Anyone observing American culture has to be mystified by the steady declines in one sector after another. Schools, inflation, the border, national debt, social harmony, all are worse. The media is more corrupt and unreliable; the public never learns what the real problems are.

So who is causing this continual, across-the-board failure? That's the pivotal question every American should try to answer.

Here's my short answer: a vast army of saboteurs has been working in the shadows for more than a century.

Here is the chronology:

1883. Karl Marx died. A major historical event as he was the mind and spirit of revolutionary Communism. Lots of people were fanatically committed to fulfilling Marx’s dreams.

1884: a wealthy Socialist couple in London founded the Fabian Society. They proposed a blueprint for conquering the world without gunfire. Their best young people would find jobs in major organizations (media, educational, cultural, and foundations). They start at the bottom; 10 years later they're middle management; 10 years further they’re upper management.

1890: many of the smartest young Americans went to Europe to get a PhD in the new fields of Sociology, Psychology, and Education. (See background in a wonderful short book The Leipzig Connection.)

1897: John Dewey published My Pedagogic Creed. Already a famous Socialist, he called himself a Progressive. This book reads like religious testimony. Many paragraphs start with the words "I believe…”

“I believe that this educational process has two sides—one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following.” No mention of knowledge, so already his vision for education was half-blind.

Dewey’s books were how-to guides for creating socialist societies. How convenient that universities were generating thousands of “apparatchiks” in the critical subjects of Psychology, Sociology, and Education. These people swarmed through the universities, the ed schools, and the K-12 educational bureaucracy.

1917: Vladimir Lenin’s Red Army conquered the Tsar’s White Army and took control of Russia. In 1920 Lenin announced the formation of the Communist International, forces sent to the US and around the world to destroy Capitalism, Western Values, Private Property, the Family, and Christianity. Goal was always power by any means. Absolute power, of course, corrupts absolutely.

1931: Education Establishment aims big, announces the replacement of phonics by sight-words (a bogus method that has created 50 million functional illiterates). The war to dominate American education was now in high gear. So the schools at all levels were in a weird position, pretending to care about education, but in fact sabotaging it.

1962: Professors of education, eager to do to math what their colleagues had already done to reading, concocted New Math. A huge, silly failure but the professors would keep trying with variations in the decades ahead.

1991: Communist Russia, aka the USSR, collapsed due to bankruptcy. By that time, Communist governments killed more than 100,000,000 people. Communism explicitly demands the centralization of power, which creates a magnet for the most ambitious and sociopathic.

Present: consider the weird evolution of three Communist dictatorships. Xi is presiding over the almost total collapse of China's economy. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cost Russia more than 330,000 casualties. These societies are riddled with corruption and incompetence. The leaders are arrogant and reckless. Biden is himself a Communist-style dictator. Arbitrary, remorseless. Open the border, cancel the pipeline, stifle the middle class, which is one of the great achievements of the United States.

The whole thrust of socialist indoctrination is to weaken resistance to Socialism and Communism. These people tend to be ruthless and opportunistic. Look at the mess they’re in right now, because they don't focus on what's best for the country. They ran an unfit president and an unpopular vice president. Even the smartest pundits can’t predict how they’ll get out of it.

The Democrats have themselves been infiltrated by Marx’s thinking. No moral compass remains. “Commies” are guided by a power compass.

The Socialist-Communist aggression was so widespread and so subtle, most people never noticed that it existed. But their machinations went on 24 hours a day and the goal was always the same: sabotage anything constructive and if the society adopted destructive ideas, promote them aggressively.

(My book Saving K-12 remains a good guide to what went wrong in the public schools and how to fix them. In fact, it's my research on education that opened my eyes to all the other aspects of our malaise.)