I’ve seen this date twice here as a watershed of America’s decline, and I don’t understand it. Why about the attacks made America’s trajectory change so? Is it because we were somehow vulnerable? Was our response incorrect?
I don’t see this as a seminal event to America’s greatness either way.
Yes, America is just like Rome, and our empire will one day fall. It is, as you say, just a matter of time.
But where are we in our parallel Rome analogy? The Punic Wars, the winning of which made Rome the master of the Mediterranean world? And then after the Punic Wars–WWII–we had Marius with the professional army replacing the citizen-soldiers? So who’s Sulla in this analogy? Is Trump supposed to be Julius Caesar? That’s laughable, he doesn’t even rise to the gravitas of a Crassus, he’s not the richest man in America, and he’s not going to be leading the legions on a doomed expedition to Parthia.
And you know, if we’re the Roman Republic which is dooooooomed any time now, well, Rome either had another 500 or 1500 years after the fall of the Republic to really and for real fall. Rome hadn’t reached its height when Julius toppled the Republic and Augustus put it back together. And the time between when Caesar ended the Republic and Commodus began the final decline was 220 years. Then another 250 years of decline and fall.
Or we could decide that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire isn’t a great metaphor for the decline and fall of countries. I mean, it used to be that the sun never set on the British Empire. Now all that’s left are a few specks. But the people are Britain are by far better off than they’ve ever been. The loss of the empire didn’t lead to a new dark age, instead it left everyone better off, both former conquered and former conquerer. Or take Germany and Japan flattened to pieces after losing WWII. Was there a dark age, with subsistence farmers plowing fields in the ruins of Berlin and Tokyo?
In just a few decades after losing the war, both Japan and Germany were better off than they’d ever been, and importantly, better off than they would have been if they had somehow won the war.
So, America. We can look at all kinds of trend lines for all kinds of metrics. Some of those metrics are going up, up, up. Some used to go up, but now are kind of flat. And some are going down. Except when we look at trend lines in the past, we don’t see that only those countries where the metrics always and inevitably improved survived. Countries have survived even though some metrics have declined for a while. Countries have transitioned from being first rank powers to second rank powers without experiencing disaster. Countries have been second rank powers while still being better places to live than the supposed first rank powers (Hi Canada!).
We tend to freak out at the metrics where we’re not doing so well. But the thing is, that’s the way we improve those metrics. These aren’t always things outside our control, we could chose to fix the problems instead of resigning ourselves to handing the crown to Odoacer.
See, the reason people make such a big deal about the Roman Empire is that it was so much UNLIKE other empires and kingdoms that came and went with flickering regularity in the ancient world. No country or empire of the modern world is very much like the empire of Rome that lasted more than a thousand years. And the general collapse of wealth, trade, technology and population took hundreds and hundreds of years to recover from.
So because in America we’ve had a couple decades of increasing income inequality, or children disrespecting their elders, and the youth chasing frivolity and license, we’re about to collapse. Like Rome in 476. But not like France in 1973, or the British Empire in 1783 or 1947, or Spain in 1821 or 1898, or any of the hundreds of other countries who have experienced setbacks over the thousands of years of recorded history. But if we are Rome in 476, how come we never got the 200 years of more or less continuous decline and fall from our peak in…where was our peak again? If at the death of Marcus Aurelius we could say that Rome would never again reach those heights, that’s still an extremely lofty height to fall from, and such a fall took literally centuries.
I do think that we are in decline, but I also think it’s reversible. As far as the reason for our decline, I don’t blame China, the EU, radical Islam, Mexican immigrants, or any other foreign power. Our decline is due to becoming more isolationist. Things like pulling out of the Paris climate accords, threatening to pull out of NATO, threatening to pull out of NAFTA, etc. are what are causing our decline. Those are all things that could be changed if we had better leadership.
Regarding comparisons to the Roman Empire, I was pondering that as well today, and I think it also fell apart internally, with the Germanic invaders succeeding due to the Roman citizens having no interest in maintaining the empire. In this way the fall of the Roman Empire was similar to the US, in that if we as a country decide to abdicate our position in the international community we will also suffer a similar decline.
No nation can be on the rise forever. No organization or process can be forever on the rise. The trick is to turn the ups and downs into cycling waves with more time spent with our heads above water than not, rather than have one glorious rise and peak and then utterly crash and burn.
