Implosion (4 page)

• In 2011, an article in
Psychology Today
was titled “Why America Is in Decline.”
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• Also in 2011,
Newsweek
reported that, aboard the Pentagon jet on his last foreign trip as secretary of defense, Robert Gates—a bipartisan veteran of the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—took a moment to peer across the American horizon and explain that “the view is dire” because “the U.S. is in danger of losing its supremacy on the global stage.”
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What the Publishers Are Selling

Consider, too, what kinds of books editors in American publishing houses are signing contracts for, marketing, and finding widespread audiences and significant sales for. Given the enormous economic and social challenges America is presently facing, it would not be surprising to find a range of successful books on ways to reform, fix, and improve our country, and there are plenty of those on the market, many written by the nation's political leaders. What is surprising is to find a remarkable number of influential, thought-provoking, and often bestselling books on the market suggesting that an apocalyptic moment may be fast approaching and that America's days may be numbered. Among them:

•
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
by Niall Ferguson (Penguin: 2004, 2005)

•
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf (Chelsea Green: 2007)

•
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
by Chalmers Johnson (Metropolitan: 2006)

•
Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
by Cullen Murphy (Mariner: 2007)

•
The Post-American World
by Fareed Zakaria (Norton: 2009, 2011)

•
Dismantling America
by Thomas Sowell (Basic: 2010)

•
After America: Get Ready for Armageddon
by Mark Steyn (Regnery: 2011)

•
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
by Patrick J. Buchanan (Thomas Dunne: 2011)

Not long ago, it would have been inconceivable to the vast majority of Americans to read a book about the possible imminent demise of their country. Today, such books are becoming national bestsellers on a fairly frequent basis. To better understand the phenomenon, let us take a closer look at three such recent titles.

Are We Really Hurtling toward “The End of America”?

Perhaps the quintessential book capturing the depth of anxiety on the American political Left in recent years is
The End of America: Letter o
f
Warning to a Young Patriot
. Published in 2007, it was written by Naomi Wolf, the noted liberal author, feminist, and political activist who writes for
The New Republic
, the
New York Times
, and
Glamour
magazine.

“To U.S. citizens in the year 2007, the very title of this book should be absurd,” Wolf concedes
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before going on to lay out her central thesis that because of our fear of radical Islam, the American federal government is steadily taking away Americans' civil liberties and creating conditions for tyranny. She continues:

I am writing because we have an emergency. . . . My sense of alarm comes from the clear lessons of history that, once certain checks and balances are destroyed, and once certain institutions have been intimidated, the pressures that can turn an open society into a closed one turn into direct assaults; at that point events tend to occur very rapidly, and a point comes at which there is no easy turning back to the way it used to be. The fascist shift . . . progresses in a buildup of many acts assaulting democracy simultaneously, which then form a critical mass. . . . If fascist Germany—a medium-sized modern European state—could destabilize the globe in a matter of a few years, and it took a world war to overcome the threat, what force on earth might restrain an America that may have abandoned the rule of law—an America with its vastly greater population, wealth, and land mass; its far more sophisticated technology; its weapons systems; its already fully established global network of black-site secret prisons; and its imperial reach?
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My point here is not to critique the validity of Wolf's thesis or research. Rather, it is to note that a prominent American thinker on the Left—one who lost relatives on both sides of her family in the Holocaust—wrote a book arguing that if we don't make major course corrections—and soon—the United States as we have known her for more than two hundred years will cease to exist. Is that true? Are we really hurtling toward “the end of America”? There was a time not long ago when suggesting such things would cast a writer so far out of the mainstream he or she might never be heard from again. Remarkably, Wolf and her book weren't laughed at, dismissed, or casually ignored by fellow liberals or the media elites. Rather, her title and theme so resonated with a segment of American society that her book became a
New York Times
bestseller.

Are We Really Preparing for Life “After America”?

Naomi Wolf's perspective received little interest, much less sympathy, from American conservatives. But as we have seen, the Left is not alone in harboring—and increasingly being willing to publicly express—dark fears about the future of our country. One recent book capturing the depth of anxiety on the American political Right is titled
After America: Get Ready for Armageddon
, released by Regnery Publishing, the foremost conservative publishing house in the U.S. The book's author, Mark Steyn, who was born in Toronto but now lives in New Hampshire, is a popular conservative who is regularly published by center-right publications such as
National Review
and the
Washington Times
and who has guest-hosted Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's highly rated conservative radio and TV programs.

“
America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
was about the impending collapse of all of the Western world
except
America,” Steyn writes in his prologue, referring to his previous book. “The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule. The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.”
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A few pages later, Steyn cites Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who in 2010 described current U.S. deficits as “unsustainable.” Steyn then quotes President Obama, who said in 2011, “We've got a big hole that we're digging ourselves out of.” Quips Steyn, “Usually, when you're in a hole, it's a good idea to stop digging. But, seemingly, to get out of the Bush hole, we needed to dig a hole twice as deep.”
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Analyzing the CBO projections for net interest payments on U.S. federal debt, Steyn writes that by 2050, “if that trajectory holds, we'll be spending more than the planet's entire military budget on debt interest.”
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Steyn does hold out a shred of hope throughout the book that Americans can still make the changes necessary to prevent an implosion, but he argues strenuously that time is rapidly running out.

The existential questions for America loom not decades hence, but right now. It is not that we are on a luge ride to oblivion but that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed. . . . Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years' time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there's a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you'll be living the American Nightmare. . . . “After America”? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what's happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called the “United States,” but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.
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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.
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“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?”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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