Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  As for the societal fissures that gave rise to Trump, Americans are likely to find that restoring a common understanding of the common good will be a long time coming. The era of utopian globalism coincided with a period of upheaval in which traditional norms related to gender, sexuality, family, and identity fell from favor among many. The resulting rifts run deep. In one camp are those waging a fierce rear-guard action in favor of a social order now in tatters; in the other are those intent on mandating compliance with precepts such as diversity and multiculturalism. Both sides manifest intolerance. Neither gives much evidence of empathy or willingness to compromise.

  A reimagined “America First” approach to statecraft would seek to insulate US foreign policy from this ongoing domestic Kulturkampf as much as possible. It would remain agnostic as to which blessings of liberty the United States views as ready for export until Americans themselves reach a consensus on what liberty should actually entail.

  This need not imply turning a blind eye to human rights abuses. Yet an “America First” foreign policy would acknowledge that on an array of hot-button issues, as varied as gun ownership and the status of transgender people, the definition of rights is in a state of flux. In that regard, the warning against “passionate attachments” that President George Washington issued in his Farewell Address should apply not only to countries but also to causes. In either case, those responsible for the formulation of foreign policy should avoid taking positions that threaten to undermine the nation’s fragile domestic cohesion. It may be naïve to expect politics to stop at the water’s edge. That said, diplomacy is not an appropriate venue for scoring points on matters on which Americans themselves remain deeply at odds. That’s what elections are for. What the present generation of Americans owes to posterity is the opportunity to sort these things out for themselves.

  Something similar applies to US military policy. Future generations deserve their own chance to choose. Unfortunately, military actions undertaken under the auspices of utopian globalism have narrowed the range of available choices and squandered vast resources. The duration of the post-9/11 wars tells the tale: Afghanistan is the longest in US history, and Iraq is the second longest. The countless sums of money wasted—few in Washington evince interest in tallying up how much—have contributed to the exploding size of the US national debt. It stood at approximately $4 trillion when the Cold War ended, has risen to $20 trillion today, and is projected to exceed $25 trillion by the end of this decade. The United States has become a country that does not finish what it starts and then borrows exorbitantly to conceal its failures.

  From an “America First” perspective, the antidote is twofold: first, curb Washington’s appetite for armed intervention except when genuinely vital US interests are immediately at risk, and second, pay for wars as they occur, rather than saddling future generations with their cost. Posterity deserves books that balance.

  Critics will contend that a nation that fights only when vital interests are at stake will become oblivious to the suffering of those unfortunate people living in such hellholes as Syria. Yet fighting is neither the sole nor necessarily the best way to respond to suffering. Indeed, Washington’s scorecard when it comes to sending US troops to liberate or protect is mixed at best. Consider the present-day conditions in Somalia, Iraq, and Libya, each the subject of US military action justified entirely or in large part by humanitarian concerns. In all three countries, armed intervention only made life worse for ordinary people.

  Does this mean that Americans should simply avert their eyes from horrors abroad? Not at all. But when it comes to aiding the distressed, they should not look to US bombs or troops to fix things. The armed forces of the United States may occasionally engage in charitable works, but that should not be their purpose. Far better to incentivize concerned citizens to open their own wallets, thereby expanding the capacity of relief organizations to help. In comparison to bureaucratically engineered programs, voluntary efforts are likely to be more effective, both in making a difference on the ground and in winning hearts and minds. In short, let marines be marines, and help do-gooders do good.

  POTUS on Notice

  All these suggestions amount to little more than common sense. Yet given the state of US politics, defined above all by the outsize role of the president, none of it is likely to happen. In that regard, the most immediate goal of an “America First” policy must be to restore some semblance of constitutional balance. That means curtailing presidential power, an aim that is all the more urgent with Trump in the White House.

  In utopian globalist circles, however, the thought of constraining executive authority is anathema. The entire national security apparatus is invested in the proposition that the president should function as a sort of quasi deity, wielding life-and-death authority. Disagree, and you’ve rendered yourself ineligible for employment on the seventh floor of the State Department, in the E Ring of the Pentagon, at CIA headquarters, or anywhere within a half mile of the Oval Office.

  This line of thinking dates back to the debate over whether to enter World War II. Roosevelt won that fight and, as a result, endowed his successors with extraordinary latitude on issues of national security. Ever since, in moments of uncertainty or perceived peril, Americans have deferred to presidents making the case, as Roosevelt did, that military action is necessary to keep them safe.