Going to Lemur866’s excellent contribution IMO one of the biggest accidental legacies of Rome to its great-grandchild cultures was that archetype of the Rise, Decline and Fall – and the implicit conclusion drawn by those later successors that the Glory That Was Rome was something to cry about over what was lost, and that such loss could and should have been avoided rather than fall to “barbarians”. As **Lemur866 **points out, the problem is that Rome is a far outlier. No power in the West has stood that long continuously on top of their game, or took down so much of the general socioeconomic order when it went down, that is not the normal thing to happen (if anything that’s a lesson about not relying on one single power to hold everything together).
So there is the aspect of what if our “fall” merely means we become a middle-of-the-pack nation slogging by in humbled mediocrity, rather than a general civil collapse where reloaded ammunition becomes the legal tender. I’ll take that any day of the week. That the alternative to being undisputed Top Dog is to become a failed state and be set upon by the barbarians while we scrounge to survive is yet another instance of relying too much on the Roman archetype.
OTOH you have a case like China which for the past 26 centuries saw a cycle of rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall and rinse and repeat over centuries on end – sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly and violently (in both directions); sometimes staying at the top or at the bottom vanishingly briefly and some times for a prolonged time; sometimes unified or divided, under homegrown independence or under interloper rulers; sometimes being the most advanced society on Earth and sometimes stagnant and left behind. But in the end there it is still: China.
I’ll add one more thing about the Roman archetype to consider. I think one distinguishing feature with Rome that makes it’s fall fascinating is that it fell to barbarians rather than another empire. Before that and since then the great empires typically were replaced by a new rising empire. Assuming the US does lose it’s status, the question is will we be replaced by barbarians or a greater power.
I think for one thing the attacks made us a more afraid, dumb country. Fear shuts down higher reasoning abilities, and for years after 9/11 we were a more authoritarian, frightened nation. It seems to have broken now, but that was a bad time in our culture. I remember journalists being fired for saying the US didnt’ have an invasion plan in Iraq (which was true), or the media refusing to investigate the Iraq war claims.
Plus it led to the US depending more on military power to achieve its goals, and the stereotype of an empire in decline relies more and more on military power because it is losing diplomatic power, ideological power and economic power is true.
9/11 didn’t cause the decline, but it accelerated it. However we aren’t going to collapse, we will just become like Britain after their empire ended.
I think we are soon looking at a tripolar world. US, EU & China. Minor powers like Japan & Russia will still be there but we are moving away from a unipolar world to a tripolar one. 9/11 (and Trump) both accelerated this transition.
Just to cavil, we could lose our status without being replaced by either barbarians or a greater power. Look at Japan today, or Sweden. No longer great powers, but far from washed up.
However, to answer the question, I’m afraid, were we to fall, we’d be replaced by something semi-barbarous, such as the drug cartels who all but rule Mexico.
The US has given up on promoting general welfare. I am thinking of health care, but also of the deplorable state of our infrastructure, including roads, bridges, dams and the like. The fact that there is not even any serious discussion of this is evidence of the decline. Ronald Reagan started this.
When one observes present day American society, the most striking thing one will notice is the complete lack of trust; a society where no one believes what the government says, no one believes what the media is saying, no one trusts what their neighbors are saying, and everyone’s got their own far-fetched theory as to what’s “really” going on. Opinion polls in the U.S. have repeatedly documented a growing lack of confidence and an increasing amount of contempt for the major institutions of U.S. society. When one observes U.S. society, one will notice a society that is only capable of maintaining ‘law and order’ by having far and away the highest imprisonment rate in the world. One will also notice the complete lack of social cohesion, the “individualism,” the breakdown of the spiritual bonds that held past traditional societies together.
Speaking as a non-American, it’s really the point American turned from a broadly friendly, welcoming, inviting country to an increasingly paranoid, unwelcoming one that treats too many of its visitors - even those from allied nations - with faint suspicion.
American society is odd too, in that you’ve got bleeding edge technological innovation right next to abject, almost third-world poverty; you’ve got this bizarre idea that universal healthcare is actually bad, and then there’s blatantly partisan news encouraging political tribalism which is quite jarring to a foreigner.
Is America in decline? No, I don’t think so. It’s got some issues to sort out, as all countries do, but as someone else noted I think what we’re seeing is other places catching up to the US.
This. The United States is declining relative to other countries. Lets say you were an 8 and they were a 2. You were 4 times as good. Now they are a 7 and you are a 9. You are now only less than a fifth as good.
Does not mean the US is actually declining in absolute terms.
