American Decline?; "Anxiety and Politics;" Operation Chariot
Reading Watching 06.28.26
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
In Phenomenal World, Tim Barker has a piece on the history of the idea of American decline, which feels timely as we approach our nation’s 250th birthday. Americans have long feared decline, but now it appears to be really upon us. The fear of decline once spurred us into furious action to stave off the reality:
In the Winter 1988–1989 issue of Foreign Affairs, political scientist Samuel Huntington attacked the question as the world stood on the precipice of the new unipolarity. Despite the impending Cold War victory, this was an anxious period for American capitalism. The malaise was summed up by Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas: “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won.” Huntington rejected this defeatism. He deflated contemporary fears by reminding readers that similar decline panics had recurred since the 1950s in a series of waves symbolized by Sputnik, Vietnam, the energy crisis, and now, in the late 1980s, Japan.
In each instance, the foretold decline failed to materialize. In hindsight, we see their fantasies and projections for what they were. Who now remembers bestsellers like The Coming War with Japan? But Huntington, while rejecting the decline thesis, refused to condescend to the declinists—even misguided fears were worth taking seriously, he maintained. True, the US had survived countless supposedly terminal diagnoses. But even a hypochondriac might benefit from regular visits to the doctor. Would the imperial republic have endured without the recurring panics? Could a hallucinatory discourse (Khrushchev will bury us) actually produce its own reality (continued American primacy)?
This is just what Huntington concluded. American structural power had endured not despite, but because of the doomsayers. In his words, “the declinists play an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.” This pattern held across the waves of post-Sputnik discourse. It also gave rise to a slyly confident prediction: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.”
This is what Plato might have referred to as a noble lie. In order to win their backing for policies to prompt renewal, American voters needed to be persuaded of the possibility of US decline. To whom would it fall to mislead the public for their own good? In the immediate sense, the declinists would do the persuading. But behind them there had to be someone capable of consciously inflating the crisis discourse. This sounds cynical, but it is appropriate when reading Huntington, who once wistfully reminded readers that Truman “had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers”—a rare admission of the sources of political power in the American Century. A radical who wrote the same sentence would be crucified for crudeness.
The short term seemed to prove Huntington correct: America in the 1990s seemed more prosperous and powerful than ever—even the malaise of deindustrialization seemed to briefly lift as investment in fixed capital grew. But perhaps this led to a degree of complacency. This is sort of the argument of my own book. People often ask me why the “populist revolt”—I call it the beginnings of a crisis of authority or hegemony—of the early ’90s faded away for almost three decades and then came roaring back. My answer is usually that the balance of the decade made that moment seem like a weird blip, a moment whose fears were mere follies, and so it was largely forgotten. It seems, as far as America goes, the only thing we have to fear is the absence of fear.
