Decline is a choice.

President Trump could not have said it better.

Two years ago, everyone was talking about the Roman Empire, musing over its tragic decline.

Would the United States fade the same way, with relentless clashes among different demographics fighting for a diminishing share of the government pie? Was Pat Buchanan right? The Republic is over, and the days of Empire have hastened the end of this once glorious experiment, he claimed.

Historians note that democratic systems don’t last longer than 250 years.

Yet the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial.

President Trump will be in office until 2029.

Even if a Democrat follows him, the United States will have endured past the expected expiration date.

The United States has lasted.

We don’t have an empire.

We have a culture, a legacy worth defending.

I once embraced the notion that countries rise and fall in the grand scheme of things.

That’s a new concept for me: that the country can still survive and thrive after 250 years.

Decline is a belief, a mindset more than anything else.

The notion of rise and fall has changed over the last thirty years, too.

The Soviet Union collapsed.

New nations emerged.

Russia is still Russia, but it’s never been a democracy.

HA! Countries with large empires saw their colonial holdings released into independence, or they fought for it just as the United States had done in 1776.

The United Kingdom has been overrun with migrants, legal and illegal.

The citizens of that country, with heritage and heart, have raised their voices demanding change.

Political parties are reshaping themselves drastically.

Populist right political parties are pushing out the globalist left- and right-uniparty phalanxes across the continent.

Will Europe survive, though? Will these countries enjoy a legacy after having adopted democratic systems long after the United States was born? They aren’t doing so well.

The Republics of Spain, Italy, Greece, etc., are hemorrhaging population, have massive debt, and are overrun by third-world migrants.

Democracy has not equated to liberty, but rather dysfunction and tyranny.

And let’s face something more damning: America was facing a long, yet slow and steady, decline.

The Cold War ended, and the civilizational rivalries of Islam arose.

Even during Reagan’s presidency, Islamic terror was piercing through the relative wind-down across the globe.

The bombing of a Berlin nightclub, the bombing of Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland – peace would not reign across a world benighted with consumer goods, capital harmony, and democratic ease.

The United States suffered 9/11.

One day, we were untouchable.

The next day, we were terrorized.

Twenty-five years later, our collective pain has worsened with conspiracies about who plotted the destruction, why certain buildings collapsed, and how much our government knew.

And why didn’t they protect us? Twenty-five years later, Islam has forced its way into American streets and our national politics.

October 7th, Gaza, Palestinian self-determination has become a political focal point in the last two election cycles.

Why are foreign wars being fought out in our elections? We cared about Israel because the Jewish state shared our Western heritage.

In fact, that little country in the Middle East has shone out as a standard for why the West is the Best, even though situated in the East.

In the United States, colleges have told the younger generations to hate their country.

Critical theory, working in Communism....