State of the Union,
Empire Falls
excerpted from the book
Dark Ages America
The Final Phase of Empire
by Morris Berman
WW Norton, 2006, paper
State of the Union
p281
H. L. Mencken, "Bayard vs. Lionheart," Baltimore Evening
Sun, 26 July 1920
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents,
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great
and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their
heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by
a downright moron.
p282
As Fareed Zakaria notes, the sacred cow in the United States is
the American people, to which politicians have to pay ritual homage
if they value their careers. No matter how manifestly stupid the
people's behavior is, American politicians praise their sagacity.
Uttering the phrase, "the American people," says Zakaria,
is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has
the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical,
all-knowing entity. Yet what if "the American people"
are, in the words of Nicholas von Hoffman, a collection of "asses,
dolts, and blockheads"? Americans, says Hoffman, are living
in a glass dome, a kind of terrarium, cut off from both reality
and the outside world-"bobbleheads in Bubbleland They shop
in bubbled malls, they live in gated communities, and they move
from place to place breathing their own, private air in the bubble-mobiles
known as SUVs." They unquestioningly take their "truth"
from the government, whereas in other countries grown-ups know
there is no truth teat to suck on, and if you want it you have
to go dig up the information for yourself. If, for example, Americans
had wanted to know the truth about our record in the Middle East,
there was enough reliable literature on the subject for them to
do so. But they have no interest in these sorts of things; instead
von Hoffman continues, they are taken up with more important things
than war and peace, like pro football and self improvement."
The only way out of this destructive American insularity is for
"the masses of moron manipulatees to demoronize themselves."
p283
sociologist Philip Slater
"The people are not 'innocent of
their rulers' military expeditions."
p284
... in the nations of the developed world, one can have fundamental
disagreements with the government or even the dominant value system
and it is perfectly all right: one won't be attacked as "un-Italian"
or "un-Danish," let say. But America is quite different
in this respect: one is immediately branded as being "un-American"
if one breaks with the pack, which includes voicing any fundamental
criticism at all. This relates to our discussion of America civil
religion, wherein the United States and its history are effectively
elevated to divine status. The American Dream - basically, shopping,
radical individualism, and the "religion" of America
(including its God-given mission to democratize the rest of the
world - is so fiercely held that it can rightly be characterized
as an addiction Hence, the rage that emerges when it is challenged,
even slightly.
p284
As sociologist Sharon Zukin notes, "The seduction of shopping
is not about buying goods. It about dreaming of a perfect society
and a perfect self." We are looking, she says, "for
truth with a capital T... In a society where we no longer have
contact with nature or beauty in our daily lives, shopping is
one of the few ways we have left to create a sense of ultimate
value. 'We are", she concludes, "searching for our dreams;'
and seek to fulfill them in stores.
p295
... 70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or
congressmen; more than half don't know the actual number of senators,
and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by
the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent cannot name the three
branches of government. Other studies reveal that uninformed or
undecided voters often vote for the candidate whose name and packaging
(e.g., logo) are the most powerful; color is apparently a major
factor in their decision. Only 21 percent of college-age Americans
today read a daily newspaper, as compared with 46 percent in 1972.
A 2002 study of college students in California found that most
freshmen were not able to analyze arguments, synthesize information,
or write papers that were free of major language errors. Over
the past twenty years, the fraction of Americans age eighteen
to twenty-four engaged in literary reading dropped 28 percent,
and in general nonreaders now constitute more than half of the
American population.
p298
George W. Bush, writes Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley,
"is a representative figure, who embodies, at this peculiar
and scary moment in our history; aspects of the American state
of mind and heart that cannot be dismissed as merely his own idiosyncrasies."
Several decades ago, playwright Arthur Miller remarked that "Richard
Nixon's character is our history," which was true when he
said it. Now it is Bush who holds that particular distinction,
and it will remain true long after his presidency is over. If
the man wound up in the White House by accident or theft in 2000,
the same cannot be said of him in 2004. The basic perception of
Americans from the outside is that we are children, adolescents
at best, and Bush is just such a person. He is an alcoholic who
never actually did the spiritual work that Alcoholics Anonymous
asks of its members, and as a result no emotional growth ever
took place. Switching from alcohol to religion, Bush remains essentially
an adolescent, what AA refers to as a "dry drunk." His
excitement over being able to wield power, to kill people, as
a substitute for dealing with his considerable "inner demons"
is quite palpable. Philosopher Peter Singer has mapped his simplistic,
Manichaean worldview; psychiatrist Justin Frank shows how early
damage left the man-boy unable to empathize, to feel the pain
of other human beings. Indeed, says Frank, it left him with a
"lifelong streak of sadism," and Christian fundamentalist
sadism at that. But the real horror is that the majority of Americans
do not see through this, and so mistake what is actually massive
dysfunction and insecurity, including emptiness, alienation, violence,
and ignorance-for strength. This man is no historical accident,
and future presidents, I suspect, are going to be variations on
this theme, which is grounded in a widespread cultural pattern."
