Don’t you think that would be ideal in its own right? The more drastically, the better what could fit a declining America better than a declining president.
Maybe it wasn’t because Joe Biden was a senile older man, despite the Republican National Committee’s tape on the subject, that he needed to be led to the red carpet in Israel. Still…
I mean, I understand. I do. After all, I’m just a year and four months older than Joe Biden in terms of aging than he is, having just turned 78. Whatever the White House spokespeople say, deterioration becomes second nature to you once you get anywhere near your age. If someone brings up a movie I saw or book I read years ago (or was it last month?) and I can’t remember a single thing about it, I’m right there with Joe on that carpet. Joe is included in the group of those of you who are of a particular age, so welcome!
Living through the decline of my nation—the once-“single superpower” on Earth—during the years of my decline is weird, if not creepy (even though Fox News isn’t picking on me). The decline-and-fall narrative in the history I remember seems uncannily familiar given the stuff I’m now forgetting. All I can say is: Welcome to an increasingly worse version of the past (just in case you’re too young to have seen it), as Joe and his top officials attempt to live life to the fullest by trying to recreate a Cold War that has been over for three decades.
Tell me that decline hasn’t been one of the most fundamental historical narratives since the extinction of the Neanderthals and the appearance of humans. Every child is aware that whatever goes up must come down. I don’t even have to finish that sentence, whatever your age, do I? When viewed in a particular light, decline and fall are the second-oldest stories in existence, behind the rise and… whatever you want to call it.
Just ask Romulus Augustulus, the final emperor of the Roman Empire (thanks a lot, Nero! ), the former kings of Sparta, the Han dynasty of China, or the Han emperors of ancient China. But in this third decade of the twenty-first century, a brand-new twist has been added to that old story. It’s not just the United States (or myself) that is declining; after all, that time when humanity flourished in its own terrible, brutal way, whether you want to talk about the extinction of species, environmental deterioration, or the escalating severity of weather disasters. Everything is it. Do not assume that China, a supposedly rising power on Earth, is excluded from this. Additionally, it suffers as a result of now emitting significantly more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation (even if the falling power of this moment, the United States, remains safely in the first place as the worst carbon emitter of all time).
The Story of Tom Engelhardt’s Rise and Fall (and So Much Else)
I find myself living through three versions of that grand narrative: my fall, the fall of my nation, and the collapse of a planet that is becoming more and more uninhabitable for all of us. In light of this, let me briefly walk you through those three oddly interwoven tales, starting with mine.
I was born in July 1944 into an America that had emerged from the “Great” Depression, as it was known, and had been transformed by World War II into a superior military and economic superpower. (In her unique way, my mother and father both served in that battle.) That worldwide conflict, which mobilized the country in every way, wouldn’t end until two American B-29 bombers dropped newly developed atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obliterating them more than a year later. For the first time in history, such acts promised an ultimate conclusion to the human story of the kind traditionally reserved for the gods. In other words, V-J (or Victory over Japan) Day was immediately tinged with a sinister undercurrent.
Worldwide conflict involving the Soviet Union
So I was born into a newly established imperial state with an unmatched worldwide punch. It would soon engage in a global conflict with the Soviet Union; another rising powerhouse initially centered on the Eurasian continent (and its newly communized Chinese ally). Of course, that would be the so-called Cold War, a nearly global conflict brought on by the danger of nuclear weapons that had been significantly upgraded and multiplied. It pitted what was then referred to as the “free world” against the communized “slave” version of the same, even though substantial portions of it were anything but “free,” and the United States frequently used its cunning to make other portions even less so.
The hottest economy in the world
Despite nuclear war worries that had kids like me “ducking and covering” under our desks at school, Americans in the US witnessed the world’s hottest economy. In the process, a good society became the Great Society, as President Lyndon Johnson named it in 1964, due to increasing affluence. Despite “red scares” and similar incidents, it was a time that would end up being better for many Americans, especially Blacks, after the civil rights struggle succeeded in ending the Jim Crow system of segregation that had replaced slavery.
Iron Curtain
In the process, the US created a world order centered on the areas under Soviet Union rule, known at the time as the “Iron Curtain.” Military installations would support it on all continents except Antarctica, alliances of all stripes, such as SEATO in Southeast Asia and NATO in Europe, and covert CIA operations spread out throughout a large portion of the world.
As for me, I continued to rise as well—first as a journalist, then as an editor in publishing—though occasionally, as during the Vietnam War years, in outright opposition to what my country was doing in the world. In a book I published titled The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, I even wrote a version of the history of my times. I had no idea how depressing the world we were constructing would end up becoming at the time. In the meantime, another form of rising in the country grew increasingly noticeable in the 1980s and 1990s, under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, during what became known as the neoliberal moment. It was of a kind of corporate power and riches that had not been seen in my generation, along with growing inequality.
I was 47 years old in 1991 when the Cold War abruptly came to an end. The Soviet Union crumbled shortly after the Red Army limped home from a ten-year disastrous war in Afghanistan (from which Washington would learn absolutely nothing). Amazingly, the United States was left on Earth as “the single superpower” after almost fifty years, seemingly victorious.
