Looking at things from a historical perspective, with regard to failed nation-states, is America in decline? If so, when would you say the decline began?
Myself, I think we are in a decline and have been since the Vietnam War. I think that conflict marked a turning point in American morale and pride from which we’ve never quite recovered. Combine the tragedy of Vietnam with the body blow to governmental integrity in Watergate; the loss of dignity of the office of the President with Monica Lewinsky; and the loss of feeling of safety (and resulting loss of freedoms and privacy) with 9/11 along with the nation becoming in the past 40 years polarized, to the point now where the government is arguably broken, and I feel we are in a (reversible) decline. I feel the only way it can be reversed is by some truly transformative figure like Theodore Roosevelt coming out of the woodwork, who is unafraid to challenge the stagnancy of large institutions and unafraid of corporate power, and who makes a great deal of changes to the Federal Government. If we continue on our current course - electing celebrities - I think we will become more and more of a joke. We are losing a great deal of our soft power and credibility as a nation under Trump; Obama proved to be little more than a slightly effective caretaker due to obstruction. I think with the level of polarization and our standing in the world, we are headed for a steep decline unless some Theodore Roosevelt is out there.
Give us a list of all the ways that you think the U.S. is in decline and how you propose to measure those ways. No, it’s not sufficient just to say that it feels to you that the U.S. is getting better or worse in those ways. Without that, there’s nothing to discuss.
This is much too vague a question. You need to get specific. For example Silicon Valley is the best in the world. Conversely wages for the bulk of the population haven’t improved in real terms for the last 30 or so years.
“the loss of dignity of the office of the President with Monica Lewinsky”. No the private sexual behavior of Bill Clinton didn’t cause a long-term loss of dignity to the office of the President-instead it’s things like what Trump is doing.
1] Domestic tranquility - violent crimes rates have significantly declined these past twenty years …
2] Common defense - I know Canada has amassed almost all her military might along the border, but I’m not worried …
3] Promoting the general welfare - The rich are getting richer but the poor still aren’t starving …
A completely dysfunctional Federal government in all other respects might be the best thing possible to preserve the Union … each of the 50 State governments are perfectly capable of governing and still hold true to the three principles above …
If you look at decline in regard to failed nation-states they were on descent that they never turned around. The US has had many ups and downs in many areas but nothing that couldn’t be turned around so far. So take any particular measurement and we could be dropping there but I don’t see any indication that we’re in a spin dive that we couldn’t pull out of. In terms of the future I don’t see that we’re closer to the worst of times than the best of times.
Certain various measures of human weal – say, infant mortality, life-expectancy, education rates – where the U.S. once led, now find us “only” in third or tenth place world-wide. We’ve “declined” a little from a solid leadership position in overall quality of life, to somewhere in the upper third of the G20, but not pegged at the top.
Much of this is due to the retreat from governance initiated by the Reagan administration. Some of it may be due to the lack of a fierce rival, now that the USSR is gone. For instance, the Apollo Program was prompted, in large part, by the fear that the Russians would get to the moon first.
Frankly, I think it is time the U.S. scaled back its “world leadership” role in terms of military might. We could cut our military budget to 1/5 of what we spend now, and still have plenty, not only for national defense, but also for force-projection to react to threats abroad. We no longer are the Imperial U.S. of 1898 nor the world-dominating polity of 1948.
It’s time to withdraw a little from strutting the world’s stage like a colossus, and pay a little more attention to our own garden.
Absolute decline – as in, it’s worse to be an American now than it used to be – or relative decline compared to other nations?
I don’t think there’s any way you can say America is worse today, in an absolute sense, than it was in, say, the 1980’s. Technology has improved dramatically and because of this the availability of information has improved. Crime rates have declined substantially. Medicine continues to advance, which makes life far better for people with all sorts of previously untreatable diseases. (As one example: My octogenarian grandmother would be blind today if not for the recent advances in the treatment of macular degeneration. Instead she’s reading books on her tablet and replying to my text messages on her smartphone, while still living in the house she grew up in.) Obviously there have been dramatic gains when it comes to legal recognition of the rights of LGBT people. And as much as we have reason to be concerned about Russia and North Korea, the possibility of a full scale nuclear war is still far more remote than it was in, say, 1983. (See Able Archer '83, and the false-alarm incident involving Stanislav Petrov.)
Certainly, there have been greater improvements in many other countries (some of which were much worse off to start with). And in terms of overall health, happiness, and life expectancy, the U.S. is often reported to be trailing several of the European democracies. And I think it may be the case that U.S. influence in the world peaked shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, or at least has been in decline since the war in Iraq began. Plus potential rivals such as China are on the rise. And of course international terrorism is much more in all of our minds ever since 2001. And global warming looms as a serious problem, in no small part because many Americans remain in denial about it. Plus we have a host of other problems: aging infrastructure, an aging population with rising health-care costs, the erosion of our privacy due to both government surveillance and corporate data gathering, many forms of on-going discrimination, the loss of manufacturing jobs, etc.
