If the US is to craft a new political culture less obsessed with grandeur and more in touch with reality, it must start with the young.

Great powers, both past and present, are haunted by three interconnected preoccupations: they are tempted by a sense of national superiority and claims to manifest historic destiny. Those pretensions tend to provoke fears of decline, which then give rise to projects of rebirth.

The European empires that once fancied themselves great, most notably the British and French, are extreme examples. As France decolonised after 1945, Charles de Gaulle made “grandeur” a watchword of national policy. For the British elite, despite the increase in standards of living, decline was an obsession throughout the postwar period. Under the sign of “cool Britannia” and Tony Blair’s embrace of Europe in the 1990s, that shadow lifted.

But since the banking crisis of 2008 and the Brexit referendum of 2016, the question has returned with ever-greater force. While the Brexiteers promise a “global Britain””, the average standard of living in Britain is declining for the first time in modern history. Nationalist bluster about “Britannia unchained” obfuscates a cool-eyed and practical appraisal of Britain’s actual position in the world.

After 1945, the United States superseded the European empires as the hegemon of the non-communist world. The question that English literature professor Jed Esty asks in his new book, The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits, is whether the US has now succumbed to the same British malady. Is the US so haunted by preoccupation with relative decline that it can’t adjust to the realities of an increasingly multipolar world?

In making his argument, Esty distinguishes the fact of the America’s diminishing superiority in economic and military terms, which he considers undeniable and inevitable, and the ideological preoccupation of declinism. As Esty puts it, it isn’t just data that matters, but the story you tell with it. It is in deciphering this complex weave of reality and narrative that Esty’s expertise as a literature professor takes effect. Ranging widely across genres, he reads cinema, TV shows and literature, from The West Wing to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy and Marvel’s Black Panther, as examples of a culture of decline.

As far as America’s relative standing is concerned, there are some uncontroversial facts. , but China is catching up. Around these facts, as Esty show us, American analysts weave a variety of diagnoses, ranging from technocratic reformism, to conservative appeals for moral renewal and a reassertion of faith in the US’ mission.

What is characteristic of these modes of thought is that they are remedial. Within the diagnosis of decline there lingers the desire to restore greatness, to Make America Great Again. That was Donald Trump’s slogan. But under the Democrats, the aspiration to restore US to world leadership is, if anything, even more clear cut. Unlike Trump, whose grim warning of “American carnage” suggested real doubts about US pre-eminence, Joe Biden takes a sunnier view. For him, America’s status as the number one power is an article of faith. His instinct has always been to breezily dismiss claims that China might be closing the gap.

Promise of national revival

As Esty points out, the assumption of national pre-eminence is shared by much of the American left. The Green New Deal was motivated by a vision of America’s unique productive power that harked back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and World War II. Talk of turning America’s world-bestriding arsenal of democracy into the motor of a sustainable energy transition is not merely window dressing.

When in August this year Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act – a much diminished nationalist green industrial policy in austerian garb – it was declared to be the bill that would “save the planet”. This despite America’s responsibility for, at most, 13.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions – less than half China’s share. By all accounts, the US delegation to COP27 in Egypt was surprised that they were not greeted with rounds of applause for having delivered what they hail as “the biggest climate package in history”.

For Esty, the swirling dialectic of national exceptionalism, fear of decline and the promise of national revival delivers a cockeyed view of the world. The preoccupation with great power status results in too much military spending and not enough money for education and infrastructure. Global posturing distracts from sensibly scaled civic initiatives to make the US a more liveable place for the vast majority of its population.

Like many American reformers before him, Esty proposes that to break out of this cycle of power-obsessed thinking, US political culture needs a new sense of proportion. And as Esty sees it, that would be best instilled by a suitably redesigned program of humanities education.

A proper appreciation of the West’s entangled and violent history will deflate the exceptionalist balloon and invite more sobriety and realism. Reversing the priorities that once motivated British critics of decline, Esty argues that America’s contemporary focus on tech solutionism and STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is both a symptom and a cause of the malaise.

This is hardly new. Since the early 20th century, US reformers have identified education as a means to instil a more pragmatic and realistic understanding of the world. Esty, however, proposes to break with America’s national traditions. His suggestion is that in crafting a new curriculum for an age beyond great power hubris, US educators and intellectuals should take inspiration, of all places, from Britain.

What he has in mind is not the Kiplingesque punditry of the likes of the historian Niall Ferguson, but its opposite. Esty’s inspiration is the British New Left, which he sees as exemplary in its efforts to come to terms with the end of imperial greatness.

It is a charming, if implausible suggestion. No one could disagree with the need to revisit classics such as Policing the Crisis (1978), a landmark work headed by Stuart Hall that used the moral panic over mugging in 1970s Britain to decipher a power structure under threat. But the suggestion that a curriculum drawn from 1970s cultural studies and back issues of the New Left Review can offer an antidote to MAGA ideology is far-fetched. Apart from anything else, Esty’s basic conceit – that the US’ imperial decline is analogous to that of the UK’s – does not stand up to close scrutiny.