Dunno about that. Australian visa application procedures make American ones look like a Kindergarten test and Australia locks asylum seekers up in Pacific Islands; I don’t think the US is the worst offender here (and neither is Australia). I only have visited the US regularly since 2013 and all my previous visits bar one were before 9/11 and I cannot say that I found it to be particularly onerous, passport control at JFK Terminal 4 is hell, but that’s due to the design of the place, not the authorities. And the automatic passport control machines have helped there. Maybe they were worse between 9/11 and 2013 and improved cause they heard I was returning? 
Every society has its quirks and problems. Though I’ll admit the rather at times abject poverty in places can be jarring. Though it’s more like you are thinking “richest country in the world, should not happen” as opposed to some fundamental problem.
Wendell makes the valid point that you need measurable criteria. This is a measurable criteria, and it’s going down. Social trust is a key measure of how well a society is doing. High levels of social trust reduce the enormous inefficiency involved in trying to live, govern and do business in places where corruption and reflexive antipathy across societal divisions are the norm and everything you try to do is limited by the need to watch your back continually.
Social trust had undergone very substantial decline in the US. Look at the graphson this page (about a third of the way down). Interpersonal trust and trust in government in the US are both at historic lows.
At the same time, US politics has become polarised to the point of near-disfunctionality. Many of us would already have seen this compelling visualisation. US congress has gone from a place where the parties differed but were nonetheless able to work sensibly together much of the time, to a place where each party reflexively opposes everything the other does to the point of near paralysis.
That’s damaging enough, but it’s done broader civil damage; the process of utterly demonizing everything that the opposition does no matter how sensible has necessarily involved throwing reasoning and truth out the window.
That cancer has now spread to the point whereanother poll reveals disturbing levels of mistrust and political isolation. A third of the supporters of one political party get their news entirely from a source that is openly partisan. Nearly ninety percent of the supporters of that party believe that their elected leader is more trustworthy than a basically neutral mainstream news outlet, despite the fact that the leader in question barely attempts to conceal his contempt for truth.
Building trust takes years, losing trust takes a moment. It is one of the greatest things the US has and it’s in steep decline. Does that mean America is in decline? You could only measure that on a multiple axis basis, but IMHO on one very important axis I think the answer is yes.
By the way, several people have posted to the effect that the US still ranks head and shoulders ahead on numerous measures. That word “decline”; I don’t think it means what you seem to be assuming it means.
Britain is a bus running on empty now. What little gas it had left in the tank the Brexiteers just poured out onto the ground in a fit of pique that blacks were allowed onto the bus, and that the Brexiteers weren’t the driver.
Definitely Nero.
Perhaps more importantly, attempts to improve on many of the other axes rely in no small part on coordination and cooperation that requires this trust. For example, we could try to fix the deplorable state of our health care system… but half the country essentially believed that in doing so, we would be opening the door to the government murdering their grandparents. We could try to get our shit together on higher education, but half the country thinks higher education as a whole is a bad thing, and they don’t trust academia. We could try to deal with gun violence, but half the country believes the other half is handling in poor faith any time the issue comes up, up to and including accusations that various mass shootings were false flag attacks in an attempt to grab our guns. We could try to address the issue of endemic police brutality, but half the country thinks that “Black Lives Matters” is a terrorist organization, and “Blue Lives Matters” is entirely sensible, and any attempt to address obscene cases like Tamir Rice’s gets one labeled as “anti-cop”. There is no trust; half the country does not believe that the other half operates in good faith, and the other half does not believe that the first half operates with half a functioning brain cell.
This is fueled in no small part by a partisan right-wing news media that intentionally skews the news one way while demonizing any neutral or non-partisan sources, and a populace who, in disturbing numbers, listens almost exclusively to those news sources and disregards others.
Why yes, I am implying this is not a bipartisan problem. Because it isn’t (and that piece was written years before Trump took the head of the party!).
I don’t know what’s involved in getting a visa for Australia but foreign friends of mine say it’s really not that hard as long as you’re not planning on moving here.
And it’s not just about passport control or visas. It’s about all the security theatre, and insisting the rest of the world ban people from taking bottles of soft drink on planes, or have to take their shoes off, or put laptops through the X-ray machine in a separate tray,
I went through security at Singapore recently and it was a breeze - bag on the X-ray conveyer, through the metal detector, metal detector beeped, super polite and friendly security guy waved the wand over me, saw my belt had set it off, smiled, told me that was fine and wished me a pleasant flight as I collected my bags. It might have taken literally two minutes from me arriving at the checkpoint area to being on the other side wondering if there were any spare power points for my laptop (there weren’t. :p)
Contrast with every American airport I’ve been through, where security has enormous queues, takes forever, and has lots and lots of people in uniforms giving you the hairy eyeball the whole time.
