Is America really in decline?(Foreign Affairs)

IS THE PRESENT ERA, as has so often been predicted incorrectly in the past, the beginning of the decline of American power and the final stages of the American century, as it was dubbed in 1941 by Henry Booth Luce, the publisher of Time and Life? Are we about to see a series of events that would, undoubtedly to the great delight of the Left, especially the "born again" European Left, humiliate the Great Hegemon?

Before analysing the earliest critiques of America, what kind of beast are we talking about? We must consider briefly the etiology of America and the essential qualities of this then new, precarious and revolutionary late-eighteenth-century republic. From its seventeenth-century colonial origins, America perceived itself as a unique society with a historical mission founded upon the dissenting and radical religious enthusiasm of objections to the settlement of the Church of England established by Henry VIII in 1529. This worldview included strong elements of millenarian and chiliastic thought inherited from the exportation of Calvinism from Europe to the British Isles, which in turn was a product of ancient Augustinian ideas (The City of God) which in turn reflected Manichean and, going even further back in time, Zoroastrian historical elements.

History to New Englanders was a progression of struggles between the forces of Good and Evil; this Manichean dualism is a transcendent feature of American culture from its colonial days to the dime novel sagas of the old west in the nineteenth century down to Hollywood and television and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush taking on the forces of evil empires. The Puritan historical view, furthermore, was both teleological--history going in a prescribed direction-and eschatological--towards a prescribed final end of time (now called by some radical Pentecostals the End Time or the Rapture, which many expected on January 1, 2000). The history of America, therefore, is perceived as part of a preordained Divine Plan.

The New England Puritans believed they had established the New Jerusalem, the "city upon a hill" as the Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop called it, which would eventually participate in the Final Days as prophesied in, among many sources, the Books of Daniel and Revelation (Islamists, by the way, use the same sources). These apocalyptic ideas profoundly influenced the development of American self-perceptions and were repackaged again and again in doctrines like that of Manifest Destiny by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in 1845. These religious beliefs were blended into a syncretistic mix of nationhood and became, as Michael Walzer calls it, the secular religion of Americanism. The reverence for the flag, marching bands, the music of John Philip Sousa, all are bound together providing social cohesion for a nation that was multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious from its founding down to the present. They are also characteristics of a jingoistic American culture which many observers, including many Americans, do not like.

The new society, therefore, on the Eastern seaboard of North America from the very outset was "full of itself". It perceived its history, and its mission, as exceptional in world historical context. This exceptionalism--about which historians such as Seymour Martin Lipset and our own Ian Tyrrell (of the University of New South Wales) have argued endlessly for the past twenty years--denotes both a belief in the uniqueness of America, and a corollary belief that its history evolves along such unique lines that it can be studied relatively independently of global forces. This is not a modest view of the world but not an unusual worldview for large, self-sustained imperial societies (for example, Egypt and China).

These ideas of millenarianism, optimistic jingoism and mission are simultaneously a source of strength and weakness for America (ideas which Lipset calls "Grand Themes" of American culture). As Graham Greene expressed it in his novel The Quiet American in 1955 in the character Alden Pyle, these ideas give Americans the motivation to act but their acts may be ill-conceived and doomed to failure (as in Vietnam and later in Iraq).

THE CRITICS