Rule America? - Liberal elites ruined Britain as a hyperpower. Could America meet the same fate?

WHAT DOES MODERN HISTORY have to teach us about the age of American empire? The final chapters of the British Empire offer lessons and parallels aplenty. Empires don't last forever, and the combination of martial victory, popular ennui, and liberal anti-patriotism is a dangerous mix for a superpower.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: "In terms of influence it was the only world power." The British people and their leaders accepted this fact. In the early 1930s, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin pronounced that "the British Empire stands firm, as a great force for good." Historian William Manchester argues that "most of the crown's subjects, abroad as well as at home, felt comfortable with imperialism."

But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture. "After the survivors of the Western front came home," Manchester writes, "Britons wanted nothing more to do with war; most of them hoped never again to lay their eyes on an Englishman in uniform, and they were losing their taste for Empire." Winston Churchill despaired of this change. "The shadow of victory is disillusion," he noted. "The reaction from extreme effort is prostration. The aftermath even of successful war is long and bitter."

A deep desire to avoid conflict, even at the price of letting the Empire dissolve, permeated British society. In 1931, the House of Commons passed the Statute of Westminster, the

first step toward independence for Britain's dominions. In 1932, a poll found that 10.4 million Britons supported England's unilateral disarmament, while only 870,000 opposed it. Historian Alistair Horne observes that, after World War I, it took just about 10 years for the "urge for national grandeur" to be replaced by "a deep longing simply to be left in peace."

Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

The parallels with 21st-century America are striking. In little more than 10 years, England went from victory in World War I to serious discussions about completely disarming herself. Talk of a "peace dividend" began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and culminated 10 years later with a major draw-down of forces and the abandonment of the two-war doctrine.

Where the Great War robbed England of a generation of its best and brightest, in America the baby boom generation was lost in Vietnam or, perhaps worse, in Canada, in the Air National Guard, and in the universities, where they learned to hide and not lead. This has taken its toll. Our two baby boom presidents have been exceedingly imperfect. (As Edmund Burke once cautioned, "A great empire and little minds go ill together.")

The American left, too, eerily echoes its British counterparts. Consider the "Peace is Patriotic" bumper stickers; the howls of protest against the nomination of

John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, for fear that he might be too assertive of American values; the comparison - by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) - of American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis and Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag; the protest cries of "No blood for oil" and the left-wing fringe speculation that the endgame of George W. Bush's 9/11 fear-mongering would be to cancel elections and establish a fascist police state.

The liberal opponents of the British Empire were proved wrong, but their misplaced disillusionment was enough to sap the vitality of imperial confidence. After rising one last time to fight Nazism, the sun set on the British Empire.

Likewise, it is pleasant to believe that the crisis of confidence in today's liberal elites won't affect the outcome of our war with Islamist extremism. The greater worry concerns what happens next. Will protestations of liberal elites become mainstream diffidence about America's place in the world? Will we, too, stop believing that America stands firm, as a great force for good - and then see our place in the world diminish?

"I would if I could find any..If you have please elucidate.."

Let me make this first grade simple for you: The article is stupid because it draws incorrect conclusions from various facts. The logical fallacy most important in this article is knows as "post hoc, ergo propter hoc". The author is commiting the fallacy when he is assuming that because one thing follows another that the one thing was caused by the other. For example:

"...Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism..."

The fallacy in the article is that the British Empire failed because of 'liberal elites' and WWI. That's not correct. The British Empire fell because because of the percentage of population of rulers to the ruled and the vast differences in culture and heritage between rulers and ruled. The British, (rightly), lost the will to be rulers and gave up their Empire. The Indians did not want to be a part of it. The Afrikaaners did not want to be a part of it. That is a fundamental difference between their Empire and the American Experiment. Indians in the days of the Raj were never Britons. An American citizen of Indian descent in New York will proudly declare his citizenship.

