Declinism: Three centuries of gloomy forecasts about America

The Hoover Institution ^ | August & September 2007 | Alan W. Dowd

[Sandreckoner]

“I’ve said it several times on FR...every superpower in history, whether good or bad, has fallen—Rome, Britain, USSR...the US is next.”

Funny, I thought Britain was still around, still possesses one of the largest economies on the planet, and one of the most capable militaries. And this from a nation that truly was stretched in every way possible during its period of ‘superpowerdom’ — a tiny population, massive percentage expenditures on a military that had nothing close to the sort of travel and logistics speed and technology available today, and on and on.

There is no substantive comparison to be drawn between the U.S. of today and Rome, Britain or the USSR. The U.S. may not always be the overweening power of the planet, but it’s virtually impossible - short of sheer physical destruction - to envision a realistic scenario in which it is ever subordinate to another.

[ClaireSolt]

Our ability to look at ourselves is inhibited by a negative media. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then just count how many countries have followed our election of Bush and elected conservatives themselves. It is a long list. Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden.

[Delacon]

I was going to post just about the same thing but felt that someone would surely point out that Britain hasn’t fallen. Thanks. Geopolitical power may wax and wane but its bad enough when people are declinist about Britain, worse still when they do it about America. Declinists have their place. Doomists don’t. Not unless you are a communist, fascist, or islamist.

[B-Chan]

John Dos Passos was quite possibly the most brilliant author of the 20th Century — socialist or not.

That being understood, it is important to note that during the Spanish Civil War Dos Passos had a complete change of heart regarding socialism. Once he saw for himself the brutality and inhumanity of the Spanish communists, socialists, and anarchists, he washed his hands of leftism, and condemned Hemingway and others for supporting the Spanish Reds. He went on to become a philosophical conservative, and spent the rest of his lengthy career promoting Rightist thinking.

[Billthedrill]

Excellent article, and thank you for posting it. The thing is that it's demonstrably impossible to make a workable predictive model of a history one happens to be in the middle of. Been tried, can't be done.

I vividly recall wrapping my head around Paul Kennedy's thesis a couple of years after he published it: a U.S. in ineluctable decline due to imperial overstretch. Every couple of chapters I'd look up and another Soviet Bloc country had fallen, and I wondered if Kennedy were going mad to watch it.

I need not have worried - the strength of an attractive theory is such that it need not consider itself threatened by mere fact. That theory is still being argued seriously. To me it seems a pretty descriptive model but it failed utterly as a predictive one.

In simple point of fact there aren't really any particularly detailed historical parallels to our current time. This is, IMHO, a time of unprecedented circumstance through which we can only feel our way, the lamp of history not throwing enough light in front of us to keep our toes from the rocks. But you can forget about the imperial model. For all the rhetoric it's as dead as the Divine Right Of Kings, and it is sadly amusing to see the desperation to which the Left in particular clings to its antiquated dictates.

One manifestation of its failure is seen in the devastation to which major parts of Africa have been subjected in an attempt to bend those circumstances into pat Post-Colonialism. There was another pretty descriptive model - ask any committed Marxist, it's a work of art - that failed as a predictive model and hence cannot possibly succeed as a normative one, and in fact has proven a colossal failure. Yet its true believers cling to it like drowning men through the blood of Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Rwanda.

My principal argument is that the historical models have broken and our guidance now must season their lessons with the certainty that everything they imply simply isn't true. That does not mean we can ignore them, it means that our activities must as well be guided by principle and by common sense. What of the future? Well, draw whatever picture you care to imagine and strive for it with the knowledge that what really does happen will be something else. Two hundred years or more from now someone will construct a proper historical model of this mess.

He'll be wrong too.

[Delacon]

I am not sure I understand your position. Are you saying that this article has a predictive premise that you disagree with or are you saying that it doesn’t and then go on to ellaborate on why you think that predictive premises are almost always wrong? Because I think this article states, rather clearly, that the predition and prognosis of America’s decline are on thin ice. It should be pointed out that this article doesn’t cover those that predict/ed America’s and the West’s continued ascension(Fukuyama comes to mind) but in my 40 some odd years I can only speak to my experience which is that more often than not the US and the West have taken a declinistic view. Heck even WF Buckley took a declinistic pov when he said conservatives stood athwart history yelling STOP!