Australia locking people up in tropical concentration camps is less out of fear and more out of either A) racism or B) concerns about integrity of our immigration policies, depending on which media outlets/press releases you read.
It’s not the existence of abject poverty as much as its proximity to the high-tech wealthy side of things that I find particularly disconcerting. Every country has its rich and poor areas, but they aren’t usually mixed so casually together - parts of downtown Los Angeles are super modern and first world, while literally one street over looks like the setting for a Grand Theft Auto gang shootout.
Every American city I’ve been to has significant numbers of homeless people - scary looking homeless people, some of whom clearly have issues they aren’t receiving the proper support for - which is totally alien to my experiences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the UK.
Obviously there are homeless people in other countries - we have them in Australia, too - but there really are a lot of them in America, certainly more visible than I’ve encountered anywhere else.
I think he talking more about the politics. In the US politics is more religion like than politics.
In UK, Canada and Europe you normally get people picking and choosing more say I support conservatives on this view, liberals on this view, conservatives on this view so on.
In the the US it more party line religion than picking and choosing. If you by coast and big city you are more likely a liberals. If you are in the south or in country you more likely a conservatives.
No debates or dialogues but sound bite, naming calling, political rhetoric and yelling in the US on like say the UK, Canada and Europe that more debates or dialogues.
So from the US politics in the US it is more religion and where born.So from that point of view US politics is mess and no country unity at all.
[pssst! Martini, they have to vacuum or polish the floors and that requires powerpoints. Check the backs of pillars and in obscure wall corners. Works every time!]
That hits the nail right there. Americas ascendency post war was inevitable economically of course, but culturally I think it did a lot of sneaky long term damage however because of how strangely it affected the American homeland. I’m not sure there has been precedence in history of such a large country as America mobilizing so hard and so fast and got involved in such a huge stinking war without a comparably damaged home front or being next to one that did to ‘show for it’. The Brits got to see it, the French, Chinese, Germans, Italians, Indians, Japanese; a lot of countries got their shit bombed or invaded or messed with to some degree. People grieved and hurt for decades after this, populations shifted around to accommodate the results, nations in general were processing goodness knows what spectrum of emotions between them. There was no comparable American soul searching afterward because the economy was too busy becoming King of the World. The golden age led astray any inquiring minds to the contrary; after all America more or less shortened the war a great deal (and the sacrifice made should never be forgotten!) and put Europe back on its feet, and in the meantime became the worlds richest bank. How to argue with those results? The golden age wasn’t questioned because it felt right, rather than being a logical but temporary result of a weird part of human history. The American economy was unnaturally boosted by the war time economy and afterward had effectively zero competition to compensate for this effect for many decades… and this snowballed into exceptionalism. Europe obliged this and that is a failing on their part, too.
America is not special. America is not important. American hegemony is a disingenuous concept furthered by the result of a massive, silly war some eight decades and a half dozen failed military adventures in between ago. Things are now seeking a balance, and it has half of you lot patriotically confused or angry while the other half has figured out what the heck is up, which is fantastic to see. The branch that bends to the storm does not break - the stiff branch does, despite all its attempts at being strong. Cut your dumb military down, and save a packet!
Maybe it’s not a bad think to realize that there are limits to our power. It seems to me that nearly every major war has started because one side or the other thought there was such a power discrepancy that they could just quickly “knock off” the other. Usually with mutually catastrophic results.
With my own limited understanding of history, it seems to me that empires decline because the world around them changes faster than they can adapt. Rome spread itself too thin and collapsed under the weight of it’s military obligations when it could no longer hold itself together through violence.
The old empires of the French, British, Ottomans, Austro-Hungaria, Germany and so on tore themselves apart over the course of two World Wars. I suspect largely due to how industrialization now made war so destructive that no nation could ever “win” intact.
The USSR collapsed because nuclear weapons prevented direct military conflict and their economic model couldn’t compete.
I suspect that, as I mentioned before, globalization is largely going to render the old model of nation states and superpowers run by heads of state largely irrelevant. Or at least very different.
Even if national borders don’t change, actual economic and political power seems to be transitioning to large urban centers like New York, London, and so on.
So IOW, the idea of “America” being able to dictate to a largely distributed and networked world will eventually become more absurd.
Is that really true though? That is to say, if you want to get from point A to point B anywhere in the USA, do you ever really have a problem?