You know, maybe my before coffee first post wasn't that clear; but maybe you just didn't understand it. Is this post clear enough for you, sparky?

The end of America was determined the day constitutional authors should have skipped Bible study and taken the day off to socialize.

The cultural power of the British Empire did survive and is still reflected in the progress of those cultures and colonies left behind. Consider the political and cultural fate of French and Spanish colonies e.g. Haiti, everything geographically below the U.S., Lebanon and even Quebec and Louisiana against others like Bermuda, Canada, Australia and India. Seeing a pattern yet? Part of it is colonizer religious doctrine; coercive paramilitary force verses an implored warning – compulsory physical control verses optional psychological control.

As a colony, America was lost by an England who soon discovered it had on its hands what was and still is something populated by ambitious breeding alpha personalities; peasant geniuses and criminals emigrating homelands to generations of family whose future prospects didn't seem appealing. Its constitution is a masterpiece in its economy of language - contextually framed in assumptions of human decency - providing unqualified freedoms of speech, arms bearing etc. The fate of the American Empire is somewhere in those possibilities unforeseen by the founders. This is why it worked so well for so long. Like a teen abandoning his parent’s governance doesn't understand why his friends didn't come through or why his prospects are narrowing and circling the drain, America knows it's in trouble but can't seem to get its arms around the problem let alone a solution. With its constitution in hand and its belief in citizen leadership, America runs around bandaging problems like a permissive parent committed to survival through the merit of naked reason rather than those traditional standards, still unproved with passing fads of academia but stand alone to account for the survival of civility. The Union came about as an inspiration of men and women reacting politically to a Europe without respect for the dignity of the underprivileged but it was populated by peasants reacting to a Europe without enough potatoes.

The problem is that America is similar to scientific discovery; interesting because it has so often been described as a social experiment. Consider industrial age discoveries like: internal combustion power, nitroglycerine, atomic power, pharmaceuticals, microbiology etc. Try to imagine what their geeky discoverers had in mind against some of the events that followed. Productive scientific discipline demands that in order to find truth all bias toward its end be removed - that all evidence be considered out of the shadow prejudice. America is an experiment; a land of laws, its citizens free to realize implicit decency, whose naive creators were unaware that decency is not implicit. Them guys were who we remember in high school as geeks; single minded - taking others at face value - unsophisticated regarding some predatory others who may view education and fellow classmates as opportunities for exploitation or even amusement.

There are only two possibilities that can possibly save America.

1) Something is mistakenly advertised and the population falls for some new decency fad; perhaps something noticed on the back of a Wheaties Box or a porn star with a tattooed phrase partially lost in the folds. What is the survival possibility of a big militarily undefeated adolescent ego of a country addicted to unnecessary amusement - unlimited by convention where cocaine logically became crack, where bright children grew up to become community leaders with steer horns on their Cadillac, where a determined young girl tried out for and realized the dream of becoming a cheerleader helped along by the nurturing maternal instincts of the first mother to whom homicide seemed a plausible solution to inevitable player cuts and where that seemed unfair and even distasteful but upon private reflection understandable to teammates.

2) America invents the time machine for constitutional author Rod Serling; a skeptical and unheeded prophet. As I write this, an episode of the old Twilight Zone TV show comes to mind. The adults around him fearfully accommodate every wish of a precocious 10 year old Anthony played by Billy Mundy who happens to be in possession of super human powers and uses them impulsively, lethally and without prejudice to make the world around him whatever he thinks it should be at any passing moment.

Predictably the results of high school academic options offered in the 1960s are in and too many future left wingers dropped history. They still have no idea how despotic and cruel charming strangers who feel wronged can be (most of the pain in this world is caused by those who feel wronged). Moral relativity is irrelevant when your family has been killed by crime, disease, terrorism or drunk driving. Myopic right wingers dropped Geography. They figure if they go swimming in California they can either come ashore or go out a little farther and call home from Miami.

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