[ME-262]

We’re Doomed, Dooomed, Dooooooomed!

If God is for us who can be against us?
If God is against us it is time to immigrate somewhere else.

I’m still looking for another Christian nation conceived with prayer and boldness that holds it to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights and trusts in God to provide while also allowing those who believe otherwise to live in their midst governed by their own conscience free from coercion. As soon as I find this place I’m moving there and learning their language like my ancestors did here.

Any suggestions, or countries I should check out?
Right now I’ve got it good living in “God’s Country”(Kansas) the buckle on the Bible belt.

[nicollo]

Thanks -- I only know the early stuff of Dos Passos and the reactions to it. I never read the "USA" collection. I suppose I should now.

I had to spend far too much time tracking the early popular career of Upton Sinclair that when I hit upon any of the socialist literary set that he and the muckrakers bred I get ugly. I also get ugly at such use of Passos as the following, from some college professor's website:

However, Americans turned their back on reforms and instead embraced in the 1920's a decade of somnolence, too entranced with the material gains of new consumer products, most notably Henry Ford's popular Model T, to even recognize the failure of politics, of ideals, of the nation's democratic heritage. Dos Passos turned his pen and his body to social activism...
http://www.csupomona.edu/~rljohnson/Professional/DosPassos.html

That's such a pissy take on the first decades of the 20th century. It's also a view born of fear, which was a primary motive of the socialist and progressive movements.

Also, every radical generation seems to have a criminal trial that demonstrates America's failure and the abuse of "the system." In the 1870s it was the Mollies. In 1911 it was the McNamaras. In the 1920s it was Sacco and Vanzetti. We've had all too many of these cases in recent times. Whatever the truth to the crimes or injustice, belief in victimhood becomes a shiboleth -- and opportunity for political agenda and book sales. And it stirs my reactionary bones.

As this thread's article shows, in every generation America is doomed. Perhaps that's part of our strength, but damn if it doesn't get annoying.

[nicollo]

Third parties won’t take under the Electoral College and the representational structure of Congress. Only under a parliamentary system could the Greens get any real power.

[B-Chan]

You should definitely read U.S.A.. While you might not agree with Dos Passos' point of view at the time, you will gain an increased insight into what the times were really like in those days.

And don't be too quick to damn poor Upton Sinclair. While he was a socialist, he was also scrupulously honest, and pushed a brand of quasi-socialism (the EPIC program) that could actually have worked in Depression-era California. His idea was basically to reorganize idle capital on a cooperative basis and use it to produce income and useful goods, not to collectivize society or outlaw private enterprise. No less a mind than Robert Heinlein signed on to the EPIC campaign, and, while not a long-term solution, the program would have been better than doing nothing, which is what actually happened in 1934 California.

[G8 Diplomat]

When I said Britain, I meant that Britain used to have the most powerful navy and colonized places all over the world and was THE nation on top. Now most of their colonies have become independent and we have the strongest navy and are the world’s superpower. There was a saying “The sun never sets on the British empire.” Britain no long has an empire.

And no comparisons between Rome and the US today? Well, there was a historian who made a list of 22 factors that lead to the fall of Rome, and compared the state of the US to that list. We have 19. Among them were a craving for entertainment and a failure to protect the defenseless. In America today we have the mall-and-movie theater lifestyle and the legalization of abortion. And we’re divided against ourself politically and racially. A divided house cannot stand. We can’t go on like this much longer. We either get it together or we fall.

[Billthedrill]

No to your first, yes to your second - I agree with the article insofar as it is skeptical about declinistic historical models, especially those that when attempting to elevate from a descriptive model to a predictive one find that they must cherry-pick historical data in order to remain valid. When we have the broad class of models labeled "imperialistic" whose claim to validity rests on an indefinite time period we have a real problem. Kennedy's, for example - its proponents insist that it is still valid, it just needs longer to play out. Most neo-Marxist models insist the same.

The difficulty with this is that a model without boundaries is useless as a predictive model, and that describes all of the declinistic models proposed in the article. I believe the author would agree. And if it fails as a predictive model it is useless as a normative model. Hence to depend on any of these for reliable advice on, say, foreign policy, is to go beyond the capabilities of the model. Kennedy got his nose rubbed in that one.