It is this, above all, that acts as a
brake on any possible recovery for American civilization. The
day after the 2004 election, a colleague of mine from Ohio, which
was the state that put Bush over the top, said to me, after I
remarked that Kerry had clearly won the three debates: "You
are missing the point. Most folks in Ohio are pretty basic, not
very successful, and not particularly happy with their lives.
Believe me, I know; I was born and raised there. When they see
Bush getting emotional and stumbling over elementary English words,
they identify with him, whereas they find Kerry cool and intelligent,
and they experience this as threatening, above their heads. To
them, Kerry's wife, who speaks several languages, comes off as
un-American, a kind of alien being; and his kids, en route to
professional careers, make them feel uncomfortable about their
own kids, who are in dead-end jobs and perhaps, like the Bush
daughters, getting pulled over for drunk driving. In short, Kerry
stirs deep anxieties about their selves, whereas Bush, because
he is a bungler, soothes those anxieties, reassures these folks
that their failure and antiintellectualism is more 'genuine 'down
to earth." Bush also, it seems to me, validates their rigidity,
their insistence on having simple answers, and their repressed
violence. Finally, he tells them that the American Dream is alive
and well, and so keeps their undercurrent of panic at arm's length.
In a word, Bush is us-or at least, a whole lot of us-and the scariness
of this is not easy to digest. Given a population that embraces
the collection of ideas, values, and policies that George W. Bush
represents, how can a decline be avoided, or arrested? Where will
a sane foreign policy come from, given the fact that neither he,
nor the American people, as the Los Angeles journalist john Powers
observes, are able to grasp the perfectly obvious bottom line,
that "they hate us because we don't even know why they hate
us"?
p300
This was the glory of America: to be a land of great promise,
a refuge from political tyranny, a place of immense creative energy,
and the world locus of political freedom. But the glory had a
shadow; a set of structural problems that were present quite early
on and that eventually landed us in a very different, and inglorious,
place. Those of us who now have different values from the country
may have to look elsewhere for hope, quality, humanism, and-possibly-freedom,
which is not exactly what we had in mind when we were growing
up.
p301
Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"
There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory-when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,-barbarism at last.
p301
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue
This time . . . the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing for quite some time.
p302
* We are in a state of advanced cultural disintegration, or what
might be termed spiritual death. Given the emptiness, alienation,
violence, and ignorance that are now pervasive in this country,
it is hard to imagine where a recovery would come from. The self-correction
theory is at least partly based on the popular reaction of an
informed citizenry. In this regard, the nature of the American
populace today is not a source of inspiration or hope.
* As far as civil liberties go, the development
and proliferation of extremely sophisticated surveillance technologies
changes the picture considerably These compromise the privacy
of the individual out of existence, and the technology is clearly
here to stay. Once in practice, it is very difficult to pull back
from its employment; close governmental and even corporate observation
of the citizenry, along with the massive collection of data, has
now become the norm. All of this makes repression easy and change
difficult-
* We seem to have passed, in significant
ways, from a nation of laws to a nation of men. This is the first
time in our history, for example, that we rewrote the law to make
torture legal, or seriously contemplated canceling a presidential
election. Nor has there been any widespread objection on the part
of the American people to these developments. Indeed, the dust
settled on them fairly quickly; they too just became part of the
"natural" political landscape.
* As both Lieven and Stone themselves
admit, 9/11 may well have damaged the cyclical or self-correcting
pattern for good. After all, the "war on terror" is
really a permanent state of war, without a clear objective and
without a specific enemy. The risk, says Stone, is that so-called
emergency restrictions will become a "permanent fixture of
American life." It is also very likely that we shall eventually
be attacked again, probably with nuclear weapons-in which case,
all bets are off. "Tolerant pluralism" will definitely
not be the order of the day.
* Changes in quantity eventually turn
into changes in quality. Past cyclical alternations may have finally
taken their toll and exhausted our ability to rebound. Democrat
friends try to reassure me: "Listen, we recovered from right-wing
setbacks in the past." Did we? Repression in World War I,
as historian Eric Foner observes, destroyed the Industrial Workers
of the World, the Socialist party, and much of the labor movement.'
