Newt Gingrich - American Despotism: The Destruction of the Family Was Not Inevitable

by Newt Gingrich

As I wrote in my previous essay, one of the most profound and deeply damaging impacts of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the destruction of the family for the poor and especially for poor African Americans.

This defines the crisis we are living through today. In many cities, crime is out-of-control crime. There is a massive underground drug economy which kills more than 100,000 Americans a year with overdoses (more annually than were killed in the eight years of the Vietnam War). Schools are overwhelmed by the collapse of parenting and teaching. In some places, entire school systems have just quit trying to educate and simply serve as temporary holding places while children grow older. These children gain no knowledge or skills, so they can’t get good jobs. They then return to neighborhoods with few legal opportunities to make a living, drive by shootings, gang domination, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness and passivity.

These are all the legacy of the profoundly wrong values and principles imposed on the poor by the Great Society.

President Ronald Reagan once said the best social program is a job. It could also be said that the key to a healthy society – rich and poor alike – is based on productive and secure family structure. All the efforts at fixing education, crime, homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty focus on narrowly trying to solve each component. Yet the root of all these issues is the lack of family support systems.

Read more at The American Spectator.

Author’s Note: The complex patterns that have led to the greatest crisis of constitutional government and rule of law since the Civil War are far bigger, involve far more people, and are ultimately more dangerous to American freedom than the personal dishonesty and criminality of the Biden family. This “American Despotism” series in The American Spectator will provide a clear history of the weaponization of government, which has violated the Constitution and corrupted the rule of law. While each article will be complete and stand-alone, together they will combine to fully describe the patterns that now threaten to destroy the foundation of individual freedom — the hallmark of the American system.

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