following in America. This is likely a result of some combination of misguided Marxist beliefs, a peculiar obviousness to cause and effect, and a sick attraction to criminal behavior, but the outcome is disastrous for our nation.

Whether one is fortunate enough to be insulated from the harms caused by irresponsibility or daily suffers from its consequences, there can be no doubt that all our futures will be determined by the extent to which we can elevate personal responsibility—and the individual accountability that naturally follows—back to the pinnacle of American values. 

If we do not, we can expect nothing other than a slow, painful, and inexorable decline.