America Will Not Recover

For Better Or For Worse

So it’s Friday again, and time for another post. While I don’t read very many blogs, there have recently been two posts that really deserve some kind of response.

The first was Tove’s, where she described the way woke attitudes took shape in her own country (Sweden) before passing by:

After Woke

The next was JS Kasimir’s, where he discussed Sir John Glubb’s claim that most empires rise and fall on a fairly predictable schedule of 250 years. Interestingly, after investigating Glubb’s prophecy of American decline, Kasimir urges a renewal of America:

Fate of Empires | The Age of Heroes

You don’t need to read either article to get what I’m saying here, but if I hadn’t started this blog specifically to carry on a conversation with others, and if I hadn’t read those, I probably wouldn’t write any of this. There’s a lot of history, and a lot of personal opinion here, so I’m less certain of any of the conclusions I have than most of what I write.

But I don’t think America is ever going to make a comeback, and here is why. (Just don’t swipe too far down or you’ll wreck Issue 3. You’ll see what I mean when you get there)

The Soul of America

The modern era is waging a war over the essence of America.

Lately, the left has started to describe the founding fathers as a pack of morally bankrupt slave owners. Meanwhile, the right insists about the founding fathers were a band of brilliant, forward-thinking, honorable and courageous slave owners.

But nowhere in the discussion is it ever admitted that in some ways, America has always been like this.

Issue 1: The American Revolution

One of the first things any student of American history discovers is that the American revolution happened. Like the French revolution or the Russian Revolution, there was plenty of rabble-rousing and gunfire, though (admittedly) we did waste more tea than they did across the pond. About 24000 Brits died in the American Revolutionary War; a similar number of Yankees died, meaning that almost 1% of the colonial population perished in this war. But we got a smashing national anthem out of it, and presumably, it was for a good cause.

Was it really though? What if we compare death tolls from other countries seeking independence from the British? I have a reader or two from Down Under, so Australia comes to mind. How did their revolution turn out?

Now you may be forgiven for having forgetten all about the Australian revolution, which in fact was accomplished with considerably less bloodshed, and a lot less wasted tea. And the reason is, surprisingly, that Australia never had a revolution. No guns, no yelling; they just went about their lives, and by 1942, they gained their independence anyway.

The case of Australia provides a pretty good natural experiment to determine the effects of having, vs. not having, a revolution. They’re an Anglophone nation, like the US. They shoved their indigenous populations aside more or less like the US. They were founded in 1788 rather than 1620, so they did have a bit less time to work with. They’re a lot smaller than the US, so there’s less total wealth. But by most metrics, they’re doing pretty well for themselves in Australia, ranking 5th in the world on the Human Development Index; the USA ranks 21st.

It’s almost as though the point of the American Revolution was really just to yell and scream and shoot and break things, which is what we’ve been doing ever since—not only overseas with our enormous military, but domestically, politically, where our polarized populace continue to resolve disputes with violence, as in 2020 following the death of George Floyd (below left), or 2022 following the presidential election (below right):

Issue 2: From Restraint to Militarism

In his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,¹ Paul Kennedy noted something which is probably taken for granted by anyone who ever played a 4X game: Building up your military, rather than your economy, sacrifices domestic development and long term ascendancy.² But even though Kennedy had never even seen Master of Orion, he still won a Wolfson History Prize for this work, wherein he predicted a gradual decline of the United States relative to other countries.

He also predicted the decline of the Soviet Union, which was still kicking back then—the Berlin Wall didn’t come down until two years after Kennedy’s book. There was a lot wrong with the Soviet Union, admittedly. But among other things, they fell prey to the problem of guns or butter: guns do not help your economy.

This isn’t just obvious, or something Kennedy noticed; even this year we continue to see studies reporting that:

The results from empirical analyses of panel data on 133 countries during the 1960-2012 period indicate that an increase in military expenditure/GDP of 1 percentage point reduces economic growth by 1.10 percentage points.³

This is something that most conservative Americans have trouble with, possibly because of how many of them are employed in the military. But getting paid to march around foreign countries and blow up the bad guys with million-dollar ordnance is not exactly sound economic policy. Lately around 20% of our budget goes to the military. A well-run country would not have even a quarter of the defense budget we have.

But of course, ever since the United States began, we were always psychologically rewarded for fighting. We won the revolutionary war, we won the first world war, and we came out of the second World War looking like kings of the world. For over a century, the United States actually pursued a pacifistic or isolationist stance towards other countries, but was this really going to last when the good people in Washington could see that war always goes so well?

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of the United States, because maintaining a minimal defense force and striving to avoid war, both at home and especially abroad, is something I dearly value. I don’t support the United States involvement in Ukraine, Israel, or anywhere else. If I were king of this country, my foreign policy would be deeply unpopular: Steer clear. Stay out. Seek diplomatic resolution.

And once upon a time, the United States was actually like this! Isolationism was pretty popular before the time of Franklin Roosevelt. It’s just that non-interventionism was never turned into a sacred, founding principle—it was never enshrined in any of our founding documents or monuments, like the right to carry deadly weapons around, or the importance of recognizing how bad kings are, or how equal we all are, or whatever.

The left is bad enough wanting to go charging into Eastern Europe; the right even wants to go rushing into the Middle East. But leaving aside questions about whether it’s moral to do so, or whether I support it at all, our budget deficit remains 19% of our revenues, and our country’s position continues to weaken.

So when conservatives talk about a return to old fashioned values, I wonder: are they willing to commit to the values that undergirded our historical power and prosperity, or, do they just want to kick all the transgendered soldiers out of the military? I ask because one of these ideas might actually help; the other is just going to piss off the woke left—and they are already pretty badly unhinged.

But less well known is just how long they’ve been unhinged:

Issue 3: Immigration

Imagine that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wanted to build a monument on the Mexican-American border. Something great. Something inspring. Something to represent America and give everybody a sense of who we are, and what we stand for. (As modern woke Democrats obviously.)

Say they hold a cabinet meeting and brainstorm ideas. After the push for the statue representing a transgender individual runs afoul of the predictable question of whether the statue should be MtF or FtM, naturally we’d expect them to reach a compromise. So they agree the statue can just be a cishet woman. Not sexualized, though; sensitive. Strong. Maybe she could hold up a symbol like a key, or a welcome mat, or a pizza, to let prospective immigrants know they are welcome here. Maybe she could have a speech bubble saying “Apply for welfare at your nearest social service agency.”

But ultimately they realize this speech bubble thing is a bit crass, so they settle on a nice poem. Poetry works pretty well, right? As for what she’d be carrying, imagine that they realize the key is also a dumb idea, but maybe a lantern or something like that could work. Given the enormous budget deficit I’ve been talking about, they realize it might go over a bit better if they seek out donations for help building the pedestal and such—and this would really be a good idea since it would allow all the wealthy Americans to signal their virtue and support for The Current Thing.

Now say one of the poems they used in their fundraising drive struck the right note on immigration, urging the world to send everyone—I mean everyone, and they’re not even being subtle on this part, like imagine they’re literally asking other countries to give us their human garbage. Imagine they’re not even trying to make it seem ennobling, or even sane; they’re being crassly explicit here, they want the garbage from other countries, OK?

Now imagine that they had the giant statue built, inscribing the poem on a plaque in the base.

And imagine that the whole thing looked like this:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And imagine everyone on Fox News howled about how awful it all was, and Donald Trump vowed to build a statue twice as big in the shape of a giant T, and the rest of us just shook our heads at how stupid our country was, and wondered when the hell any of this was ever going to end.

Follow the Trends

Tove points out that in Sweden, pro-immigration attitudes and a transgender fad swept across the culture like a wave, only to pass by. In the United States, this seems less likely. Though the values we see today are not the same as those from America’s founding, they are nowhere near as new as they may seem. We will not have a moratorium on immigration any more than we will tear down the Statue of Liberty.

Will we learn to calm down and discuss things rationally with one another? To heal the divides and divisions that set us at one anothers’ throats? Not likely; witch hunts and moral panics have always been the way for us here in the US. We will vote, and vote, and vote again, most assuredly! But we can’t let things be, or have a tepid discussion about them. And if the voting doesn’t work, well heck, a violent revolution might. After hundreds of years of fighting, we have a distinctly militaristic mindset, and one does not compromise with the enemy. And now that we are becoming more and more anxious,⁴ and our girls in particular are losing their grip on reality,⁵ some of us are becoming paranoid enough to decide that the enemy is surrounding us at all times, or even that the enemy is us.

As technology, individualism, social fragmentation continues to increase, as the declines to social capital and overall trust decrease, we might well expect that anxiety, mental illness, and general unhappiness will also continue to increase. And a country full of unhappy, unhinged people is not going to be thinking hard about how they need to dial back their aggressive political demands. The desire for change—for something being done—will more likely increase than decline. So while I can imagine the transgender debates eventually simmering down as other Sudden Emergencies arise, I foresee no decline in the overall woke push for equity, nor in any increase in their willingness to tolerate their critics in the near future.

Caveats and Conclusions

These are predictions, not facts. I don’t know this country is on an irreversible trajectory of decline. Rather, that’s merely the outcome of the model I’m working with. If you think this model is wrong, let me know!

And even aside from these discussions on mental health or individualism or history, there’s much more that I’m not mentioning, some of which may tend to accelerate or strengthen these trends, some of which may tend to halt or even reverse them. There’s also bound to be twice as much that I don’t even know about. But I don’t look forward to a bright future where America rises from its malaise, or where there’s life after wokeness.

Conservatives always want to point to some point in history when things were better, but everything today happened because of yesterday, and yesterday because of the day before. If the people and plans and ideas from the day before yesterday were wonderful, I always wonder, shouldn’t today be a really great day? If you’re going to complain about things now, you really need to admit that the people who were figuring things out the day before yesterday weren’t doing a very good job of it, don’t you?

But even if I forget about that, even if I just run my fingers backwards through the history books, passing by the names and dates into the past—no matter how far back I go with this country, I never really reach a point that I say “Oh, well yeah, that was a time I can respect.” It seems to me that you really have to go back to before 1776 to skip past America’s craziness—and that’s already 250 years, and now forget everything I’m saying about individualism and technology and anxiety; if you believe anything John Glubb says, he says Time Is Up.

So to me, the best thing this country can do is fragment, dwindle, and decline. And in that regard, I think Paul Kennedy’s concluding remarks from 25 years ago remain relevant today:

Each of today’s large powers… is therefore left grappling with the age-old dilemmas of rise and fall, with the shifting pace of productive growth, with technological innovation, with changes in the international scene, with the spiraling cost of weapons, with alterations in the power balances. These are not developments which can be controlled by any one state, or any one individual. To paraphrase Bismarck’s remark, all of these Powers are “travelling on the stream of time” which they can “neither create nor direct,” but upon which they can “steer with more or less skill and experience.”

May we all steer wisely and well, whatever country we live in. And if not… then may we at least have good luck.

1. Kennedy, Paul M. (1987). The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York, Vintage Books.

2. The exception to this is when you take over enemy planets, which increases your total population, allows you to spread to new regions of the galaxy, and gives you a chance to learn new technologies from the conquered population. This is pretty much what you have to do against the Psilons, because if you don’t they’ll just run over you late game. Still, building an enormous space fleet and then bombing enemy populations into oblivion doesn’t really help balance the budget.

3. Saeed, L. (2023). The Impact of Military Expenditures on Economic Growth: A New Instrumental Variables Approach. Defence and Peace Economics, 1-16.

4. Twenge, J. M. (2000). The age of anxiety? The birth cohort change in anxiety and neuroticism, 1952–1993. Journal of personality and social psychology, 79(6), 1007.

5. Bor, W., Dean, A. J., Najman, J., & Hayatbakhsh, R. (2014). Are child and adolescent mental health problems increasing in the 21st century? A systematic review. Australian & New Zealand journal of psychiatry, 48(7), 606-616.