Concerning Empire – A Memo to Myself
These are confusing times. Every day brings news that overturns habits and thoughts of a lifetime. I hope my friends in Europe are able to do what is best and right. Now is a time for energy, decision, and unity in the face of American decline.
Yes, American decline and the vacuum that implies.
So: now what?
It isn’t very helpful to search for words at the moment. Our vocabulary is insufficient. Our metaphor supply seems inadequate. We are suddenly adrift. Unmoored, we are flailing. For how long depends upon our ability to clear the air and shed enough of the past to understand what happened. And what we must do in response.
Yet we must try.
Is it amusing or is it frightening to see just how shaken our leadership seems to be? Our commentariat is in high dudgeon. Its core beliefs have been shattered in the course of a month. Eight decades of comfort have been overturned in a few days. Entire careers-worth of steady and well rehearsed ideas have been turned to compost as a consequence of just one or two recent speeches. Think tanks full of well paid and highly regarded “thought leaders” have been shown to be shallow pools of ignorance.
How did all these so-called clever people not see this coming?
Complacency.
Did they not read “Project 2025”?
Complacency.
Have they not traveled through America as it exists, rather than as it persists in their starry-eyed memories? Bubbles are bursting. Fear and uncertainty are afoot. These are dangerous times. Why was the glass so easily shattered?
Complacency.
That America, the one that stood for western values, the one that held a comforting umbrella of safety above its friends, the one that wrote the rules of the game, that one, the one of now misty memory, that one — is gone. It left the stage quietly ages ago. But the lingering shadow so beguiled the clever people that they refused to see the void taking shape. They fooled themselves into believing any lapse was temporary. They pretended that America was a beacon of something even long after the fire was extinguished.
Reagan’s deficit wasn’t enough. Clinton’s neoliberalism wasn’t enough. Bush’s Iraq war wasn’t enough. Obama’s timidity in the face of the Great Recession wasn’t enough. And even Trump 1 wasn’t enough. The piling up of policy error after policy error was never enough. Stagnating wages were never enough. Health care system failure and falling life expectancy weren’t enough. Rotting infrastructure wasn’t enough. A lack of housing wasn’t enough. And, worst of all, egregious inequality of wealth, incomes, and standards of living were absolutely never enough.
Nothing. None of this total and abysmal failure was enough. Nothing could shake the clever people out of their enervation. They were complacent beyond complacency. They lived increasingly in a parallel world. Inhabited by clever conferences, meetings, shared commentaries, shared values, and what is now obviously a much tolerated mediocrity, their world lived on memories and shadows of reality rather than in the world that was taking shape.
Two groups in particular deserve our most derisive criticism: our American so-called educated left of center elite, and its European equivalent. Fat. Happy. Self regarding and self-applauding. And self deluding. Brilliantly educated and yet equally emphatically ignorant. Willfully bereft of contact with their fellow citizens, and steadily losing empathic understanding of what their policy choices were doing to the fabric of the society they claimed to share in, they tolerated the corrosion that has suddenly collapsed both the ceiling and the floor above and below them.
Complacency.
All empires end this way.
The torrent of social criticism pouring from our universities flooded society with radical and other worldly interpretations of daily life. Lived experience was set aside in favor of the latest cleverness and insight into various forms of identity. Those who were unsure of these interpretations were deemed fools, or even more callously, as toxic. Division became unity. Unity became division. Solidarity was re-cast as an existence within only narrow channels. Exclusion became inclusion. And identity was limited to a few. Everything outside was viewed with increasing intolerance and a haughty dismissal. Only the clever people understood life. Those living it were the least heard in any conversation.
No wonder a reaction was inevitable.
Complacency.
The same sort of story extends into any sphere of activity populated by our legions of clever people. The media failed us. Our diplomats lived in the past. Our politicians bickered and failed to provide the leadership needed. Worse: our politicians aged and were so steeped in myth that they became sclerotic and unable to respond to even the most violent of signals that all they knew was wrong.
How come our legal system was unable to deal with an attempted coup? Rot. Rust. Frozen and hidebound it lived in fear of action. It had a false belief in long ago methods. False belief upon false belief. And trust in a system that had become incapable of moral assertion.
Complacency.
And decadence.