  Yet Trump, to put it mildly, is no Roosevelt. More to the point, both the world and the United States have changed in innumerable ways. Although the lessons of World War II may still retain some legitimacy, in today’s radically different circumstances, they do not suffice. So although the risks of ill-considered appeasement persist, other dangers are at least as worrisome—among them, recklessness, hubris, and self-deception. In 1940, the original America First movement warned against such tendencies, which had in recent memory produced the catastrophe of World War I and which would lay the basis for even worse things to come. Today, those warnings deserve attention, especially given the recklessness, hubris, and self-deception that Trump displays daily.

  The point is not to relitigate the arguments over whether the United States should have entered World War II: in that instance, Roosevelt got it right and those who thought Nazi Germany posed no threat to the United States got it wrong. Yet the latter were not wrong to insist that the previous war against Germany and all that it had wreaked remained relevant. Nor were they wrong to decry the chicanery and demagoguery that Roosevelt was employing to maneuver the United States toward war.

  Americans today need to do a better job of remembering. To remember with an open mind is to consider the possibility that those on the losing end of old arguments might be worth listening to. The imperative now, amid the wreckage created by utopian globalism and the follies of Trump, is to think creatively about the predicaments that the United States faces. Stripped of their unfortunate historical associations and understood properly, many of the concerns and convictions that animated the original America First movement provide a sound point of departure for doing just that.

  19

  Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye

  (2017)

  Forgive me for complaining, but recent decades have not been easy ones for my peeps. I am from birth a member of the WHAM tribe, that once proud but now embattled conglomeration of white, heterosexual American males. We have long been—there’s no denying it—a privileged group. When the blessings of American freedom get parceled out, WHAMs are accustomed to standing at the head of the line. Those not enjoying the trifecta of being white, heterosexual, and male get what’s left.

  Fair? No, but from time immemorial those have been the rules. Anyway, no real American would carp. After all, the whole idea of America derives from the conviction that some people (us) deserve more than others (all those who are not us). It’s God’s will—so at least the great majority of Americans have believed since the Pilgrims set up shop just about four hundred years ago.

  Lately, however, the rules have
been changing in ways that many WHAMs find disconcerting. True, some of my brethren—let’s call them 1 percenters—have adapted to those changes and continue to do very well indeed. Wherever corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, tech gurus, university presidents, publishers, politicians, and generals congregate to pat each other on the back, you can count on WHAMs—reciting bromides about the importance of diversity!—being amply represented.

  Yet beneath this upper crust, a different picture emerges. Further down the socioeconomic ladder, being a WHAM carries with it disadvantages. The good, steady jobs once implicitly reserved for us—lunch pail stuff, yes, but enough to keep food in the family larder—are increasingly hard to come by. As those jobs have disappeared, so too have the ancillary benefits they conferred, self-respect not least among them. Especially galling to some WHAMs is being exiled to the back of the cultural bus. When it comes to art, music, literature, and fashion, the doings of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, and women generate buzz. By comparison, white heterosexual males seem bland, uncool, and passé, or worst of all simply boring.

  The Mandate of Heaven, which members of my tribe once took as theirs by right, has been cruelly withdrawn. History itself has betrayed us.

  All of which is nonsense, of course, except perhaps as a reason to reflect on whether history can help explain why, today, WHAMs have worked themselves into such a funk in Donald Trump’s America. Can history provide answers? Or has history itself become part of the problem?

  Paging Professor Becker

  “For all practical purposes history is, for us and for the time being, what we know it to be.” So remarked Carl Becker in 1931 at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Professor Becker, a towering figure among historians of his day, was president of the AHA that year. His message to his colleagues amounted to a warning of sorts: Don’t think you’re so smart. The study of the past may reveal truths, he allowed, but those truths are contingent, incomplete, and valid only “for the time being.”

  Put another way, historical perspectives conceived in what Becker termed “the specious present” have a sell-by date. Beyond their time, they become stale and outmoded, and so should be revised or discarded. This process of rejecting truths previously treated as authoritative is inexorable and essential. Yet it also tends to be fiercely contentious. The present may be specious, but it confers real privileges, which a particular reading of the past can sustain or undermine. Becker believed it inevitable that “our now valid versions” of history “will in due course be relegated to the category of discarded myths.” It was no less inevitable that beneficiaries of the prevailing version of truth should fight to preserve it.

  Who exercises the authority to relegate? Who gets to decide when a historical truth no longer qualifies as true? Here, Becker insisted that “Mr. Everyman” plays a crucial role. For Becker, Mr. Everyman was Joe Doakes, John Q. Public, or the man in the street. He was “every normal person,” a phrase broad enough to include all manner of people. Yet nothing in Becker’s presentation suggested that he had the slightest interest in race, sexuality, or gender. His Mr. Everyman belonged to the tribe of WHAM.

