Implosion (5 page)

“How did the United States blow it?” Zakaria asks. “The United States has had an extraordinary hand to play in global politics—the best of any country in history. Yet, by almost any measure—problems solved, success achieved, institutions built, reputation enhanced—Washington has played this hand badly. America has had a period of unparalleled influence. What does it have to show for it?”
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Bottom Line

Unfortunately, there is a compelling case for such deep and rising anxiety. As we'll see as we move deeper into this book and examine more specific data, the leading economic and cultural indicators do not bode well for America. The evidence, I believe, strongly suggests an implosion is possible.

But as we end this chapter, we must draw an important distinction right up front. Do the authors and analysts I have cited in this chapter believe America is predetermined to implode? Do they believe our fate is sealed and there is no longer any hope? No, most do not. Most believe there is still a chance for Americans to turn things around. The point is that most of these observers—and many Americans like them—see our situation as more precarious than perhaps at any other point in our nation's history, and they have become steadily more pessimistic over time. They believe time is running out, and most are not encouraged by the leadership being shown in politics, business, media, or education, much less the church.

That said, theirs is not the only view.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CASE OF THE OPTIMISTS

To be clear, not all Americans fear we’re in decline.

Nor do all Americans believe we are facing an implosion. Indeed, many Americans believe the magnitude of the challenges we face is being overstated. They argue that the “doomsday” talk by some in the media, academia, the financial sector, the pulpits, the political sphere, and around the watercooler is just a vastly overblown and dangerous overreaction. What’s more, they fiercely maintain their belief that America is poised for a historic renaissance.

These people are determined optimists. Yes, the threats Americans face from within and without are real and serious, the optimists readily concede, but this doesn’t necessarily mean our challenges are insurmountable. To the contrary, they argue, our greatest days are still ahead.

We have faced dark times before in our nation’s history. We have faced moments when it truly seemed like the American experiment was destined to fail. Yet by the grace of God and the wisdom of some extraordinary leaders in government, business, and the church, we have repeatedly made the critical course corrections that were necessary. We have gotten our country back on the right track numerous times and have subsequently soared to heights never really dreamed possible by Americans or by anyone else in the world, and these optimists are certain we can do it again.

Barack Obama has certainly sought to position himself politically as America’s “optimist in chief.” As a candidate, he inspired tens of millions of Americans with his message of hope and change. As president, he has engendered enormous criticism from the Right, Center, and even some from the Left. Many commentators have accused him of (wittingly or unwittingly) leading the U.S. to the brink of outright collapse by accelerating the fiscal bankruptcy of the country and undermining the moral authority of American foreign policy with his approach of “leading from behind,” as one of his advisors so memorably described Obama’s approach to world affairs.
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President Obama has steadfastly refused to be labeled a pessimist, arguing that America has a hopeful future and that one of the things that makes our country great is “an enduring faith, even in the darkest hours, that brighter days lie ahead.”
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President Obama epitomized his views in an essay titled “Why I’m Optimistic,” published in the fortieth-anniversary issue of
Smithsonian
magazine:

There is, of course, no way of knowing what new challenges and new possibilities will emerge over the next forty years. There is no way of knowing how life will be different in 2050. But if we do what’s required in our own time, I am confident the future will be brighter for our people, and our country. Such confidence stems largely from the genius of America. From our earliest days, we have reimagined and remade ourselves again and again.
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Even many strong critics of the president and his devout ideological liberalism join him in describing themselves as fundamentally optimistic regarding the future of America, though they would hasten to add that their policy prescriptions for getting us out of the severe mess we are in differ dramatically from President Obama’s.

Bullish on America

One example is William J. Bennett, the conservative former secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and “drug czar” for President George H. W. Bush. Bennett, who now hosts a nationally syndicated talk radio show called
Morning in America
, remains convinced that Americans can and will turn things around in time, despite having chronicled the enormous surges in violent crime, out-of-wedlock births, and other social pathologies rampant in the United States over the past four decades. In his 1999 book,
The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century
, Bennett wrote, “To those who believe our decline is inevitable because social trends are irreversible, our answer should be: no, it need not be so, and we will not allow it to happen. Restoring civilization’s social and moral order—making it more humane, civil, responsible, and just—is no simple task. But America remains what it has always been: an exceptional nation. Our capacity for self-renewal is rare, and real. We have relied on it in the past [and] we must call on it again.”
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Ten years later, in his book
A Century Turns: New Hopes, New Fears
, Bennett passionately continued to make the case that Americans have risen to the occasion of social and economic renewal before in tough times and said that he saw no reason why we could not do so again. “Today, the levels of both hope and fear are at a high point. Whether or not we can expand the former and reduce the latter, continuing to ‘have the freedoms we have known up until now,’ will depend precisely on what we do with the challenges before us today. Will people one hundred years from now say, ‘Thank God for those people in 2009’? As an American, as an optimist, as a true believer in the uniquely American capacity for self-renewal, I hope and believe the answer is ‘Yes!’”
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Larry Kudlow, the CNBC host and
National Review
columnist, is similarly bullish on America’s future, despite being a sharp critic of President Obama and his policies. “The pessimists are now talking about the end of capitalism or a permanent decline of America. I don’t believe that for one moment,” Kudlow wrote in September 2008, just as the economic meltdown was beginning. “Specific regulatory reforms can get us out of this fix. And most of all, policymakers must maintain the low-tax, low-inflation, open-trade formula that has propelled this nation’s economy and produced so much prosperity for so long. I say, never sell America short.”
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The upheavals of the next few years rattled many, but not Kudlow. While he wrote repeatedly about the severe challenges to the nation and its economy and spoke out strongly about the damage he believed the Obama team was doing to America’s fiscal health, he remained remarkably positive about the future. “There’s a lot of pessimism in the air right now,” he wrote in the spring of 2011. “It’s rooted in themes I’ve been discussing for weeks and weeks—namely, lower profit margins from spiking energy, food, and raw-material prices; supply-chain disruptions from the Japanese disaster that cuts into top-line sales revenue; and gasoline price hikes that are depressing the consumer. . . . This is not the end of the world. . . . I still believe in longer-term optimism.”
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Editorial Optimism

