Granted, that’s a mighty big IF. It’s impossible to read the future. But nothing lasts forever, and the United States will certainly cease to exist at some point. And when that time comes, historians will look back in an effort to identify and analyze the causes.
It’s impossible to know the future, but thoughtful speculation can enlighten how we understand the present. In that spirit, if the United States has turned a corner, I offer these four possible factors to explain its impending imperial decline.
Internal Political Dysfunction: Political dysfunction in the United States is a wide ranging problem. Among the many issues, partisan gridlock wrenching the federal government has received much attention of late, and rightly so.
However, from the marbled halls of Washington, D.C. to the modestly carpeted offices of municipalities, counties, and townships, the major overarching problem in U.S. politics is the corrupting influence of money.
Getting elected has become an increasingly expensive proposition everywhere. The necessity of raising substantial sums of money to win elections often leaves successful politicians beholden to various special interests. And as the lobbying industry bears more and more impact, it is beginning to recede into the shadows, away from the light of day that nourishes healthy democracies.
Of course the United States, like most places, has a long history of government representing elite interests. The founders created a republic that severely limited voting rights to the privileged and wealthy. However, notions of republican virtue and national interest, which used to play a prominent role in American political culture, seem to be on the decline. Politicians increasingly serve private and even ideological interests instead of the citizenry or nation.
If the economics and culture of American politics do not improve, the results are potentially devastating. In the long run, the combination of dysfunctional gridlock and a highest bidder mentality could render American governments unable to deal with pressing issues that threaten the citizenry’s well being.
Foreign Competition: Originally a rural nation with a cash-poor, agricultural economy, the United States built immense wealth during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Colonial expansion at the expense of Indigenous nations, an abundance of natural resources, and a seemingly endless pool of cheap labor, from slaves to factory workers, all fed economic growth. By World War I, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial power, with European empires in decline.
But the real turning point was World War II. The United States was the only industrialized nation to emerge from that war more powerful and prosperous than when it began. Whereas much of Europe and Japan lay in ruins, America suffered no invasion and was able to substantially build up its industrial base even further. The results were staggering.
At war’s end, national unemp
loyment stood at a minuscule 1.9%. Maximum employment and wartime rationing had left Americans collectively holding nearly $140 billion in savings; that’s nearly $2,000,000,000,000 in today’s money.
As the rest of the world’s industrialized nations began the slow road to recovery, America stood atop the global economy unchallenged. By the late 1940s, Americans were earning 42% of all global income despite comprising only 7% of the world’s population. The U.S. also accounted for roughly half of the world’s manufacturing output, including: 57% of steel, 43% of electricity, 62% of oil, and 80% of automobiles. Never before or since has a single political entity so dominated the world economy.
But those days are now over. The U.S. longer enjoys unmitigated supremacy. Europe and Japan rebuilt decades ago. China is now a major (and still growing) economic powerhouse, with India and Brazil on the horizon. In order to maintain its dominance, the United States must now compete again as it did during the 19th century.
To be sure, the U.S. does maintains certain economic advantages unavailable to it back then. But then again, it no longer has millions of square miles of Indigenous lands to steal, or the abundance of untapped natural resources that came with it. Likewise, many major American cities are in decline or trying to cobble together a comeback, while a manufacturing sector that was once the envy of the world has been gutted, without a comparable sector arising to replace it.
For all these reasons and more, the United States is almost certainly past-peak when it comes to global economic dominance. Indeed, in the centuries to come, it is quite reasonable to expect that no nation will ever again dominate the world economy to the degree the United States did during the two decades following World War II.
Subsidizing a Permanent Underclass: A popular myth we like to tell ourselves is that anyone can grow up to become president. Of course we all know it’s happytime bullshit, but it speaks to a wider national mythology about a supposedly fluid class system. Popular culture still defines America as a land of opportunity, as place where anyone can succeed in a general sense, particularly at making money.
Historically, however, the United States has always been a place of haves and have-nots. Slaves (followed by sharecroppers and tenant farmers) and exploited wage laborers have, at different times, been a staple of the labor force since before the nation’s founding.
The post-WWII period of national prosperity and international dominance is the closest America has come to being a wealthy nation with a large middle class. But since the 1980s, the gulf between rich and poor has grown large
r again with the middle class shrinking as a percentage of the population.
A 2012 Pew Research Center report classifies only half of American households as earning a middle class income. This is down from 61% in the 1970s. And it’s been forty years since the national poverty rate hit its all time low of 11% way back in 1973.
Nowadays, the misery of poverty is somewhat mitigated by a public social welfare system. Since the New Deal of the 1930s, the U.S. has sporadically followed the lead of other industrialized nations by implementing vital social services for its citizenry. Reforms to help those in need come primarily from the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and include: social security, unemployment insurance, welfare for the poor, food stamps, disability insurance, Medicare, and Medicade.
But as the nation’s impoverished population grows, demands on the system increase. At the same time, the decline of the middle class cuts into the most important source of revenues to fund such programs. One wonders what will prevent the United States from deteriorating into a nation of less and less wealth, with more and more of it concentrated at the top, and a growing underclass of exploited wage laborers and the unemployed at the bottom.
If that trend continues, the idea of America as the Land of Opportunity runs the risk of becoming not just an over-hyped myth, but a cruel joke.
The Culture of Impermanence: Amid national decline, we would expect to find a variety of responses by the citizenry. One might be a rising tide of conservative and reactionary ideology as people struggle to hold onto something better, look for simplistic targets to blame, and are drawn to fantasies of an idealized past.
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Another widespread response we might expect to find would be an adaptation to and reflection of national disintegration itself as it unfolds; a culture that grapples with and echoes its own decline.
In that vein, America seems increasingly dogged by a disposable public culture, and not just the endless array stuff that quickly ends up on garbage heaps. Beyond that, American ideas and expressions are also subject to casual dismissal.
It would be easy to blame the rise of digital media, particularly the internet, for promoting a culture of immediacy and short attention spans. However, it’s not just a matter of online ephemera. The larger culture, including much of the older media forms, seems to be more and more dedicated to the transitory. As phenomena such as the 24 hour news cycle churn through an endless cacophony of passing fancies, and the cult of celebrity finds ever more displays of temporary outlandishness, the culture of impermanence primarily reveals, and perhaps even reflects, a state of national entropy.
With each passing year, Andy Warhol’s claim that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, seems more and more relevant. Perhaps the question then becomes: To what extent does it reflect the fear that the United States’ own fifteen minutes might be nearing an end?
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In the end, the issues discussed here may not prove to be an indication of America’s ongoing and eventually fatal decline. However, if the United States is to rebound and show signs of maintaining its preeminence, or in the long term even prominence, then all of these issues and a number of others must be adequately addressed. Though of course, judging the merits of American global dominance is another matter entirely.
Note: A longer version of this article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.