  In order to “live in a world of semblance more spacious and satisfying than is to be found within the narrow confines of the fleeting present moment,” Becker emphasized, Mr. Everyman needs a past larger than his own individual past. An awareness of things said and done long ago provides him with an “artificial extension of memory” and a direction.

  Memories, whether directly or vicariously acquired, are “necessary to orient us in our little world of endeavor.” Yet the specious present that we inhabit is inherently unstable and constantly in flux, which means that history itself must be pliable. Crafting history necessarily becomes an exercise in “imaginative creation” in which all participate. However unconsciously, Mr. Everyman adapts the past to serve his most pressing needs, thereby functioning as “his own historian.”

  Yet he does so in collaboration with others. Since time immemorial, purveyors of the past—the “ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths”—have enabled him to “hold in memory . . . those things only which can be related with some reasonable degree of relevance” to his own experience and aspirations. In Becker’s lifetime it had become incumbent upon members of the professoriate, successors to the bards and minstrels of yesteryear, “to enlarge and enrich the specious present common to us all to the end that ‘society’ (the tribe, the nation, or all mankind) may judge of what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do.”

  Yet Becker took pains to emphasize that professional historians disdained Mr. Everyman at their peril:

  Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices. . . . The history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history, is living history. . . . It is for this reason that the history of history is a record of the ‘new history’ that in every age rises to confound and supplant the old.

  Becker stressed that the process of formulating new history to supplant the old is organic rather than contrived; it comes from the bottom up, not the top down. “We, historians by profession, share in this necessary effort,” he concluded. “But we do not impose our version of the human story on Mr. Everyman; in the end it is rather Mr. Everyman who imposes his version on us.”

  Donald Trump as Everyman’s Champion?

  Becker offered his reflections on “Everyman His Own Historian” in the midst of the Great Depression. Perhaps because that economic crisis found so many Americans burdened with deprivation and uncertainty, he implicitly attributed to his Mr. Everyman a unitary perspective, as if shared distress imbued members of the public with a common outlook. That was not, in fact, the case in 1931 and is, if anything, even less so in our own day.

  Still, Becker’s construct retains considerable utility. Today finds more than a few white heterosexual American males, our own equivalent of Mr. Everyman, in a state of high dudgeon. From their perspective, the specious present has not panned out as it was supposed to. As a consequence, they are pissed. In November 2016, to make clear just how pissed they were, they elected Donald Trump as president of the United States.

  This was, to put it mildly, not supposed to happen. For months prior to the election, the custodians of the past in its “now valid version” had judged the prospect all but inconceivable. Yet WHAMs (with shocking support from other tribes) intervened to decide otherwise. Rarely has a single event so thoroughly confounded history’s self-assigned proctors. One can imagine the shade of Professor Becker whispering, “I warned you, didn’t I?”

  Those deeply invested in drawing a straight line from the specious present into the indefinite future blame Trump himself for having knocked history off its prescribed course. Remove Trump from the scene, they appear to believe, and all will once again be well. The urgent imperative of doing just that—immediately, now, no later than this afternoon—has produced what New York Times columnist Charles Blow aptly calls a “throbbing anxiety” among those who (like Blow himself) find “the relentless onslaught of awfulness erupting from this White House” intolerable. They will not rest until Trump is gone.

  This idée fixe, reinforced on a daily basis by ever more preposterous presidential antics, finds the nation trapped in a sort of bizarre do-loop. The media’s obsession with Trump reinforces his obsession with the media and between them they simply crowd out all possibility of thoughtful reflection. Their fetish is his and his theirs. The result is a cycle of mutual contempt that only deepens the longer it persists.

  Both sides agree on one point only: that history began anew last November 8, when (take your pick) America either took leave of its senses or chose gre
atness. How the United States got to November 8 qualifies, at best, as an afterthought or curiosity. It’s almost as if the years and decades that had preceded Trump’s election had all disappeared into some vast sinkhole.

  Where, then, are we to turn for counsel? For my money, Charles Blow is no more reliable as a guide to the past or the future than is Donald Trump himself. Much the same could be said of most other newspaper columnists, talking heads, and online commentators. As for politicians of either party, they have as a class long since forfeited any right to expect a respectful hearing.

  God knows Americans today do not lack for information or opinion. On screens, over the airways, and in print, the voices competing for our attention create a relentless cacophony. Yet the correlation between insight and noise is discouragingly low.

  What would Carl Becker make of our predicament? He would, I think, see it as an opportunity to “enlarge and enrich the specious present” by recasting and reinvigorating history. Yet doing so, he would insist, requires taking seriously the complaints that led our latter-day Mr. Everyman to throw himself into the arms of Donald Trump in the first place. Doing that implies a willingness to engage with ordinary Americans on a respectful basis.