The contributors to the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial page likewise remain fundamentally optimistic about America’s future. Like Bennett and Kudlow, they don’t fail to point out the serious challenges facing the country, nor do they hesitate to advocate specific reform proposals. Yet the
Journal
’s editors regularly publish essays by those who specifically push back at the notion of America in decline. In February 2011, for example, the
Journal
published an essay titled “The Misleading Metaphor of Decline” by Joseph Nye, distinguished professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “Is the United States in decline? Many Americans think so, and they are not alone. A recent Pew poll showed that pluralities in thirteen of twenty-five countries believe that China will replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower,” Nye wrote. However, he argued, “America is likely to remain more powerful than any single state in the coming decades.” Nye also noted that even “Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power. . . . Rather than succumb to self-fulfilling prophecies of inevitable decline, we need a vision that combines domestic reforms with smart strategies for the international deployment of our power in an information age.”
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Two months later, the
Journal
published an essay called “The Facts about American ‘Decline,’” written by Charles Wolf Jr., a corporate fellow in international economics at the RAND Corporation and a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

It’s fashionable among academics and pundits to proclaim that the U.S. is in decline and no longer No. 1 in the world. The declinists say they are realists. In fact, their alarm is unrealistic. . . . In absolute terms, the U.S. enjoyed an incline this past decade. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. GDP increased 21 percent in constant dollars, despite the shattering setbacks of the Great Recession in 2008–09 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. In 2010, U.S. military spending ($697 billion) was 55 percent higher than in 2000. And in 2010, the U.S. population was 310 million, an increase of 10 percent since 2000. . . . Some numbers show inclines, some show declines, and some numbers are mixed. . . . The overall picture is far more complex than the simple one portrayed by declinists. The real world is complicated, so a portrait in one dimension distorts rather than reflects reality.
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Three months after Wolf’s op-ed ran, the
Journal
published “The Future Still Belongs to America” by Walter Russell Mead, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of
American Interest
:

It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The twenty-first century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers. This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. . . . Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the twenty-first century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.”
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These are but a few of many examples of the pushback from both the Left and the Right against the real and increasingly widespread notion that America is rapidly approaching—or even has passed—the point of no return.

Trials and Triumphs

What’s more, the case the optimists are making is historically valid. Americans have faced very dark times before and overcome them.

“A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations”

The American Revolution itself was one such dark time.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, the citizens of the thirteen colonies were suffering from “a long train of abuses and usurpations” designed “to reduce them under absolute despotism” by a “tyrant” who was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” After many humble—and rebuffed—attempts at gaining redress for their grievances, and after much prayer and soul-searching and much discussion and debate, the people concluded it was their right and their duty “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” They appealed in the process to the God of the Bible, “the Supreme Judge of the world,” knowing as they did that the task of establishing a free and independent country would require them to go to war with the British Empire, the most powerful military entity on the planet. The undertaking seemed nearly impossible.
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To war they did go, of course, and a painful, bloody, and often gloomy war it was at that. At times, no small number within the American military forces—both officers and enlisted men—were so utterly demoralized that they were more inclined to give up than to fight on, to simply return home to their families and friends. Some soldiers didn’t have shoes to wear or blankets to keep them warm or enough rations to keep them fed and energized. They were young and homesick and convinced neither they nor those for whom they were supposedly fighting had any hope for the future.

Historian Washington Irving noted that at one point during the conflict, “half of the officers of the rank of captain were inclined to retire, and it was probable their example would influence their men,” who would not reenlist unless they saw their leaders making the same commitment.
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At that point, an utterly depressed George Washington, commander of the American forces, wrote a letter to the president of the Congress, saying, “I am sorry to be necessitated to mention to you the egregious want of public spirit which prevails here. . . . I find we are most likely to be deserted in a most critical time.”
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In a letter to his secretary, Washington wrote, “Could I have foreseen what I have experienced and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
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Yet George Washington did not abandon the cause or his responsibilities. Despite how dark the situation often seemed to be, the military commander chose to believe that the impossible was only impossible if they gave up and stopped trying. Thus he rallied himself and his men to commit their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of liberty, as stated in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence. He encouraged his distraught and downtrodden men to press on despite the enormous challenges and seemingly overwhelming odds against them, and they chose to follow his lead.