All these clever people benefitted from the steady corruption of the very mythology that they preferred to believe still existed as reality. When norms were shattered they pretended it was only temporary. When violence erupted they saw it as contained. When the extremism manifested itself in Congress they told us it was not the norm. In other words they hid. They ducked. They weaved. And they refused to act. When the checks and balances of yore disappeared like so much dust in a tyrant’s backdraft they wailed that the rules were being broken. Yet it was their complacency and inaction that robbed those checks and balances of strength. Inaction is not a defense. It is surrender.
Action requires commitment. It entails risk. Above all it needs actors capable of translating the complexities of reality into the simplicities of plans that will inevitably need constant revision. And revision implies a humility and admission of failure.
No one is ever correct. The best they can be is not disproved. Yet. Skepticism is the basis of any movement forward. And the enemy of skepticism is …
Complacency.
All systems decay. It is the way of the world. Any belief in perpetual endurance is either vanity or laziness in the face of reality. All empires end this way. History does not lie.
History also teaches us that the end is dramatic even if the decay set in long before. The erosion is steady but not sufficient to cause alarm. So the requirement for reform can be postponed in favor of temporary patching up of whatever is most easy to continue. The steady withdrawal from the outer limits of the original system is a step by step abandonment of what appear to be easily foregone or unnecessary elements. The retreat gathers steam. Each step backwards is justified by the exigency of the moment. Limited budgets justify threadbare responses rather than creative expansion. Innovation becomes additive rather than transformative. Cost-cutting replaces investment as a source of profit. Toughness is expressed as cruelty rather than empathy. Loss of service is disregarded in order to avoid revision of intent. Bold intent is surrendered in favor passive necessity.
And in the face of decline, leadership justifies its failures as being forced upon it rather than self-inflicted by timid incapacity to imagine something else. Cowardice replaces courage in thinking.
All empires end this way.
As the shrinkage reduces the room for maneuver, politics sours. The retreat gathers momentum. Those who are able lead the way. They build bulwarks to prevent themselves and divert the meagerness elsewhere. They withdraw. They maintain their habits, but behind walls of privilege they protect assiduously. They write laws to benefit themselves and increase their rents. They consume conspicuously whilst others reduce. They accumulate assets whilst others are left with less.
All empires end this way.
The desperation to protect asset values is one of the most prominent markers of decay. The vigor of growth destroys while it constructs. Decay impels the preservation of the past rather then at the creation of the future. So policy is dominated by asset protection. The trade of existing assets rather than investment and the creation of new assets is a defining marker of the end of empire. With the old energy gone, and with elite withdrawal into its self protective redoubt, the empire focuses on its past glory. It repeats its mythologies to itself as if they were current realities. And as the gap between the myth and the real grows the decline accelerates. Until …
Implosion.
Empires rot from within.
Setting the original date of decline is impossible. Rot begins in unlikely places before it engulfs everything else. It often begins as an unintended consequence of an action or policy that, itself, was supposed to cure a past ill.
America is rotten. When that rot began history will judge better than we can. Sometime in the 1970/80s is the best guess. The subsequent stagnation gathered momentum until its starkness was too sharp to ignore.
In modern post-industrial societies with a pretense to democratic governance we do not have the revolutions of the 1800s. They exist only as fantasy in the minds of a certain sort of utopian thinker. We have a different method of overthrow. And we have a different source of energy for that overthrow. What the working class once did, now the middle class does. The deprivation of that vast group is the root cause of our current distress. The steady erosion of their opportunity and the foreclosure on their aspiration is the driving force of the collapse underway.
Trust has been shattered.
Trust in leadership. Trust in the future. Trust in cleverness. Trust in science. Trust in the very institutions of governance. Trust in the elite’s capacity to deliver security, prosperity, and growth.
Suddenly the American middle class has risen against its overseers. The self-serving attitude and delusion of the elite has been seen through. The rot has become too obvious to too many.
The gap between myth and reality has become so wide that history cannot be connected with the future. One of them has to be changed radically. The reality lived in by the few is a lie to the majority. So the pitchforks are out. And little will be left standing.
All empires end this way.
America is showing the world that its vaunted exceptionalism was always a myth. It is showing the world that it, too, is subject to the normal process of imperial decline. It needs thorough re-invention and reform. It needs to renovate itself. It will never be what it was. So the world must move on without nostalgia. It will. A new hegemonic power will emerge. A new imperium awaits. That is the way of history.
And history punishes the complacent. Always.
The entropy of empire is a persistent and recurring feature of our world. They all fail. They all delude themselves. They are all exceptional. Until they aren’t.
Now what?
