• “Not only corrupted and despotic rulers, but the United States and other world powers with an aggressive nature will finally suffer a defeat by nations, and God’s promises will come true,” the Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated in 2011.[16]
• “I am certain that the region will soon witness the collapse of Israel and the U.S.,” Ahmadinejad echoed the same year.[17]
On and on it goes. By now such sentiments and predictions should not be surprising. The jihadists believed their prayers and efforts led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now they believe the “godless” American empire is next to fall.
What is surprising, however—stunning, really—is that large segments of American society have also come to believe that the United States is in severe trouble. Not just run-of-the-mill, garden-variety trouble, but real peril. Grave danger. And not just from threats without, such as radical Islam, but from threats within, such as financial ruin and moral decay. Vast numbers of Americans have come to believe we have entered a period of severe and potentially irreversible decline. What’s more, many Americans go even further, fearing that the United States is in serious risk of economic and social collapse, not mere decline. Some fear America is following the path of the Roman Empire and wonder if their country is destined for destruction. Their reasoning may have little or nothing to do with that of the Islamic Radicals, but their conclusions seem unnervingly similar.
What’s more striking is that these Americans are not limited to a particular political party, religion, socioeconomic status, or region of the country. They don’t represent just one sliver or slice of the country. Rather, they increasingly span the full spectrum of partisan, ideological, racial, cultural, and spiritual backgrounds. Were one somehow able to put them all in the same place, they would surely have more disagreements than agreements on how best to solve our country’s problems. But they would agree on at least one thing: they all genuinely wonder if we are in jeopardy of witnessing the end of America as we have known her for so long.
What the Polls Are Saying
Public opinion surveys are, to be sure, imperfect barometers of the American mood. Even the most carefully designed and trustworthy polls can provide only momentary glimpses into people’s hearts and minds. They represent mere snapshots in time. Still, a review of polling trends over the last decade or so paints a sobering picture of rising American anxiety about the future of our country.
The Gallup organization, for example, routinely asks Americans, “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?”
In January 2000, at the dawn of a new millennium, we were brimming with optimism. Only 28 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in America, while 69 percent of Americans said they were satisfied.[18]
Eight years later, however, everything had changed. Amid the historic financial crisis on Wall Street in the fall of 2008, the loss of trillions of dollars of personal wealth, millions of layoffs, surging unemployment, soaring home foreclosures, an alarming number of bank failures, and skyrocketing national deficits and federal debt, such optimism had evaporated. By October of that year, a stunning 90 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the situation in America, while a mere 9 percent said they were satisfied. This proved to be the lowest such reading to that point in Gallup’s history, the organization noted, adding that “the previous low point for Gallup’s measure of satisfaction had been 12 percent, recorded back in 1979, in the midst of rising prices and gas shortages when Jimmy Carter was president.”[19]
Other polls taken during that period similarly captured the magnitude of Americans’ anxiety about the condition of their country and their increasingly deep-rooted pessimism about the future. A remarkable 73 percent of Americans at the time told pollsters they believed the U.S. was in a state of decline, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.[20] What’s more, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 82 percent of Americans said the country was on the wrong track.[21]
Over the next several years, those poll numbers ebbed and flowed, but overall the nation remained deeply pessimistic. As businesses continued to shut their doors or lay off employees, more homes were foreclosed, more banks failed, federal spending continued to skyrocket, and the federal deficit and debt exploded to levels never before seen in the entirety of our nation’s history, Americans remained deeply anxious about the country’s short-term future, to say nothing of our long-term prospects. It was as if Americans felt they were standing in the middle of a frozen lake, far away from the safety of the shore, and they were beginning to hear the ice cracking under their feet. They had not plunged into the bone-chilling waters below—not yet—but they feared a wrong step, a wrong move, could prove fatal.
Consider the following numbers:
• In the spring of 2010, nearly eight in ten Americans said they feared the U.S. economy could collapse entirely.[22]
• A year later, the same number said they were dissatisfied with what’s happening in our country, while only two in ten Americans said they were satisfied.[23]
• Four in ten Americans in the summer of 2011 said that “the current economic downturn is part of a long-term permanent decline, and the economy will never fully recover.”[24]
• Nearly half of all Americans feared the U.S. was heading for another Great Depression.[25]
• At the end of 2011, more than seven in ten Americans said they believed the country was on the wrong track.[26]
Permanent decline? Economic collapse? Another Great Depression? Do Americans really believe such catastrophic events could happen here? Not all Americans do, of course, but yes, clearly tens of millions of people believe this. And while it’s probable that these polls are partly picking up the views of perennial pessimists and congenital hypochondriacs, the data suggest that such fear about the future of our country has become both widespread and mainstream.
What the Pundits Are Saying
Consider, too, what a wide range of political analysts, columnists, social scientists, historians, and other commentators are saying. Not only are Americans across the political spectrum privately contemplating the possibility that the United States may be in a tailspin from which we may not be able to recover, but they are also increasingly feeling compelled to say such things aloud.
• Keith Olbermann, a liberal political commentator, told viewers on MSNBC that we are witnessing “the beginning of the end of America.”[27]
• Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator, told his nationwide radio audience that “this is the end of America as you know it.”[28]
• Al Gore, former vice president of the United States and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 campaign, has said he believes that America is in “grave danger” and that the world faces a “planetary emergency.”[29]
• Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative columnist, told Fox News viewers that “it’s midnight in America.”[30]
• Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, believes “the American dream is not totally dead, but it’s . . . dying pretty fast.”[31]
• Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist, says there is across America “a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed anytime soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track’ and ‘wrong track’ but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?’ is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.’”[32]
• Chalmers Johnson, a late liberal professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, wrote before his death in 2010 that “the capacity for things [in America] to get worse is limitless” and that “Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be comi
ng to its end.”[33]
• Thomas Sowell, a conservative professor and economist, observes that “the collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins. Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet.”[34]
• Cullen Murphy, the liberal editor of Vanity Fair and former editor of The Atlantic, asks, “Are we Rome? In a thousand specific ways, the answer is obviously no [but] in a handful of important ways, the answer is certainly yes.”[35]
• Pat Buchanan, a conservative columnist and former advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, believes that “The United States is strategically overextended worldwide. . . . It is an empire, and the empire is coming down.”[36]
• David Murrin, an international market strategist and author of a book on the future of the markets, warned viewers on CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe that the enormous deficit and debt crisis facing the United States was causing him to become very doubtful about America’s ability to turn things around. “It’s the beginning of the end,” he said, assessing the whole of the American economic and political system.[37]
• Tom Friedman, a liberal New York Times columnist, surmises, “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the twenty-first century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced, and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious . . . ?”[38]
Yet it is not merely partisans on the Left or Right who are deeply worried about where America is headed. The so-called mainstream media sees the decline of America as mainstream thinking as well.
• A 2009 headline in U.S. News & World Report declared: “Nine Signs of America in Decline.”[39]
• In 2010, Salon.com published a story titled “How America Will Collapse (by 2025): Four Scenarios That Could Spell the End of the United States As We Know It—In the Very Near Future.”[40]
• In 2011, Time published a cover story with the headline “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?”[41]
• In 2011, an article in Psychology Today was titled “Why America Is in Decline.”[42]
• Also in 2011, Newsweek reported that, aboard the Pentagon jet on his last foreign trip as secretary of defense, Robert Gates—a bipartisan veteran of the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—took a moment to peer across the American horizon and explain that “the view is dire” because “the U.S. is in danger of losing its supremacy on the global stage.”[43]
What the Publishers Are Selling
Consider, too, what kinds of books editors in American publishing houses are signing contracts for, marketing, and finding widespread audiences and significant sales for. Given the enormous economic and social challenges America is presently facing, it would not be surprising to find a range of successful books on ways to reform, fix, and improve our country, and there are plenty of those on the market, many written by the nation’s political leaders. What is surprising is to find a remarkable number of influential, thought-provoking, and often bestselling books on the market suggesting that an apocalyptic moment may be fast approaching and that America’s days may be numbered. Among them:
• Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson (Penguin: 2004, 2005)
• The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf (Chelsea Green: 2007)
• Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson (Metropolitan: 2006)
• Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy (Mariner: 2007)
• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria (Norton: 2009, 2011)
• Dismantling America by Thomas Sowell (Basic: 2010)
• After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn (Regnery: 2011)
• Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Patrick J. Buchanan (Thomas Dunne: 2011)
Not long ago, it would have been inconceivable to the vast majority of Americans to read a book about the possible imminent demise of their country. Today, such books are becoming national bestsellers on a fairly frequent basis. To better understand the phenomenon, let us take a closer look at three such recent titles.