Personally, I don't believe this country ever really recovered
from McCarthyism, which dealt a severe blow to movements for social
change, or from Ronald Reagan, whose spirit strongly animates
the forces dismantling what's left of the New Deal. We didn't
survive Vietnam; we didn't survive the repeal of Bretton Woods.
The point is that when you look at the larger picture or the long
waves, the short-term cycles seem far less impressive. Thus Arnold
Toynbee noted that in the process of decline a civilization may,
from time to time, rally for a while; but it is the overall trajectory,
the structural properties of the situation, that ultimately determine
the outcome.
* Immanuel Wallerstein remarks that Europe
and Asia see us as much less important on the international scene,
that the dollar is weaker, that nuclear proliferation is probably
unstoppable, that the US. military is stretched to the limit,
and that our national and trade debts are enormous. Our days of
hegemony, and probably even leadership, would thus seem to be
over. Can America rebound from all this? It depends, he points
out, on how one defines "rebound." A genuine rebound
would require an internal assessment of values and social structure,
and a reversal of the deep social, economic, and political polarization
of the last thirty years.' It would also require changing basic
American habits and values, the minute particulars of daily life,
and this simply isn't going to happen. Jimmy Carter tried something
like this and was booted out of office for his efforts, inasmuch
as the American people much prefer fantasy to reality. In addition,
large-scale foreign and domestic policy is grounded in these minute
particulars, making substantive changes terribly unlikely. So
while I agree with Wallerstein that there is no hope without an
"internal assessment," I very much doubt that such an
assessment will come to pass.
p306
Democrats versus Republicans
Since the late 1940s, the United States
has been deliberately engaged in an imperial project, and anyone
who would hold the office of the presidency has to be willing
to serve that end. All presidents have to promote the national
security state, both domestically and in American foreign policy,
if they wish to attain and hold on to power. This is why nothing
really changed after the end of the Cold War, militarily speaking.
Our empire expanded after the USSR collapsed, which would suggest
that the move toward empire in the decades after World War II
was not the result of any external threat. In the post-Cold War
era, President Clinton effectively picked up the imperial thread,
but from an economic vantage point. NAFTA got passed; American
enterprise would, he insisted, have to start operating on a global
scale. On the domestic front, the gulf between rich and poor widened
dramatically, as Clinton deregulated telecommunications and finance,
cut the capital gains tax, and "reformed" welfare. As
Chalmers Johnson notes, the rationales of free trade and open
markets were used to disguise our hegemonic power during the 1990s,
and to make that power seem benign and "natural." The
upshot was that the United States would rule the world, but under
camouflage-a kinder, gentler imperialism, if you will. But the
bottom line is that it, and it alone, would rule.
All of this makes one wonder about the
rage that conservatives had for Clinton, who was in effect carrying
out their agenda, but with a lot more panache than they could
ever hope to muster. Indeed, in a way similar to FDR, Clinton
was the ideal capitalist, smoothing over the rough edges, containing
the contradictions as best he could, and generally seeing to it
that the basic formula was left intact. The result, writes Alexander
Cockburn, was that the Democrats and their associated public interest
groups rallied around their leader
and marched into the late 1990s arm in
arm along the path sign-posted toward the greatest orgy of corporate
theft in the history of the planet, deregulation of banking and
food safety, NAFTA and the WTO [World Trade Organization], rates
of logging six times those achieved in the subsequent Bush years,
oil drilling in the Arctic, a war on Yugoslavia, a vast expansion
of the death penalty, reaffirmation of racist drug laws, [and]
the foundations of the Patriot Act.
Cockburn could also have added that Clinton
saw to it that the cruel and murderous sanctions against Iraq
were kept in place, and that in June 2004 he declared his support
for the U.S. invasion of that country. Not surprisingly, the objection
to the new world order finally materialized in the streets of
Seattle in 1999, not from within the ranks of the Democratic party.
p308
Would it have been different if John Kerry were now sitting in
the Oval Office? The point is that if you don't act as steward
and promoter of the national security state, your chances of occupying
the White House are less than zero. Even the preelection "debates"
of 2004 made this quite clear. It was not permitted, for example,
to analyze the invasion of Iraq in terms of neocon influence,
to mention the Project for the New American Century, or to state
that the war had been in the pipeline for a number of years. You
could talk about Israeli suffering, as john Edwards did; but the
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which is ultimately the
source of the suffering, was somehow off limits. It was perfectly
fine to say Iraq was a strategic error or that it was "mismanaged,"
but under no circumstances could you point out that it was an
illegal and immoral neocolonial adventure, an intervention in
someone else's civil war. And of course, absolutely verboten was
the one thing everybody in the world seems to understand but us:
that 9/11 was the blowback from an interventionist foreign policy.