But on the whole, I would much rather be an American today than at any previous point in our history.
America is a deeply troubled society. All mass societies are deeply neurotic, deeply troubled, and suffer from many internal contradictions. But none more so than the present day U.S. And it is for that reason I believe that America’s power and credibility in the world is waning.
Things are too far gone now, the process of dissolution will continue. America will fall further into neurosis, disorder, and incoherence, and it’s power and credibility in the global scene will continue to decline. The recent election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land reflects this.
Decline and collapse doesn’t have to be all bad. The British, French, German, and Japanese Empires ended and what’s left is well off, materially speaking.
America might be losing the Cold War more slowly than the Russians did. Chalmers Johnson said it better than I could:
Whether that will happen tomorrow or in a hundred years, who knows. America could choose to disengage, but given the attitudes of its elites and opinion makers I doubt it. Look only to the response to Trump’s bombing of a Syrian runway.
Hmmm. As a long time student of history, I’ve been hearing talk of American and other “declines” for a long time now. Frankly, I’ve become skeptical about the whole “nation state in ascendancy/decline” model altogether. Mainly because the whole idea of each phase, is dependent on attitudes about various things, and about whether you consider the culture to be the important functional element, or the size of the officially designated territory involved, or the relative military strength and so on.
It’s even more difficult to judge, because so much of America’s own history has been propagandized to the point where many people think we were ALWAYS a great nation, while others are so set on looking at the negative actions of the past, that they are sure that we were never really great. The Big Business As Proof folks would tend to think everything’s been going down hill since the antitrust acts were passed.
Right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with China appearing to be “taming itself” by slowly moving towards capitalist-communism, it seemed to some that we’d reached the highest possible pinnacle. Actually, some think that illusion led directly to the neocon foolishness of invading (or planning to invade) a series of ME countries, with the unspoken plan being to use our temporary hegemony, to clean up the last few “defective” regimes, and then live happily ever after.
And then the misadventure of trying to “tidy up” Iraq and Afghanistan at nearly the same time, revealed just how powerful and influential we actually were NOT. North Korea went nuclear, and the idea that we could knock them off with a quick strike vanished. Russia tore a chunk off of the Ukraine, and no one anywhere in the world did more than protest. Bottom line, at least SOME of us realized that the idea that the US was the most powerful and influential democracy on the planet was actually more illusion than fact, so maybe the idea that we are in dramatic decline is an illusion as well.
Certainly America’s influence in the world is declining. Major accelerants of the process were the Bush administration’s attempts to bully its allies into supporting the war in Iraq and the Trump administration’s…well, pretty much everything… but really this is an inevitable consequence of the post-Cold War era where America’s role as Leader of the Free World became increasingly unnecessary at the same time other economies were continuing to grow. I’d argue that the peak was likely in the Reagan/Bush Sr era; as the 1990s drew on and Clinton fumbled the ball on Rwanda and delegated Yugoslavia to NATO, we were already beginning to see the power beginning to drain away. And while Obama managed to restore much of America’s credibility after the Bush era, he did nothing to extend its influence.
The question now isn’t how we can get back what we once had. We can’t - that era is gone. The question is how we can be a major player in the world as it is becoming, and that requires a whole different mindset.
I feel that it’s important to point out that the USA still represents around 22% of the total world GDP. China is second with around 13% (with 4x the population), then Japan with around 6%.
The entire EU is slightly more than the USA, but at this point, I wouldn’t put money on them becoming the dominant unified political and economic force in the world.
I do think that the trends of globalization are changing the old model of an American superpower dominating the world through economic and military might. National boundaries seem like they are becoming less relevant with respect to business or even military conflict.
In some ways we are. Economic insecurity is worse for many people due to a mix of fewer good jobs, higher expenses and stagnant wages. Plus our political divide is getting worse.
But a lot of it is because other nations are rising. China is seeing their gdp double every 7-10 years. I think it is good, the US needs some competition and humility. The US isn’t in decline, places like China are catching up. That is good if those nations see less poverty and more science and technology.
We’ve been declining in relative terms since the 1950s. But that’s because our competitors’ economies were crushed by the war, not because we were particularly great. In absolute terms, it is unquestionably better to be an American today than it was at any previous time. We have better medicine, better entertainment, better food, fewer military threats, and the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips. Also black people can vote and sit at lunch counters, gay and lesbian couples can marry, women have the right to bodily autonomy, and so on.
Is that peak greatness, or do you see things continue to improve from here? A number of metrics related to relative wealth imbalance seem to be moving in the wrong direction now.
America has been in decline ever since the end of World War II. There were brief times - like the 1980s and 1990s when it rose up again - but ever since 8:00 AM Eastern seaboard time on 9-11-2001 it’s been going steadily downwards.