The British Empire never wielded the firepower commanded by Washington today. The UK never confronted a nuclear armed Soviet Union or the rise of modern China. On the other hand, America’s domestic problems are far more severe, violent and entrenched than anything confronting postwar Britain in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, or today.

Though they may share a common history in Atlantic slavery, Britain is a post-colonial, not a post-emancipation, society. There is no British equivalent to mass incarceration, Jim Crow or the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of declinism, the UK was building a welfare state. Half a century later, as the richest and most powerful nation on Earth, the US still lacks a decent public healthcare system. Life expectancy in America lags significantly behind that in Britain.

Even if Esty’s analogy between Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and modern-day America made sense, can one really say that the British New Left offered a coherent reading of the UK’s predicament, or one that helped British society or politics to accept its own decline? Indeed, one might wonder whether the British New Left was ever truly reconciled to its country’s diminished standing.

With the significant exception of Hall, they wrote as the self-conscious heirs of a fallen empire. Still today, Perry Anderson, the power behind the New Left Review and repeatedly invoked by Esty, writes as if from the Olympian heights. Recently, he has concentrated most of his attention on the logics of American power. If the aim is to propose a more democratic and modest approach to history, would it not make more sense to draw inspiration from grassroots efforts such as the History Workshop Journal or Raphael Samuel’s remarkably capacious understanding of popular history?

Less grandeur, more reality

If the US today is to craft a new political culture less obsessed with grandeur and more in touch with 21st-century realities, should our efforts not start with the young Americans who will grow into that world?

Rather than needing a new academic curriculum to immunise them against delusions of national grandeur, the consistent result of opinion polls taken in recent decades suggest that younger Americans have defected of their own accord from US exceptionalism.

Solid majorities of Millennials and Gen Z refuse the idea that their country is the greatest on Earth, which is hardly surprising given their experience of it. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, their interest in military adventures is mainly confined to the computer screen. And more young Americans today evince sympathy for the idea of socialism than for capitalism.

If anyone is failing to grasp modern realities it is not younger Americans, who are presumably the targets of Esty’s program, but their parents and grandparents.

Decline defined in economic terms is relative underperformance. It is not defeat. This is the common sense that Esty wants America to adjust to.

Faced with a rapidly changing world, Americans over 60 – the so-called silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) and the boomers (1945-64) – remain addicted to the claim of American greatness. In the elections of 2016 and 2020, they voted solidly for Trump.

And the Democratic Party’s own gerontocrats – with Biden and Nancy Pelosi in the lead – are unabashed exceptionalists. Their animating idea is to wage a global power struggle with Russia and China in which the ideological stakes resemble those of the Cold War. In so doing, they strike a pose that not only discards the idea of US national decline but puts in question the very terms of declinist discourse.

Declinist discourse is full of anxiety, imagining a world in competitive terms, with countries racing each other to have the largest economy or the best scores in educational rankings. This vision of competition, however, is tempered by reference to third-party standard, which in the modern era has been the primary yardstick of economic performance. This economic logic both defines national decline and relativises it.

It is, after all, not surprising that China should catch up with the US at least to some degree, any more than it was surprising that West Germany caught up with Britain after 1945. Decline defined in economic terms is relative underperformance. It is not defeat. This is the common sense that Esty wants America to adjust to.

But it is precisely that logic that has over the past decade been upended by the US’s policy elite. Starting with the pivot to Asia in 2011 under Barack Obama and moving into a more aggressive gear during Trump’s presidency, the Biden administration is clear that in the critical fields of industrial policy, the US is no longer competing with China as if on a playing field, or as though they were measured against a common yardstick.

Nor is it a matter of protecting property rights or opening markets for American exports. As far as the cutting edge of microelectronics and AI are concerned, the declared aim of US policy is to cap China’s development both in absolute and relative terms and by means of aggressive “sanctions” to sustain America’s military superiority.

To achieve this extraordinarily aggressive techno-military objective the US is not only seeking to deny China access to America’s own technology, it is also endeavouring to block exports to China of key technologies by businesses from Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Japan. This is not competition, nor the rhetoric of declinism. This is the logic of economic war.

In historical terms it is quite hard to think of any analogy to this moment. The Soviet Union was never as entangled with the Western economies as China is today. For all its commitment to the economic weapon and blockade, the British Empire never pursued a policy as deliberately destructive of any particular commercial competitor as the one that the US has pursued against China’s Huawei.

Read against the current mood in Washington, Esty’s critique of declinism and his well-meaning appeal for common sense and realism feel almost escapist. It would be comforting to imagine that America today is in a situation analogous to that of Britain in the 1950s or the 1960s, where the worst that could be unleashed is a bloody but localised post-colonial expedition.

