A fear is roaming the porous edges of America: could this massive ship be slowing and listing, going the way of all before? Retracting its vast tentacles, gradually at first, for a tighter defense, hollowing within? All the while lashing out with long-distance brutality and domestic repression in defense of private wealth?
No majorities seem to be required to command this ship. Is it all over now, Baby Blue?
Whether or not U.S. global dominance is actually sinking, it may be more important ask why so many Americans feel hopeless about what they are facing? Why are public images of the future — whether from Hollywood, science, religion, or shared discourse — sliding toward dystopia? Do Americans believe a catastrophe is at hand? Despite its bellicose nationalism and apparent global dominance, America is not the world. The world clearly encompasses America and will endure without it, just as life will continue without homo sapiens. But America’s fading future resonates globally because many suspect it is not only America that is failing. We seem to have only one answer to the question “what comes next?” It is not a pretty one.
Historians have long disputed the causes of Rome’s fall, and even whether it was more of a transformation than a collapse. Among the most prominent factors suggested are: the invasion of Germanic peoples displaced by Huns who themselves may have been refugees from the drying Asian steppes; a Mediterranean climate crisis beginning about 150 CE that reduced cropland and hence tax revenues, followed by devastating pandemics that killed half of Rome’s population; an increasing gap between rich and poor; overdependence on slave labor; expensive wars on the empire’s periphery (especially the costly defeat at the hands of the Sassanid Empire of Iranians) that required a swelling military budget and therefore increased land taxes, leading to the abandonment of farming in many areas, and eventually to the collapse of the Empire’s population and currency; finally, historian Edward Gibbon includes the explosion of a small religious cult into state-sanctioned Christianity that declared all of Rome’s traditional beliefs pagan heresies. After centuries of expansion that hollowed out whole societies, whole cultures, and replaced them with Roman traditions, the same was happening to Rome itself, whose main bequeathal to the Middle Ages would be the Latin language and a Christian religious hierarchy with an uncanny resemblance to that of imperial Rome.
Historical analogies can be perilously imprecise. Although the USA is facing many similar concerns — environmental crises, desperate refugees, pandemics, a huge military budget required to support wars on the rebellious peripheries, economic inequality — our situation is distinctive and uncertain. “The future’s not ours to see.” Whether or not the USA proves more persistent than Rome, the world will most likely communicate in English for centuries to come, and there are even hints that a new cult may model itself on the memory of America even as it tries to replace it.
No adversary could have accomplished this. Rotten with megastores, boarded-up malls, profligate consumption, and two-ton machines of metal and plastic designed to navigate a world dispersed to accommodate more growth, more profits for the few who long ago abandoned any loyalties but to their own wealth and status. Bread and circuses.
America has had a special attractiveness to many around the world. Its economic, military and technological power has been stunning, as has its soft power: jazz and rock, Hollywood, scientific research, the internet, social media, ethnic and racial diversity, and the English language. Moreover, there is a story, told by U.S. citizens and millions of others across the globe, that in the U.S. one can go from rags to riches, from poverty to upper middle class status, within two generations. Indeed, this has been the experience of many. But the story erases the experience of numerous others denied the opportunity to acquire lasting resources.
Considering all this, might we still honestly pledge allegiance to the aspirations America has symbolized, at least for some: economic well-being, equality, acceptance of diversity, public participation in political decisions — things that pull in the opposite direction from the concentration of power? Today, all of these aspirations matter only if they are universal, only if they supersede other loyalties, even to America itself (the reality, not necessarily the dream). Such a vision would require a deep global consciousness aligned with the cries of the powerless. We know the alternative, Baby Blue.
Note: For younger readers, this title comes from the song of the same name by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan.
Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield.