American decline is a term used by various analysts to describe the diminishing power of the United States geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, in health and the environment. There has been a debate between declinists, those who believe America is in decline, and exceptionalists, those who feel America is special. Dennis Prager believes that every aspect of American life is in decline. Richard Lachmann argues that the main problem leading to the U.S. decline is the control of the elites over governmental resources and agencies.
Some analysts say that the U.S. was in decline long before Donald Trump ran for presidency; becoming the first presidential candidate to promote the idea that the U.S. was in decline. While others suggest the decline either stems from or has accelerated with Trump's foreign policy and the "country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena." According to Noam Chomsky, America’s decline started at the end of WWII, dismissing the "remarkable rhetoric of the several years of triumphalism in the 1990s" as "mostly self-delusion".
Dennis Prager believes that 'family' and 'education' is decaying in America. He mentions same sex marriage as showing "American decay". Gallup's pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30% in 2018, placing the U.S. a notch below China's 31% and leaving Germany as the most popular power with an approval of 41%. Michael Hudson describes financial pillar as paramount, resulting from bank-created money with compound interest and the inbuilt refusal to forgive debts as the fatal flaw.
China's challenging U.S. for global predominance constitutes the core part of the debate over the American decline.
Some analysts say that the U.S. was in decline long before Donald Trump ran for presidency; becoming the first presidential candidate to promote the idea that the U.S. was in decline. While others suggest the decline either stems from or has accelerated with Trump's foreign policy and the "country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena." According to Noam Chomsky, America’s decline started at the end of WWII, dismissing the "remarkable rhetoric of the several years of triumphalism in the 1990s" as "mostly self-delusion".
Dennis Prager believes that 'family' and 'education' is decaying in America. He mentions same sex marriage as showing "American decay". Gallup's pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30% in 2018, placing the U.S. a notch below China's 31% and leaving Germany as the most popular power with an approval of 41%. Michael Hudson describes financial pillar as paramount, resulting from bank-created money with compound interest and the inbuilt refusal to forgive debts as the fatal flaw.
China's challenging U.S. for global predominance constitutes the core part of the debate over the American decline.
Comparison with earlier states
Many
of America's "leading" commentators, since more than half a century,
have consistently described the U.S. as "a weak, "bred out" basket case
that will fall to stronger rivals as inevitably as Rome fell to the
barbarians, or France to Henry V at Agincourt."
Michael Hudson points to debt forgiveness being necessary when
individuals' debts to the state are too large. Rome put an end to this
practice, whereas earlier empires (Assyrian) survived through periodic
debt forgiveness, this practice ended with the Roman empire, resulting
in impoverishment and dispossession of farmers, creating a growing
lumpen proletariat. The same process contributed to the collapse of the
British empire and continues today, with periodic financial crises
(1930s, 2008) which are only relieved by government bailouts and/or war.
Hudson adds that every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
I.e., the U.S. is being destroyed by bank debt with no forgiveness
mechanism, making collapse inevitable.
Rome
Countries with United States military bases and facilities
According to Patrick J. Buchanan,
"Post-Christian America, in many ways, is beginning to mirror what we
were once taught that the pre-Christian Roman Empire looked like."
The Roman Empire, Byzantium,
the Tatar/Mongol Golden Horde, and the Ottoman Sublime Porte all
provided these two essential services—unhindered trade and security—in
exchange for some amount of constant rapine and plunder and a few
memorable incidents of genocide. The Tatar/Mongol Empire was by far the
most streamlined: it simply demanded “yarlyk”—tribute—and smashed anyone
who attempted to rise above a level at which they were easy to smash."
According to Dmitri Orlov, the American empire is "a bit more
nuanced: it uses the US dollar as a weapon for periodically
expropriating savings from around the world by exporting inflation while
annihilating anyone who tries to wiggle out from under the US dollar
system."
There were 38 large and medium-sized American facilities spread
around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases—approximately the
same number as Britain's 36 naval bases and army garrisons at its
imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD
required 37 major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt,
from Hispania to Armenia. Yale historian Paul Kennedy
compares the U.S. situation to Great Britain's prior to World War I. He
comments that the map of U.S. bases is similar to Great Britain's
before World War I.
Britain
Kennedy
argues that “British financial strength was the single most decisive
factor in its victories over France during the 18th century. This
chapter ends on the Napoleonic Wars and the fusion of British financial
strength with a newfound industrial strength.” As the U.S. dollar loses
its role as world currency, it will not be able to continue to have
trade deficits to finance its military expenditures.
According to Richard Lachmann
U.S. would last much longer if it, like Britain, could restrict
particular families or elite control over offices and governmental
powers.
Soviet Union
Dmitry Orlov
argues that the US is now in a rapid decline, "retracing the trajectory
of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s toward national bankruptcy and
political dissolution". Orlov argues that U.S. is bedeviled by "runaway
debt, a shrinking economy, and environmental catastrophes to rival
Chernobyl". He believes that there are some parallels with the U.S.:
outsized military spending, growing international debts and trade
deficits, unwieldy governments, rigid ideology, ecological crisis,
resource decline.
