Again, my intention here is not to critique the validity of Steyn’s research or every point he makes in the book. Rather, it is to show that a noted thinker on the Right wrote a book arguing that if we don’t make major course corrections—and soon—the United States will soon cease to exist as we have known her. Is that true? Are we really preparing for life “after America”? Like Wolf, Steyn wasn’t ridiculed or dismissed for such a stark and essentially apocalyptic analysis of the American condition. To the contrary, his book also became a New York Times bestseller, and conservatives not only bought it but also discussed it widely.
Are We Really Entering a “Post-American World”?
Profound pessimism about the future of America is not isolated to intensive analysis and spirited discussions on the political Left and Right. Moderates and the politically unaligned are deeply engaged in the conversation as well. Thus, in 2008, when Fareed Zakaria released a provocative, intriguing, and much-talked-about book titled The Post-American World, it immediately became a Time cover story and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. When the 2.0 version of The Post-American World was released in paperback in 2011, it, too, became a national bestseller.
One of the reasons for this particular book’s influence and success is that Zakaria was not making his case as an ideologue or a partisan. He was writing as an ostensibly mainstream journalist who grew up halfway around the world, chose to make America his home, and over time became deeply concerned about his adopted nation’s future. A nominal Muslim who emigrated from India to the U.S. in the 1980s and went on to earn degrees from Yale and Harvard, Zakaria rose to become the host of an influential Sunday interview program on CNN and editor-at-large for Time magazine. He describes himself as neither a liberal nor a conservative but as a political Independent.
“There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life—its politics, economics, and culture,” Zakaria writes. The first, he argues, was the rise of the Western world. The second was the rise of the United States, which, soon after it industrialized, became “the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations.” But Zakaria believes that “we are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era,” which he calls “the rise of the rest.” America, for example, is struggling to stay out of recession, while countries like India and China are growing economically at upwards of 9 percent every year with no signs of slowing down.[50]
“We are moving into a post-American world,” Zakaria writes, and thus the central question of our time is, “What will it mean to live in a post-American world?”[51]
Put simply, Zakaria believes the United States is not only struggling not to collapse, but with many other countries rapidly rising, we are in growing danger of being left in the dust. He notes:
The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded company is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, Hong Kong now rivals London and New York as the leading financial center, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world’s largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America’s greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world’s biggest is in Dongguan, China.[52] Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that twenty years ago, America was at the top of many, if not most, of these categories.”[53]
America today remains the global superpower, Zakaria concedes, but he says we are an “enfeebled” one. The U.S. economy is “troubled, its currency is sliding, and it faces long-term problems with its soaring entitlements and low savings.” What’s more, he notes, “anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high everywhere from Great Britain to Malaysia.” He goes on to argue:
The most striking shift between the 1990s and now has to do not with America but rather with the world at large. In the 1990s, Russia was completely dependent on American aid and loans. Now, it has its own multibillion-dollar fund, financed by oil revenues, to reinvigorate its economy during slowdowns. Then, East Asian nations desperately needed the IMF [International Monetary Fund] to bail them out of their crises. Now, they have massive foreign-exchange reserves, which they are using to finance America’s debt. Then, China’s economic growth was driven almost entirely by American demand. In 2007, China contributed more to global growth than the United States did—the first time any nation has done so since at least the 1930s—and surpassed it as the world’s largest consumer market in several key categories. In the long run this secular trend—the rise of the rest—will only gather strength.[54]
“How did the United States blow it?” Zakaria asks. “The United States has had an extraordinary hand to play in global politics—the best of any country in history. Yet, by almost any measure—problems solved, success achieved, institutions built, reputation enhanced—Washington has played this hand badly. America has had a period of unparalleled influence. What does it have to show for it?”[55]
Bottom Line
Unfortunately, there is a compelling case for such deep and rising anxiety. As we’ll see as we move deeper into this book and examine more specific data, the leading economic and cultural indicators do not bode well for America. The evidence, I believe, strongly suggests an implosion is possible.
But as we end this chapter, we must draw an important distinction right up front. Do the authors and analysts I have cited in this chapter believe America is predetermined to implode? Do they believe our fate is sealed and there is no longer any hope? No, most do not. Most believe there is still a chance for Americans to turn things around. The point is that most of these observers—and many Americans like them—see our situation as more precarious than perhaps at any other point in our nation’s history, and they have become steadily more pessimistic over time. They believe time is running out, and most are not encouraged by the leadership being shown in politics, business, media, or education, much less the church.