In its unipolar moment, the United States created havoc enough, in Iraq and Libya. But today the stakes are higher even than that. Rather than the Suez debacle of 1956, the relevant historical example today is the Cuban missile crisis. As tension with Russia mounts over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan, the question that overshadows our time is not American national decline, but the risk that a second Cold War might unleash a third World War.

First published in the New Statesman December 9, 2022

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-us-is-addicted-to-greatness-and-haunted-by-its-loss/

SEE ALSO:

stalin's posthumous babies....

THIS SITE USES CARTOONS SUCH AS THAT ON TOP TO DEMYSTIFY THE VERNACULAR BULLSHIT OF EMPIRE. I HOPE WE SUCCEED IN PROVIDING WHAT SHOULD BE A "PAINFUL AMUSEMENT" AT THE IDIOCY OF MOST OF OUR "LEADERS" OF THE WORLD...

 GUS LEONISKY — CARTOONING SINCE 1951....

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

BY Douglas Murray
New York Post

Why do they do it? Who needs to lie like this? I am thinking, of course, of Representative elect George Santos. But also of the whole lot of them. Of politicians as a species. Why do they feel the need to make stuff up? 

It must be admitted that Santos is emerging as the undisputed top of his class of fibsters. 

To date he claims to have attended a prestigious Bronx prep school which has no record of him ever being there. He claims to have graduated from Baruch College, despite never having enrolled there. He claims to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs but never did. When confronted with the fact that he´d never worked for either company he blamed a "poor choice of words." 

I can see the point. I often claim to have worked for the Dalai Lama, UN Secretary General and the Pope as their joint global emissary to solve all world conflicts. Whenever anyone points out that I haven't left my apartment much lately I too just blame a "poor choice of words." 

Still, it is the sheer weirdness of Santos' claims which keep striking me. It's not just career embellishments — it is lies about pretty major things. For instance, so far the Republican has claimed that he is both Jewish and Catholic. When confronted by The New York Post about this he replied "I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was Jew-ish." It turns out that his family are from Brazil. 

Then yesterday we learned that as recently as last year he was claiming that his mother died as a result of 9/11. Then he said she died of cancer in 2016. 

What is it with this guy? Why does he feel the need to any of this? Does he think that people vote out of pity? Or because of which school or college someone went to? And what the hell does he think of New Yorkers if he thinks we deeply want representatives who worked for Goldman Sachs? 

Of course he´s not the only one who does this. Our very own President is a master of the career-embellishing lie.

But with Joe Biden there is at least method to the madness. For instance when Biden has claimed in the past to have graduated at the top of his class in the toppiest class that ever was he is hoping that the public will just be wowed by his brilliance. "Top of the class? Well gee — there's a guy I can get behind to run this country" says no one. In a way it is understandable. Joe Biden clearly has some kind of intellectual inferiority complex and it bursts out of him occasionally. 

Way back in 1987 Biden could be found on the campaign trail claiming that he had attended law school on a full academic scholarship, been the outstanding student in the political science department and graduated with not one, not two, but three undergraduate degrees from Delaware. Turned out he'd been at the bottom of the class and scraped a single degree. Back then it was thought that Biden's lies about his own career would destroy his future political prospects. So much for that. 

Still there is a certain sense in that lie. As there is to the other category of lie that Biden likes to use. Because as well as being an academic genius who spends most of his time touring the world with President Xi, Joe also has to pretend to be a horny-handed son of the soil. That is why when he visited a technical college in Minnesota last year he couldn't resist putting himself at the center of even these events. Back then Biden told the poor souls he was being introduced to that he understood their jobs all too well. Given that he himself had once been a tractor driver. "Awesome" said one of his interlocutors, with a slight wobble of doubt in his voice. 

Why could Biden not have just said "I sometimes drive a car. I guess this thing's just the same but bigger?" or some similar scintillating chat. Why does he have to put himself at the center of things? Because he needs to be one of us and also better than us. Both above the people and of the people. 

Hillary Clinton was similar. Most of her lies were either ways to make herself look braver and more respected than she was or just attempts to appear relatable to normal earthlings. 

But with Santos it is something else entirely. Why does he think that New Yorkers will admire someone whose mother died in 9/11, had to leave private school in 2008 because of the financial crisis, worked for Goldman Sachs, is Jewish and also Catholic? 

The explanation from his campaign makes matters even worse. Santos 2022 spokesperson Gabrielle Lipsky claimed that "As a millennial, George did what he had to in order to evade smear campaigns put forth by elitist organizations." What? Millennials have to lie? Lipsky went on to say that the media has "shamefully launched open season against the first openly gay person to be elected to Congress." 

Fact check: Santos is not the first openly gay person elected to Congress and is not the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. 

So lie upon lie. 

In the past you'd say such stuff made someone unelectable. But today a long list of lies seems to be what you need for elected office.

READ MORE:

https://www.sott.net/article/475844-George-Santos-fibs-take-the-cake-but-WHY-does-Joe-Biden-get-a-pass-for-his-lies

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....