The Year Ahead: 2009

[S]ince 1913, our federal government has grown like a cancer to a size previously unthinkable. So perhaps it is no surprise that the whole enterprise is now collapsing, with government power increasingly drowning individual freedom in a tidal wave of police-state and coercive-socialist tyranny. The America of Henry David Thoreau, of Mark Twain, of Walt Whitman, of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and the millions more who brought this nation into being and kept it alive in their hearts and, to a large extent, on the ground, for so long – that America, the real America, the "asylum for mankind" that Paine wrote about so eloquently – that America is gone, fading already into myth and legend, gone soon even from living memory as the last citizens who remember America's dying embers wink out from this world, one by one.

Glen Allport presents a dire assessment of the coming year(s).