That said, theirs is not the only view.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CASE OF THE OPTIMISTS
To be clear, not all Americans fear we’re in decline.
Nor do all Americans believe we are facing an implosion. Indeed, many Americans believe the magnitude of the challenges we face is being overstated. They argue that the “doomsday” talk by some in the media, academia, the financial sector, the pulpits, the political sphere, and around the watercooler is just a vastly overblown and dangerous overreaction. What’s more, they fiercely maintain their belief that America is poised for a historic renaissance.
These people are determined optimists. Yes, the threats Americans face from within and without are real and serious, the optimists readily concede, but this doesn’t necessarily mean our challenges are insurmountable. To the contrary, they argue, our greatest days are still ahead.
We have faced dark times before in our nation’s history. We have faced moments when it truly seemed like the American experiment was destined to fail. Yet by the grace of God and the wisdom of some extraordinary leaders in government, business, and the church, we have repeatedly made the critical course corrections that were necessary. We have gotten our country back on the right track numerous times and have subsequently soared to heights never really dreamed possible by Americans or by anyone else in the world, and these optimists are certain we can do it again.
Barack Obama has certainly sought to position himself politically as Amer
ica’s “optimist in chief.” As a candidate, he inspired tens of millions of Americans with his message of hope and change. As president, he has engendered enormous criticism from the Right, Center, and even some from the Left. Many commentators have accused him of (wittingly or unwittingly) leading the U.S. to the brink of outright collapse by accelerating the fiscal bankruptcy of the country and undermining the moral authority of American foreign policy with his approach of “leading from behind,” as one of his advisors so memorably described Obama’s approach to world affairs.[56]
President Obama has steadfastly refused to be labeled a pessimist, arguing that America has a hopeful future and that one of the things that makes our country great is “an enduring faith, even in the darkest hours, that brighter days lie ahead.”[57] President Obama epitomized his views in an essay titled “Why I’m Optimistic,” published in the fortieth-anniversary issue of Smithsonian magazine:
There is, of course, no way of knowing what new challenges and new possibilities will emerge over the next forty years. There is no way of knowing how life will be different in 2050. But if we do what’s required in our own time, I am confident the future will be brighter for our people, and our country. Such confidence stems largely from the genius of America. From our earliest days, we have reimagined and remade ourselves again and again.[58]
Even many strong critics of the president and his devout ideological liberalism join him in describing themselves as fundamentally optimistic regarding the future of America, though they would hasten to add that their policy prescriptions for getting us out of the severe mess we are in differ dramatically from President Obama’s.
Bullish on America
One example is William J. Bennett, the conservative former secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and “drug czar” for President George H. W. Bush. Bennett, who now hosts a nationally syndicated talk radio show called Morning in America, remains convinced that Americans can and will turn things around in time, despite having chronicled the enormous surges in violent crime, out-of-wedlock births, and other social pathologies rampant in the United States over the past four decades. In his 1999 book, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, Bennett wrote, “To those who believe our decline is inevitable because social trends are irreversible, our answer should be: no, it need not be so, and we will not allow it to happen. Restoring civilization’s social and moral order—making it more humane, civil, responsible, and just—is no simple task. But America remains what it has always been: an exceptional nation. Our capacity for self-renewal is rare, and real. We have relied on it in the past [and] we must call on it again.”[59]
Ten years later, in his book A Century Turns: New Hopes, New Fears, Bennett passionately continued to make the case that Americans have risen to the occasion of social and economic renewal before in tough times and said that he saw no reason why we could not do so again. “Today, the levels of both hope and fear are at a high point. Whether or not we can expand the former and reduce the latter, continuing to ‘have the freedoms we have known up until now,’ will depend precisely on what we do with the challenges before us today. Will people one hundred years from now say, ‘Thank God for those people in 2009’? As an American, as an optimist, as a true believer in the uniquely American capacity for self-renewal, I hope and believe the answer is ‘Yes!’”[60]
Larry Kudlow, the CNBC host and National Review columnist, is similarly bullish on America’s future, despite being a sharp critic of President Obama and his policies. “The pessimists are now talking about the end of capitalism or a permanent decline of America. I don’t believe that for one moment,” Kudlow wrote in September 2008, just as the economic meltdown was beginning. “Specific regulatory reforms can get us out of this fix. And most of all, policymakers must maintain the low-tax, low-inflation, open-trade formula that has propelled this nation’s economy and produced so much prosperity for so long. I say, never sell America short.”[61]
