The Retaining Wall

I’m looking out the window as I write at the total shambles of our once beautiful and rather elegant back courtyard. Impeccably tiled, graced by a raised garden bed, shadowed by an impressive stand of maples and oaks, and fitted out with the finest of outdoor wicker furniture and glass-topped tables, it is no more. The devastation is complete.

We discovered that the lengthy back wall buttressing the neighbor’s elevated property was looking rather worse for wear and weather. On closer inspection, we noticed that the railway-sourced ties or “sleepers,” both the horizontal whalers and vertical strongbacks, were starting to bulge and beetle and that the wood was beginning to rot and flake in various places. Accordingly, we hired an engineer to survey the topography, examine the wall, and offer a professional recommendation. We had hoped for time, but the verdict was that it would be better to correct the problem now rather than deal with an eventual landslide, which would be far more costly and less amenable to repair.

We had to engage a major company to dig out the tiles, lug the toothing stones, remove the extended fence that rose above the retaining wall, replace the rotting T-style deadman anchors with new tieback timbers inserted horizontally into the earthwork, bring in gigantic cranes to lift equipment, rake in a ton of gravel, pour cement from big-rig mixers into a deep lower trench to reinforce the foundations, making sure the proper rebars were inserted to strengthen the concrete — in order, as the foreman said, to ensure the wall did not collapse as buildings do in China — and perform carpentry to scale and stain the panels to complete the façade of the wall itself. The work will go on for several more weeks at prohibitive expense, but the finished product, we are assured, will be state of the art and guaranteed to last.

The metaphor strikes me as apt. It is common knowledge that the edifice of democracy is now under sustained attack by the Gramscian Left and its long march through the institutions, which, as Mark Levin scrupulously documents in "American Marxism," “threatens to destroy the greatest nation ever established… and impose autocratic rule.” 

Indeed, the threat of powerful invasive forces pushing against the social and cultural retaining wall has never been greater in whatever direction we might choose to look. The physical wall at the southern border, such as it is, with its enormous gaps and substitute materials, is clearly inadequate to resist the avalanche of illegal migrants swarming unchecked into the country as if we were observing a mordant reprise of Jean Raspail’s "The Camp of the Saints." It is also a symbol of every wall intended to hold chaos at bay. 

What we might call the “wall of merit” that has enabled our schools and universities in the past to provide something resembling an education to their students has been catastrophically breached by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion pathology that has allowed a veritable mob of incompetent, untrained and unfit personnel to destroy a reasonably solid structure of scholarship and intellectual achievement. The transformation of our schools and universities into re-education camps and indoctrination centers has led to the imminent eclipse of the political and cultural project of the democratic West.

Following hard on the education travesty, the Sovietization of the press and the internet is now a feature of American and Western life struggling under the weight of censorship, demonetization, shadow-banning, and outright “canceling.” The vacuum so created is then filled with factoids, agitprop, and all sorts of spurious matter perpetrated by an army of canting and duplicitous “fact-checkers.” The lizard brains are busy at their disruptive trades. The frontier between the truth and the lie has become alarmingly permeable as the deceit and disinformation of the Left pour across into the shrinking domain of authenticity and rectitude.

The lack of fiscal restraint — the insensate printing of fiat money, the annual raising of the debt ceiling, and out-of-control inflation — are undermining the economic foundations of viable democracies. Investopedia points out that the U.S. national debt passed $33.99 trillion in January 2024. “This also puts the country at higher risk of default, which is concerning to investors as it could cause financial panic in domestic and international markets.” The debt ceiling is a kind of wall that is constantly raised, or “patched,” to avoid default; once it can no longer be suspended or raised — i.e., temporarily mended — national bankruptcy results. Reducing spending and borrowing and getting the debt under control, no matter how painful, is equivalent to building a new, stronger wall.   

When it comes to the judiciary, the perfidy, self-importance, disingenuousness, and hireling mentality of the justice industry has turned it into a caricature of disinterested “honor” and a handmaiden of tyranny. A justice system consisting of beholden appointees, party hacks, and black robes on the take is a surefire recipe for social and national ruination.

The rules that governed the appropriate treatment of emerging epidemics (or pandemics), intended to protect a vulnerable population, have yielded to the pressure of corrupt and muddy-minded elites intent on career, profit, or control. The Hippocratic Oath no longer functions as a barrier between professional integrity and base criminality.

The stoking of racial distrust and hatred via Critical Race Theory, the specious disciplines of gender ideology and radical feminism, and the phony theory of manmade global warming all have the goal of dismantling the Anglosphere as an alliance of free societies. The barricade between decency and depravity has disintegrated almost completely.

Such is the rot generated by our elites — hard-core leftists and champagne socialists — in media, academia, high tech, medicine, the courts, the nonprofits, and the administrative state — that is eating away at the bulwark of civilized life meant to impede the marl and muck of autocratic barbarism.

The question is: what can we do about it? Is there some way, at great cost and much turmoil, to set about shoring up the retaining wall between prosperity and destitution, between freedom and servitude, between democratic governance and centralized authority, between free markets and command economies, between the good of equality and the evil of equity, between sanity and madness? Clearly, surrender is not an option. 

Every attempt to address the issue honestly and lucidly, to engage in the effort to inform oneself, to elect populist leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Donald Trump in the U.S., to oust the fascists and communists and cretinous apparatchiks who dominate the school boards and universities, to resist corruptocrats like Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau by the power of the pen even if, like Ezra Levant of Rebel News, one is persecuted by government for expressing one’s political views, to be unafraid to protest and demonstrate in the name of constitutional rule, to exercise the power of the purse against ideological companies and Woke organizations even at great inconvenience, and other tactics of resistance — every such attempt is another sturdy and durable portion of the wall. There is no excuse to stand back and wait for the situation to magically right itself. 

So I stare out my window and muse. Havoc precedes restitution. My backyard resembles a war zone and my bank account looks even worse, but ultimately, I had no choice if I wanted to maintain my property. The social, political, and economic retaining wall that presses back against the forces of dissolution and that is presently on the verge of collapse obviously represents an issue that is orders of magnitude greater than the restoration work involving a single household. Yet if the principles that sustain a genuine liberal culture decay and molder, losing their tensile strength, the individual household will also crumble. 

In effect, it is the same retaining wall we rebuild.