These were debates with 95 percent of the political reality screened
out in advance, There was no anti-empire candidate on the podium
(nor will there ever be); so what really was being debated? An
imperialist rubric mandates a phony discussion, in which the two
candidates energetically duke it out over a soft versus hard version
of the same agenda, while a compliant press (ever mindful of their
careers) reports on the' contrast" to an ignorant and gullible
American public, who thinks it is getting the real McCoy. This
is part of the deep structure of our decline: the truth of L-our
situation won't fly politically, so perforce it must remain invisible.
p310
It may well be that the real agenda of the Bush administration
is to create a kind of soft fascism, a presidential dictatorship
or one-party system that presides over a de facto Christian plutocracy,
and that has managed to squelch all opposing voices.
p311
... it is not likely that United States will be able to recover
from eight years of a fundamentalist boy emperor and a cynical,
Dr. Strangelove-like vice president who have successfully persuaded
the majority of the American people that up is down; and who,
in a country in which an elementary understanding of thesis and
proof, evidence and logical argumentation, are no longer part
of the culture, have been able to get away with it.
p312
... comparisons between the Bush administration and the Third
Reich,(which at first glance seem preposterous, really are). Was
it an accident that, in the fall of 2004, Philip Roth published
The Plot Against America, a novel about fascism come to America
that has eerie echoes with our present situation? Or that the
eminent historian Fritz Stern referred to Bush's "mission
accomplished" landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003
as part of the "Leni Riefenstahi-ization of American politics"?
Or that philanthropist and author George Soros could say that
the statements of John Ashcroft reminded him of similar ones that
he heard coming out of the German propaganda ministry when he
was a teenager? The truth is that there are creepy parallels,
and they may get creepier. All of the social analyses of the "It
can happen here" variety; beginning with Erich Fromm's Escape
from Freedom (1941), are tied to a critique of popular culture
that points to the existence of a large mass of people who are
unable to think for themselves, operate out of an emotive basis,
confuse entertainment with education, and desperately want to
be "filled" from the outside. The ascendancy of fascism
might be a lot less inexplicable than we think, and its attraction
a lot more plausible in certain contexts than we can imagine at
this particular moment. Thus Fromm held that a big part of that
attraction was the need for a father figure who acted with conviction-someone
who, in uncertain times, was perceived (even if unconsciously)
as being able to allay widespread anxiety. And what kind of "father"
is George W. Bush? Fritz Stern remarked just prior to November
2004 that "if we re-elect Bush, it would be a judgment on
all of us." What does it mean, after all, to have an antiEnlightenment
president, and an American majority so easily seduced by faith-driven
discourse? Obviously, Roth et a!. (and I) could be accused of
paranoia here, but I can't help wondering if America may not be
drifting toward an ominous situation, with all of it being "willed
by God." 15 The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course,
is tribalism and groupthink. More and more, this is the direction
in which the United States is going. In the world of groupthink,
loyalty is everything; and it was just this kind of tribalism,
I believe, that got Bush reelected. Harvard University's Simon
Scharna notes that although Kerry won the televised debates, the
real victory "was one of body language rather than reasoned
discourse." Thus Kerry's charge that the Iraq war had actually
made America less, not more safe, and had served to recruit more
terrorists to the Al Qaeda cause failed to register with the majority
of voters. Why, asks Schama, would that be?
Because, the president had "acted,"
meaning he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in
response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong
place-as Kerry said over and over-was simply too complicated a
truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate
was saying ... it's all sand and towel-heads anyway, right? Just
smash "them ... like a ripe cantaloupe." Who them? Who
gives a shit? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to
the polls.
But we would be missing the point if we
were to conclude that ignorance or stupidity by themselves kept
Bush in the White House. They were crucial to his reelection,
to be sure, but tribalism is hardly the prerogative of the ignorant
and the stupid. In fact, many intelligent people voted for Bush.
It's a question of how one defines "intelligence," or
perhaps what kind of intelligence one is referring to. This brings
to mind the German expression blut und boden ("blood and
soil")-the tribal way of relating to the world. When the
limbic system takes over, it's about fear, testosterone, and the
logic of "either you're with us or you're against us."