The upheavals of the next few years rattled many, but not Kudlow. While he wrote repeatedly about the severe challenges to the nation and its economy and spoke out strongly about the damage he believed the Obama team was doing to America’s fiscal health, he remained remarkably positive about the future. “There’s a lot of pessimism in the air right now,” he wrote in the spring of 2011. “It’s rooted in themes I’ve been discussing for weeks and weeks—namely, lower profit margins from spiking energy, food, and raw-material prices; supply-chain disruptions from the Japanese disaster that cuts into top-line sales revenue; and gasoline price hikes that are depressing the consumer. . . . This is not the end of the world. . . . I still believe in longer-term optimism.”[62]
Editorial Optimism
The contributors to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page likewise remain fundamentally optimistic about America’s future. Like Bennett and Kudlow, they don’t fail to point out the serious challenges facing the country, nor do they hesitate to advocate specific reform proposals. Yet the Journal’s editors regularly publish essays by those who specifically push back at the notion of America in decline. In February 2011, for example, the Journal published an essay titled “The Misleading Metaphor of Decline” by Joseph Nye, distinguished professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “Is the United States in decline? Many Americans think so, and they are not alone. A recent Pew poll showed that pluralities in thirteen of twenty-five countries believe that China will replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower,” Nye wrote. However, he argued, “America is likely to remain more powerful than any single state in the coming decades.” Nye also noted that even “Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power. . . . Rather than succumb to self-fulfilling prophecies of inevitable decline, we need a vision that combines domestic reforms with smart strategies for the international deployment of our power in an information age.”[63]
Two months later, the Journal published an essay called “The Facts about American ‘Decline,’” written by Charles Wolf Jr., a corporate fellow in international economics at the RAND Corporation and a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
It’s fashionable among academics and pundits to proclaim that the U.S. is in decline and no longer No. 1 in the world. The declinists say they are realists. In fact, their alarm is unrealistic. . . . In absolute terms, the U.S. enjoyed an incline this past decade. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. GDP increased 21 percent in constant dollars, despite the shattering setbacks of the Great Recession in 2008–09 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. In 2010, U.S. military spending ($697 billion) was 55 percent higher than in 2000. And in 2010, the U.S. population was 310 million, an increase of 10 percent since 2000. . . . Some numbers show inclines, some show declines, and some numbers are mixed. . . . The overall picture is far more complex than the simple one portrayed by declinists. The real world is complicated, so a portrait in one dimension distorts rather than reflects reality.[64]
Three months after Wolf’s op-ed ran, the Journal published “The Future Still Belongs to America” by Walter Russell Mead, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of American Interest:
It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The twenty-first century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers. This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. . . . Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the twenty-first century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.”[65]
These are but a few of m
any examples of the pushback from both the Left and the Right against the real and increasingly widespread notion that America is rapidly approaching—or even has passed—the point of no return.
Trials and Triumphs
What’s more, the case the optimists are making is historically valid. Americans have faced very dark times before and overcome them.
“A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations”
The American Revolution itself was one such dark time.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, the citizens of the thirteen colonies were suffering from “a long train of abuses and usurpations” designed “to reduce them under absolute despotism” by a “tyrant” who was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” After many humble—and rebuffed—attempts at gaining redress for their grievances, and after much prayer and soul-searching and much discussion and debate, the people concluded it was their right and their duty “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” They appealed in the process to the God of the Bible, “the Supreme Judge of the world,” knowing as they did that the task of establishing a free and independent country would require them to go to war with the British Empire, the most powerful military entity on the planet. The undertaking seemed nearly impossible.[66]
To war they did go, of course, and a painful, bloody, and often gloomy war it was at that. At times, no small number within the American military forces—both officers and enlisted men—were so utterly demoralized that they were more inclined to give up than to fight on, to simply return home to their families and friends. Some soldiers didn’t have shoes to wear or blankets to keep them warm or enough rations to keep them fed and energized. They were young and homesick and convinced neither they nor those for whom they were supposedly fighting had any hope for the future.