The Consequences of a Post-Hero America

We no longer have the heroes we need to defend the least of us because we no longer believe in the heroic virtues that make such men

Eighty-one years ago on My 26, 1940, Allied troops were evacuated by sea from Dunkirk, France. It was a pivotal point in the Allied fight, both a Strange Victory, and Strange Defeat, as two historical works would later poignantly label the event. And it was. The heroics of that day would not overshadow the high cost of life – rather the loss and retreat from Dunkirk hardened the resolve, made clear the stakes, and drew sharper the line between the victory of the good and the necessity of defeating evil. But it would take the heroics of more than the fighting man. It would take people spanning both land and sea to raise their righteousness heroes to the call of battle.

That is what it took during the Second Great War. But what about now in the war for the America’s great vision? Who do we champion as our heroes to carry the burden of a legacy built on the ideals of men uninterested in personal glory, wanting only to bequest a nation to a free and liberty-minded people? What becomes of a nation that cannot distinguish between the Hero and Villain?

Winston Churchill, the newly commissioned Prime Minister, understood the stakes and gave the British people a preview of the hardships to come. From his May 13th speech:

I would say to the House as I said to those who have joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat". We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

The distinction between hero and villain is an important one, one which would seem to be an easy contrast. The symbolism of the White Hat versus the Black Hat in the Westerns started with the 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery. But later, as the (often overly simplistic) retrospectives represented life in the 1940s and 1950s gave way to the more morally ambiguous and disenchanted 1960s, so too did the ideals of a straightforward and simplistic hero. A transformation from the heroes depicted in the Westerns of John Ford – the eventual commitment to honor despite personal doubt and risk, to the vague and unsettled morality of anti-heroes who were disinterested in virtuousness and more focused on an unheroic world disenchanted with the former institutions in which people put their faith. These sentiments were reflected in the American psyche through novels such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the works of William Burroughs and William Gaddis’ J R. it was an inversion of the American dream and a turn to nihilism and radical isolationism. It ushered in a post-hero world.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, some have interpreted the relatability of the sinful nature and fallibility of the Devil as the story’s protagonist. The Devil is a reflection of our own fallen nature and propensity to acquiesce to temptation, but it is the defiance of indulging that part of our humanity that elevates us to the virtuous and aspire to be the heroes modeled in the great canons of classical Western literature – Homer’s Odyssey, Achilles of the Iliad, and Dante’s Inferno. A flawed hero makes him relatable and understandable, but his virtues are revealed with the knowledge of the dishonest and the sinful. The (sometimes reluctant) hero is aware of the significance in deciding which divergent path to choose and takes the righteous path.

It was a resurrected belief in the 1980s of a new renewed American nationalism. In the Cold-War era, America cast aside the idea of an inevitable détente with the Evil Empire of Communist Russia. Americans accepted the fate that lay before a nation reawakened to its destiny of being the beacon of freedom and a ‘city upon a hill’ as preached by John Winthrop in 1630, and romantically echoed by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. But what happens when we no longer believe we uphold those ideals as proclaimed by our Founders? What if Americans instead believe there is no moral foundation upon which America stands that can give rise to heroes – or even scoffs at the notion that there can be a contrast between the hero and the villain?

Today we are seeing the fruits of a corrupt honor that demands the destruction of the monuments to our heroes and idolizes the morally ambiguous.

Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death. It was a tragedy and an unfortunate loss of human life. In a society that insists on making political power the apex of existence, this was an opportunity to subvert law and order by a growing crisis of conscience. The radical left has long sought the destruction of traditional social norms and an ordered civil society. It harnesses an emotive elitist guilt that is paid for by the people who suffer under their imposed rules. George Floyd was a flawed man in need of grace. But he was no symbolic hero. Derek Chauvin was one man found guilty of murder. He is not proof of a racist society – or even of a racist police department. To elevate George Floyd to the symbolic savior of a rotten culture and to use Derek Chauvin as an excuse to condemn all police severs the properly understood meaning of heroism and villainy from the society from which they are created. It is how statues of President Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are defaced and people like Al Sharpton are put on pedestals while he evangelizes his sermons of race-baiting and bigotry. He is an ordained Leftist idol, leeching the spotlight and making fame and fortune from the pain of other people. He is shameless in extorting racial guilt while the mostly black and underserved communities he claims to represent suffer unspeakable violence and hopelessness.

When America retreats to the shadows of fear and sacrifices the most vulnerable in society for selfish acts of self-preservation, there can be no room for heroics. The coward despises the hero because it exposes him for the recreant conformist he is: a person lacking the mortal fortitude to stand on principles he only feigns to possess until his comfort is threatened. Then he cowers behind the security of the baseless crowd, hoping to disappear to wallow in his contrived victimhood. We saw it in the teachers who refused to go back to work. We saw it in the public health ‘experts’ who demand children wear masks for no reason. We see it now in the ‘activists’ who claim the mantle of anti-hate yet condone anti-Semitic violence and ignore the alarming increase open and unapologetic anti-Jewish discourse. We see it in the entertainers and sports ‘heroes’ who are quick to their kneeling stand for social justice but are quicker at hiding behind insincere claims of ignorance as China commits genocide and keeps a stranglehold on its own people. We even see it on their own side: they idolize a woman like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, until they see her decision to not retire as an unforgivable sin for dying during a Republican administration.

For the retreat at Dunkirk, the Allies could have made the decision to take the path of self-preservation at the cost of freedom and moral obligation. But a call to arms and duty rang out from Churchill’s second Battle of France speech, one which would give rise to an era of unprecedented heroics

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Churchill’s words didn’t cause heroes to form from the masses, he met them with an emotional appeal, stoking the embers of virtue, courage, and moral excellence already burning in their hearts. We needed heroes, we believed in the cause of heroes, we celebrated and championed their noble cause. But now, if we have no reason to have faith in a righteous America, or that there is such a thing as an inherent good and evil, why should we believe that men exist to defend the ideals of a virtuous, good nation?