Manifestations
U.S.
hegemony has always been supported by three pillars: "economic
strength, military might, and the soft power of cultural dominance."
Military
Kennedy
argues that continued deficit spending, especially on military
build-up, is the single most important reason for decline of any great
power. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion, which Kennedy deems a
major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt
America by drawing it into a trap. By 2011 the U.S. military budget —
almost matching that of the rest of the world combined — was higher in
real terms than at any time since WWII.
According to a 98-page report by National Defense Strategy
Commission, "America's longstanding military advantages have
diminished", and "America's ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat
opponents and honor its global commitments have proliferated." The
report cited "political dysfunction" and "budget caps" as factors
restraining the government from keeping pace with threats in what the
report described as "a crisis of national security." The report wrote
that, to neutralize American strength, China and Russia were trying to achieve "regional hegemony" and were developing "aggressive military buildups". In 2018, air Force General Frank Gorenc said that the United States airpower advantage over Russia and China was shrinking. According to Forbes, the military's decline began when defense secretary Dick Cheney stopped a hundred major weapons programs 25 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Culture
America culture is in decline, according to Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch and Russel Jacoby. Samuel P. Huntington
also believes that the American culture and politics had been in a
constant decline since the late 1950s, coming in several distinct waves,
namely in reaction to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik; to the
Vietnam War; to the oil shock of 1973; to Soviet aggression in the late
1970s; and to the general unease that accompanied the end of the Cold
War.
The rise of postmodernism since WWII has contributed to the decline of
American culture, according to Goldfrab. Bloom observes that "instead of
the pursuit of truth, there is an adolescent certainty that all is
uncertain." He criticizes his students for their relativism, narcissism
and the decadence of love and friendship, pointing to such cultural
icons as Mick Jagger, who portrays himself as a nihilistic rebel, both
hetero and homosexual, embracing drugs and "the rock ideal of universal
classless society founded on love." Because youth bond with such
decadent anti-heroes, they miss embracing the positive heroes of the
past, never achieving a deep love for culture.
William J. Bennett argues that America’s cultural decline is signaling "a shift in the public’s attitudes and beliefs". The rate of maternal morality decline has risen in U.S. in recent years.
According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, published in
1993, statistically portraiting the moral, social and behavioral
conditions of modern American society, often described as 'values',
America’s cultural condition was in decline with respect to the
situations of 30 years ago, 1963. The index showed that there has been
an increase in violent crime by more than 6 times, illegitimate births
by more than 5 times, the divorce rate by 5 times, the percentage of
children living in single-parent homes by four times, and the teenage
suicide rate by three times during the 30-year period. By 2015, around half of American children were born to an unmarried mother. Dennis Prager argues that family and education is decaying in America. He describes same sex marriage
as signaling "American decay". He argues that the average American
school, instead of teaching more about "important" subjects including
"American history, English grammar, literature, music, and art", teach
much more about "social justice, environmentalism, and sex" and mention
it as signaling the decline of America. Also, Camille Paglia believes that transgenderism reflects the decline in morality in America.
Patrick J. Buchanan believes that the U.S. has used its wealth
and freedom to create a culture and a society many of U.S. people and
much of the world now see as "dissolute and decadent".
According to Kenneth Weisbrode,
though statistics point to American decline (increased death rate,
political paralysis, increased crime), "Americans have had a low culture
for a very long time, and have long promoted it". He thinks that the
obsession with decline is not something new, as something dating back to
the Puritans. "Cultural decline, in other words, is as American as
apple pie," Weisbrode argues. Weisbrode likens pre-revolutionary France
and present-day America for their vulgarity, which he argues is "an
almost natural extension or outcome of all that is civilized: a
glorification of ego."
Economy
By 1970 U.S. share of world production had fallen from 40% to 25%, While economist Jeffrey Sachs observed the US share of world income was 24.6% in 1980 falling to 19.1% in 2011. The ratio of average CEO earnings to average workers’ pay in U.S. went from 24:1 in 1965 to 262:1 in 2005. A survey carried out by Pew Research Center
shows that a majority of American predicted the U.S. economy to be
weaker in 2050. Also, the survey says, a majority of the people thought
the U.S. would be "a country with a burgeoning national debt, a wider
gap between the rich and the poor and a workforce threatened by
automation."
Most right wingers and some centrists believe that the American
fiscal crisis stems from the rising expenditures on social programs or
alternatively from the increases in military spending for the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars, both of which would lead to decline. However, Richard Lachmann
argues that If none of military or overall spending are pressuring the
U.S. economy, they would not contribute to U.S. decline. Lachmann
describes the real problem as "the misallocation of government revenue
and expenditure, resulting in resources being diverted from the tasks
vital to maintain economic or geo-political dominance."
Kennedy argues that as military expenses grow, this reduces investments
in economic growth, which eventually "leads to the downward spiral of
slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending
priorities, and weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense."
Health
The U.S.
placed 35th in a 2019 ranking of countries on health, vs Canada's
16th-place. "Life expectancy in the U.S. has been trending lower due to
deaths from drug overdoses and suicides."
