Declinism

The Atlantic | Megan McArdle | America's Perpetual Decline

Dan Drezner channels Daniel Bell, who notes that pundits have been predicting the twilight of American power for at least half a century:

Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of "America's decline" had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s. It had come, he wrote, in several distinct waves: in reaction to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik; to the Vietnam War; to the oil shock of 1973; to Soviet aggression in the late 1970s; and to the general unease that accompanied the end of the Cold War. Since Huntington wrote, we can add at least two more waves: in reaction to 9/11, and to the current "Great Recession."....

What the long history of American "declinism" -- as opposed to America's actual possible decline -- suggests is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses.

For whatever reason, it is clear that for more than half a century, many of America's leading commentators have had a powerful impulse consistently to see the United States as a weak, "bred out" basket case that will fall to stronger rivals as inevitably as Rome fell to the barbarians, or France to Henry V at Agincourt.

On the foreign policy front, selective U.S. retrenchment doesn't imply terminal decline so much as a temporary realignment to ensure that American power and interest are matched up going forward.

Drezner is talking about geopolitical power, but he might as well have been talking about economic power; at least since the 1970s, we've been hearing that America was just about to have its lunch eaten by some emerging power. In the 1970s it was the Arabs; in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the Japanese and the Germans; and after a brief bout of optimism, the Chinese became our betes noires. Each time, the narrative was largely the same: American market capitalism was a failure. The competitive model rendered us incapable of long term planning. We allowed corporate loose cannons to seduce our consumers into bad choices and disrupt our markets, rather than sensibly regulating them. The American consumer was greedy, lazy, and selfish, interested only in sating himself with an endless parade of consumer gimcrackery. Meanwhile, our competition were masters of central planning, manipulating everything from their currency to the American psyche. Eventually, this saturnalia of selfishness and sensation-seeking would have to end as the Huns master technocrats finished conquering the decadent remnants of a once-great nation.

This is not to deny that American capitalists made some colossal mistakes, driven by a combination of greed and stupidity. Nor that we are in for some hard economic times. And of course, the little boy who cried wolf was right--eventually. American dominance is not going to last forever, after all, and there's no particular reason that we couldn't be living at the moment when our power finally wanes.

But it's worth remembering that the other declinists were powerfully convinced of their own argument. The human brain is programmed to look for what is new, and what is dangerous. That means that we're prone to ignore all the strengths of the American economy that are still there: the dynamism, the willingness to take risks, the immense flexibility to change and invent and grow.

I find declines extremely short-sited and boring. I was about to issue my standard rejoinder that the Romans started complaining about their decline somewhere around the second century BC, and that it took until 1453 or so until their empire was actually extinguished.  Even if you wanted to take the earliest possible date for the "Fall of Rome," you're looking at the end of Theodosius' reign in 395, in which case Rome was declining for longer than America has existed, and we've been griping pretty much the whole time about how things were better back in the Good Ole Days.

So yes, I was going to go on about how there's always some new threat over the horizon, and how the sky isn't falling, and how even if we aren't numero uno in everything we've still got a pretty sweet society to live in, and can't we all relax with the End of America thing?

And then... and then I saw this:

The Week | The 'Glee' cast: Bigger than The Beatles?

The irrepressible "Glee" kids have surpassed the Fab Four with 75 hits on the Billboard charts — depressing cultural critics everywhere

I don't even care for The Beatles that much, but I'm pretty sure this is a sign that America is over.