Substantial strength
According to conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the previous bipolar international order was ended, and we were now in “the unipolar moment.” Because there was just one significant power remaining on the globe, university, Krauthammer knew that unity wouldn’t last very long, but far too many officials in Washington felt differently. As it turned out, the top officials in the administrations of Bush the elder and subsequently Bush the younger had every intention of making that unrivaled moment of global triumph a permanent reality. Starting with President George H.W. Bush’s Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991, which (unfortunately) became known as the first Gulf War, a series of wars, invasions, and conflicts of every kind aimed at establishing the global order followed.
Also, as a result, the domestic “peace dividend” that had been promised with the conclusion of the Cold War is missing. As a result, no matter how much the US military could accomplish, the need to continually pump taxpayer money into the Pentagon, a “defense” budget that was unmatched, and the military-industrial complex’s companies that manufacture weapons grew after “peace” had been achieved.
As its leaders strove to assure that their nation would continue to be a superpower all of the time, all of this was to be the worldwide legacy of that one superpower. After a decade of that process, I launched TomDispatch, the website that would help me get through my years of decline. I was outraged by how Bush the younger and his top aides responded to the 9/11 attacks.
Changes in the weather
Remember that the third decline-and-fall tale only gained traction during those supposedly triumphant years. We now know that a science advisory council first alerted an American president, Lyndon Johnson, to climate change in 1965. His leading science adviser forewarned Jimmy Carter of the danger of “catastrophic climate change” in 1977. Two years later, Carter installed solar panels on the White House, only to have Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Nevertheless, the lone superpower accomplished very little in the years that followed, despite President Barack Obama being a crucial player in the negotiations for the Paris Climate Agreement (from which Donald Trump would dramatically withdraw this country).
Trump’s win in 2016 encapsulated the demise of the unipolar era in its unique way. In the lives of so many Americans, society had changed from being “wonderful” to something much grimmer, leaving them as apprentices on what increasingly appeared to be a journey to hell. His victory was a cry of agony and protested against this civilization.
Make America Great Again
Despite experiencing bankruptcy after bankruptcy, that egotistical billionaire, master thief, and disordered person managed to rise to the top of the heap. He was the most accurate representation of terrible times, deterioration, and rage about it. After all, the fact that the man running under the slogan “Make America Great Again” won that election wasn’t a coincidence. Unlike other politicians at the time, he was willing to acknowledge that our country had stopped being excellent for many Americans.
Of course, Donald Trump would rule over increased domestic inequality and continued global decline. Even worse, he would lead a global power that wasn’t going away on its own—development China has made the United States no longer the “only” global governance. The planet had also begun its descent by that point. Additionally, the American military would keep proving that it was powerless to triumph and that another V-J Day would never occur.
Significantly breaking down
Meanwhile, the political elite was dramatically disintegrating. A fate that, in normal circumstances, may have been awful news for them would be that one party, the Republicans, would be in utter denial about the nature of the world we currently find ourselves in. For the rest of us, especially the youngest among us, it just increased the likelihood of a tragedy at the time.
And yes, Joe Manchin, the head of the West Virginia coal industry, recently changed his tune (in exchange for a tonne of favors for his significant backers in the oil and gas sector). Still, the nation that launched the Manhattan Project and once manufactured those atomic bombs is strangely unrecognizable, even to itself. The government committed enormous financial resources to develop nuclear weapons that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II; the government committed substantial financial resources to that cause. It continues to invest significant resources and time into “modernizing” the American nuclear arsenal.
However, few in Washington today could even envision starting a modern-day Manhattan Project to devise new, efficient ways to deal with climate change to save the world rather than destroy it. Instead of dealing with the genuine predicament of decline and fall that this nation, much less this civilization, faces, it would be preferable to start a horrible remake of the now-ancient Cold War.
Normal in my lifetime
Although I recently came across a piece I wrote in the 1990s that highlighted global warming, I have to admit that I only became very aware of the issue this century when my deterioration started (almost unnoticed by me). Even when I first began writing passionately about climate change for TomDispatch, I have to say that at first, I didn’t picture myself experiencing it this way—as so many of us have in this tremendously scorching summer of 2022. I also didn’t think tuch horrific fires, floods, droughts, and storms would become “normal in my lifetime.” I have to admit that I didn’t consider at the time that the phenomenon would eventually result in an all-too-likely extinction event for humans, r what some scientists are beginning to refer to as a “climate endgame.”
And yet, here we are in a country with a massive military (supported by a corporate weapons-making complex of almost unimaginable size and power) that has proven incapable of winning anything of significance, even if funded in a once difficult way to imagine outside of actual wartime. All of this is happening within a democratic system, under unimaginable strain. In a way, its astonishing capacity to further fossil fuel the world might be its only claim to “success.” In other words, while we face the potential decline and fall of everything, we now live in an America that is falling apart at the seams, and the oldest story in human history may be changing.
At the end of the narrative
There’s no stopping my decline and fall regarding my personal experience, as there is with all of us. The story’s conclusion, however, has not yet been written regarding our nation and the rest of the world. Will we be able to write it in a way that doesn’t result in the extinction of humanity as well as this imperial power?
Analysis by Advocacy Unified Network
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