Authored by William Brooks via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

“The enemies from within are more dangerous to me than the enemies from the outside,” said Republican Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump, at a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on May 11, 2024.

The United States flag at the dome of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on May 12, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

At a Springfield, Illinois, event, some 20 years before the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln delivered a prophetic message to his fellow citizens: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

The speech is said to be the origin of the popular quote wrongly attributed to Lincoln: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

While these were not Lincoln’s exact words, most Americans understand that the 16th and 45th presidents of the United States were troubled by the same thing—the potential self-destruction of their nation.

History has demonstrated that internal discord can be as dangerous to a sovereign country as a foreign aggressor.

A History of Betrayal

In 2013, American author Diana West published “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” Her book initiated an important debate about the modern history of the American Republic.

Ms. West contended that Nov. 16, 1933, was the beginning of a long assault on the security of U.S. democracy. This was the date when Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to normalize relations with the murderous communist regime known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. FDR’s fateful decision opened America’s doors to an unprecedented invasion of Marxist militants, communist spies, and domestic fellow-travelers.

In the decades that followed, progressive academics, journalists, novelists, artists, and entertainers all celebrated the socialist ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to Ms. West, even American businessmen were “eager to buy their rope from Lenin.”

Ms. West’s views about the influence of communist ideologues in American politics were ridiculed by some of the most notable literary figures in the United States and Canada.

Other courageous scholars came to her defense.

One was the late Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian-born writer and human rights activist who spent 12 years in Soviet psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and labor camps during the Brezhnev era. Another was Pavel Stroilov, a Russian Christian exile who fled to the UK after his academic research put his life and liberty in jeopardy.

Writing for Breitbart News in November 2013, Mr. Bukovsky and Mr. Stroilov insisted that Diana West’s book would make history. Both agreed that, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, the United States never really won the Cold War.

Like Ms. West, they asserted that the conflict between the United States and the USSR was more than a military stand-off.

“It was an ideological war waged by the totalitarian utopia of Socialism against our civilization; and on that level, the most optimistic view of it is that it still goes on. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia is still governed by a junta of Gestapo officers; China is still governed by the Communist Party; and the Western world is governed by closet Marxists and Mensheviks, imposing on us yet another version of the same socialist utopia,” they wrote.

Drawing on copious research and experience, Ms. West, Mr. Bukovsky, and Mr. Stroilov demonstrated that it was an elite American intelligentsia who surrendered the United States to the adversarial socialist culture. The U.S. establishment’s capitulation to the global left led to a complete occupation of U.S. institutions and the ultimate corruption of the free world.

Few scholars have produced better explanations for the precipitous decline of Western democracy in the 21st century.

Treason of the Intellectuals

For more than 150 years after the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Americans regarded their nation as a beacon of liberty and a model for representative democracy.

In the early decades of the 19th century, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville expressed high praise for the United States, its citizens, and their civic institutions.

After abolishing slavery, Abraham Lincoln identified the U.S. Republic as “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Americans developed civil institutions that were second to none. In 1964, the American Civil Rights Act extended the foundational promises of the United States to all of its citizens.

Today’s woke left is destroying America’s legacy. While they claim to worry about “democracy,” they are really worried about losing their own power. They saw how actual democracy worked in 2016 and they don’t want any more of it.

Ordinary American citizens are victims of what French philosopher Julien Benda once called “La Trahison des Clercs” (The Treason of the Intellectuals).

Benda condemned early 20th-century European elites who were apologists for aggressive imperialism, military power, and racial discrimination. The elites who are betraying America today are proponents of aggressive globalism, technocratic power, and reverse racial discrimination.

Both Benda and Ms. West asserted that free societies can be ruined by a leadership class that rejects objective reasoning and ignores the difference between truth and lies.

From the New Deal to Bidenomics, Soviet show trials to corrupt courts, national sovereignty to open borders, education to indoctrination, free speech to censorship, honest elections to ballot harvesting, and freedom of religion to the suppression of faith, the survival of American democracy is more tenuous than ever.

These are the “dangers from within” that Presidents Lincoln and Trump were speaking about.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.