[NutCrackerBoy]

Predictive, schmaddictive. No historical model can be predictive. We can only form theses and defend them with intellectual honesty.

Clearly many who saw decline were just wrong. I see decline of the West in the loss of confidence in the culture. For example, the civilization's people must be "arrogant" enough to force immigrants to assimilate. This is now lacking everywhere in the West.

America may recover that backbone in response to some future crisis. We hope it will not be too late.

[Billthedrill]

Oh, but they do pretend to be predictive, and that's the point. Marx, for example, was absolutely certain that the historical forces he'd identified would result in the increasing alienation, impoverishment, and illiteracy of the proletariate and decreasing industrial profits, and that it was imminent. This he published in the Manifesto in 1848. In fact, the directions of all of those were quite the opposite and this was obvious even by the time he was writing Capital in the mid-1860's.

His model failed, and he knew it, and instead of altering the premises that resulted in that failure he changed their measures. They've been cheating that way for a century and a half.

[NutCrackerBoy]

I don't want to take your time on a "declining" thread, but I'm intrigued.

I understand the fallacy of "historicism," as it is sometimes called, and Marx was definitely guilty of it, due to misappropriating Hegel, but do you assert that this is where all the declinists went wrong?

I say a thinker makes some honest prediction based on an understanding of the world. After events have transpired, we judge, coming to many different honest conclusions, whether the ideas turned out to have any merit.

Such scenarios around historical analysis play out without necessarily any reference to predictability, or lack thereof. A common reason for failures of specific predictions is that the actual future saw a radical innovation occur. I don't think it is possible to predict the innovations, but one can imagine that a resourceful people will find solutions.

We can also learn from failed predictions that simply misjudged a national character or human nature. This is a lesson beyond merely understanding the fallacy of historicism.

[Delacon]

“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder” Arnold Toynbee

[Billthedrill]

...do you assert that this is where all the declinists went wrong?

Not, not really, although I can see where what I scribbled above might lead you to think so. Most of the "declinists" don't have their own models at all but are reasoning by analogy toward someone else's model which is only dimly understood in the first place.

For example - and I apologize in advance if this offends anyone reading it - the notion that the U.S. is in decline just as Rome because we have poor border policies with respect to a sovereign country south of us and the Romans had poor policies with respect to different groups of migratory peoples is, at best, a stretch. It's perfectly useful as a descriptive model but you might get into a little trouble with it as a predictive model. You might end up concluding that the illegals are going to sweep through the country in armed groups, take over our grain supplies in Canada, and threaten to starve us out. The Vandals did something like that to Rome's breadbasket in North Africa. And perhaps they will but I wouldn't place any large bets on it.

So the analogies are only good as far as they go, no better and often much worse than the models they depend on. That's what I was trying to say...

[NutCrackerBoy]

Rome controlled a great empire--its decline and fall was an enormous human tragedy. The United States "empire of liberty" is at best an analog. Be that as it may, to forestall another human catastrophe, we may attempt to draw lessons from the Roman experience.

Broadly, Rome got away from the habit of molding conquests to Roman ways and its republican governance was too mercurial. If these are the key weakening dynamics, I suggest the United States form includes multicultural apathy. The Latin immigrant population will eventually become a brittle faction, resulting not in open conflict, but loss of capacity for the republic to adapt, to resist boondoggles.

Successful civilizations periodically do dirty work like ridding the open seas of pirates. That is also a way of molding the "outside" world to civilized ways. But the West increasingly relegates sovereignty to a United Nations over-tolerant of tyrannical rule, allowing threats to gather.

[Greg F]

http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html

Interesting read. He’s a CFR fellow, never got his Masters or PhD . . . so enough of an autodidact to say something original.

[SunkenCiv]

...the topic is from 2007. Guess he changed his mind in a year...

The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented
Daily Telegraph | January 15, 2005 | Niall Ferguson
Posted on 01/16/2006 9:28:48 AM PST by B.Bumbleberry
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1559001/posts

[snip] Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America’s closest regional ally... the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran...So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country’s treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China’s veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals... Only one man might have stiffened President Bush’s resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke... This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran... The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq’s Shi’ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran. Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened. [end]