Are We Really Hurtling toward “The End of America”?
Perhaps the quintessential book capturing the depth of anxiety on the American political Left in recent years is The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Published in 2007, it was written by Naomi Wolf, the noted liberal author, feminist, and political activist who writes for The New Republic, the New York Times, and Glamour magazine.
“To U.S. citizens in the year 2007, the very title of this book should be absurd,” Wolf concedes[44] before going on to lay out her central thesis that because of our fear of radical Islam, the American federal government is steadily taking away Americans’ civil liberties and creating conditions for tyranny. She continues:
I am writing because we have an emergency. . . . My sense of alarm comes from the clear lessons of history that, once certain checks and balances are destroyed, and once certain institutions have been intimidated, the pressures that can turn an open society into a closed one turn into direct assaults; at that point events tend to occur very rapidly, and a point comes at which there is no easy turning back to the way it used to be. The fascist shift . . . progresses in a buildup of many acts assaulting democracy simultaneously, which then form a critical mass. . . . If fascist Germany—a medium-sized modern European state—could destabilize the globe in a matter of a few years, and it took a world war to overcome the threat, what force on earth might restrain an America that may have abandoned the rule of law—an America with its vastly greater population, wealth, and land mass; its far more sophisticated technology; its weapons systems; its already fully established global network of black-site secret prisons; and its imperial reach?[45]
My point here is not to critique the validity of Wolf’s thesis or research. Rather, it is to note that a prominent American thinker on the Left—one who lost relatives on both sides of her family in the Holocaust—wrote a book arguing that if we don’t make major course corrections—and soon—the United States as we have known her for more than two hundred years will cease to exist. Is that true? Are we really hurtling toward “the end of America”? There was a time not long ago when suggesting such things would cast a writer so far out of the mainstream he or she might never be heard from again. Remarkably, Wolf and her book weren’t laughed at, dismissed, or casually ignored by fellow liberals or the media elites. Rather, her title and theme so resonated with a segment of American society that her book became a New York Times bestseller.
Are We Really Preparing for Life “After America”?
Naomi Wolf’s perspective received little interest, much less sympathy, from American conservatives. But as we have seen, the Left is not alone in harboring—and increasingly being willing to publicly express—dark fears about the future of our country. One recent book capturing the depth of anxiety on the American political Right is titled After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, released by Regnery Publishing, the foremost conservative publishing house in the U.S. The book’s author, Mark Steyn, who was born in Toronto but now lives in New Hampshire, is a popular conservative who is regularly published by center-right publications such as National Review and the Washington Times and who has guest-hosted Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s highly rated conservative radio and TV programs.
“America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It was about the impending collapse of all of the Western world except America,” Steyn writes in his prologue, referri
ng to his previous book. “The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule. The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.”[46]
A few pages later, Steyn cites Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who in 2010 described current U.S. deficits as “unsustainable.” Steyn then quotes President Obama, who said in 2011, “We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves out of.” Quips Steyn, “Usually, when you’re in a hole, it’s a good idea to stop digging. But, seemingly, to get out of the Bush hole, we needed to dig a hole twice as deep.”[47] Analyzing the CBO projections for net interest payments on U.S. federal debt, Steyn writes that by 2050, “if that trajectory holds, we’ll be spending more than the planet’s entire military budget on debt interest.”[48]
Steyn does hold out a shred of hope throughout the book that Americans can still make the changes necessary to prevent an implosion, but he argues strenuously that time is rapidly running out.
The existential questions for America loom not decades hence, but right now. It is not that we are on a luge ride to oblivion but that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed. . . . Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare. . . . “After America”? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called the “United States,” but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.[49]
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