In such circumstances, a high IQ counts for nothing. One sees
this blut und boden reasoning in the writings of the neocons,
for example, with their call for "World War IV" Smart
people, but not very far removed from the 29 percent of Americans
who believe that Muslims teach their children to hate and are
engaged in a worldwide conspiracy "to change the American
way of life," There is, in short, more than one way of being
dumb. The result that the Enlightenment is now skating on very
thin ice.
p316
... from 2001 to 2004 the United States went from a $5 trillion
budget surplus to a $4 trillion budget deficit ...
p317
Despite all of our vast military resources and our cutting-edge
technologies, they are in large part inadequate for fighting a
war-a real one, that is. With our decision to act as world policeman,
we have, says Chalmers Johnson, bought into a "domino theory"
that leads to an endless number of places and commitments to protect,
"resulting inevitably in imperial overstretch, bankruptcy,
and popular disaffection, precisely the maladies that plagued
Edwardian Britain." Note that since World War II, we have
avoided taking on an equal power. Our engagement with the Soviet
Union itself was a balancing act involving the (often judicious)
use of diplomacy. When we actually attacked, it was at the periphery:
Korea (a stalemate); Vietnam (a defeat). Otherwise, the engagement
consisted of covert operations against virtually defenseless nations
or massive attacks on puny countries or tinpot dictators (Grenada,
Panama, Iraq, and so on). In situations that really matter, there
is a huge gap between America's military power and its ability
to shape events according to its will. "Preponderance,"
says Zbigniew Brzezinski, "should not be confused with omnipotence."
By the summer of 2003 it had become clear that the waging of two
small "wars" and the occupation of two weak nations-Afghanistan
and Iraq-had strained our manpower to the limit."
Meanwhile, serious rivals have better
things to do with their time. New York Times reporter Jane Perlez
observes that "China has wasted little time in capitalizing
on the U.S. preoccupation with the campaign on terror to greatly
expand its influence in Asia." In fact, most Asians regard
the American obsession with terrorism as tedious, while China,
she says, "has the allure of the new." Japan, Australia,
and South Korea are all rebounding because of the huge exports
being devoured by the Chinese economy, a process the Indonesians
call "feeding the dragon." Indeed, in the fall of 2003,
former Australian prime minister Paul Keating asserted that the
American century was ending and the Asian one dawning, and there
is a good bit of data to support this prediction. During the first
six months of 2003, the Chinese car manufacturing industry, for
example, expanded at a rate of 32 percent. Shopping malls have
sprung up along Beijing's Avenue of Everlasting Peace, where tanks
once mowed down protesters. In fact, the Chinese economy has been
doubling in size every ten years, which is astounding. Thus a
2004 study by the investment firm of Goldman Sachs predicted the
Chinese economy would be the world's biggest by the early 2040s.
How long before China leverages that economic power into political
power? Already, Perlez continues, it is pushing for an East Asian
Economic Community "that would cut out the United States
and create a global bloc to rival the European Union." If
China does manage to replace us, it will do so by becoming us,
and by doing that more successfully.
And yet, there's the rub: thinking in
terms of quality, and not just geopolitically (that is, who's
top banana), this is as much a disappointment as the American
experiment finally proved to be, if not more so. Change is always
different, but it isn't necessarily better. There is little in
the way of an "inner frontier" in China, a concern about
civic virtue, civil liberties, or the quality of life-except on
the part of dissidents, who are ruthlessly crushed. Leaving its
abysmal record on human rights aside, China is beginning to resemble
the United States in Mandarin. It seems to have no larger vision,
and there is absolutely no indication that its emergence as a
superpower will herald a better world. One percent of the Chinese
population owns 40 percent of the nation's wealth, while 18 percent
lives on less than a dollar a day. In a single generation, the
gap between rich and poor there has become one of the largest
in the world, with all the attendant problems characteristic of
the US.: widespread corruption, huge inequities in health care,
gated suburban communities (with names such as Napa Valley, Palm
Springs, and Park Avenue), luxury supermarkets, fleets of SUVs
and stretch limos, millions of workers laid off, and a candid
belief on the part of the new elite that, as Ross Terrill writes
in The New Chinese Empire, "the world is a huge jungle of
Darwinian competition, where ... notions of fairness count for
little." A "me first" psychology is very much in
evidence in the People Republic no as the old socialist China
of thirty years ago is being replaced by a new "money-centered
cutthroat society" Meanwhile the number of beggars on the
streets of the major cities has risen dramatically, and in the
countryside the number of farmers living in poverty went up by
eight hundred thousand during 2003 alone.
p320
If one looks at the 140 largest companies in the Global Fortune
500 ratings, 61 of them are European, while only 50 are American.
Fourteen of the twenty largest commercial banks in the world are
European, including three of the top four.
p328
H. L. Mencken
"The whole purpose of politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with
an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Dark
Ages America
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