An Observation on the American Decline
I love being an American. For better or for worse, this is where I was born and this is where I live; This our home. It’s natural that I want nothing but the best for our country, our people, our Constitution, and our way of life. However, just because you or I may believe these things doesn’t mean we can get away with ignoring the fact that our nation is suffering through a period of decline. We could sit here and talk about how we would define a decline or even to what extent, but when the overall degree of shared social alienation on all sides is palpable enough where people begin to feel like that peaceful reform is no longer an option, if we have to skip plans b, c, d and go all the way to z, then there is no point in splitting hairs over a matter of extent.
Without condoning any specific course of action, I’ve heard just about every solution possible: secession, a constitutional convention, a mass display of civil disobedience, all the way up to an outright kinetic war. There is one very important similarity that ties all of these scenarios together: they all involve successfully and definitively solving the problem through highly decisive action that ultimately results in the nation’s preservation or absolute transformation into something entirely different all together—and to be clear, there is no room for a middle ground within these ideas. However, either extreme is rarely seen throughout history; I feel like we’ve gotten to the point to where most people’s political mindset, red or blue, right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative, most closely resembles the third act of some superhero movie without any basis in reality. We all want to go out, or rather stay in, as T.S. Eliot would put it, with a bang and we want it so bad that we feel that we are the most entitled to it out of any other civilization throughout history.
However, history has seen the rise and fall of countless civilizations throughout time; it does so without care or regard to any of the circumstances involved. Historians will argue for years about why it happened, but we’ll all universally agree that an empire’s decline is rarely as graceful as what we have made up in our own heads.
For instance, at what point did a citizen of the City of Rome begin to realize that the Western Roman Empire had effectively dissolved? It’s easy for us to picture because we have the insight of multiple historical accounts from the era; all a flesh and blood person living in the time had was observation of their immediate surroundings and the local rumor mill to rely on for their perspective. First of all, they would have known for an absolute fact that Diocletian split the empire in two halves in 285 AD and that Constantine had officially moved the capital to Byzantium in 330 AD. Even then, there’s still an empire, or at least the semblance of one. Perhaps one might notice the gradual reduction in administration: less bread given out in alms, fewer public holidays, fewer tax collectors milling about, fewer public works projects. Perhaps there’s whispers of yet another invasion. After all, Rome had already been sacked three times by this point, but that didn’t mean anything to the people; the Senate just simply paid the invaders to leave.
The people of Rome during the 5th Century AD likely had a lot of complaints that were similar to ours: an ineffective, corrupt government barely capable of administrating it’s vast land holdings, the high number of urban poor wandering the streets asking for handouts, constant invasions (in their case militaristic, in our case economic and migratory), severe mismanagement of vital resources, or even the sorry state of public infrastructure. The average Roman of the day (rather, a member of the landed aristocracy) had their very own ideas on how to solve it all. As we all know from history, it never got solved.
The history books cite the year 487 for the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but even this consensus was agreed upon only by historians well after the fact. The average Roman did not mark the day on their calendars and say “well, I guess we’re no longer Romans”. Instead, the average Roman, try as they did, couldn’t stop their squabbling long enough to solve their problems. They had failed despite their best efforts. The Western Roman Empire went out with a whimper rather than a bang. The guards defending the borders saw the invading force, put down their arms, and walked away; the idea of Rome to them was no longer worth enough for one to put their lives at risk. Eventually, some Gothic warlord just walked in with their raiding party, shrugged, and said “I guess I own Rome, now” before embarking on the arduous task of figuring out how to administer it.
Thinking back to the state of America in 2022 and the situation we find ourselves in— what makes us so special that we always get to solve our problems and that the forces of “good” will prevail in every situation? What sort of national-scale solipsism deludes us into believing that we should be afforded the dignity of such a decisive and conclusive degree of closure as if we’re just turning a page to start a brand new chapter? Why do we believe our ending is worthy of an entire fireworks show? Don’t get me wrong, I want nothing but the best, I pray for nothing but peace, but I have to also acknowledge the fact that odds are that we too, like the Romans, will go out with a whimper than a bang. There won’t be a hero showing up to save us. We’ll do nothing more than fight, bicker, point fingers, virtue signal, and argue until the absolute bitter end. We’ll still have our ideas of how we want to fix things, they’ll oftentimes involve castrating or outright eliminating the opposition, but they’ll mean absolutely nothing as the gradual hundred-years-long decline continues. This is what our whimper will sound like.
Let’s say the end comes in what we believe to be the ultimate nightmare scenario. So then what? What of the impending power vacuum as powers vie for the pieces of a fractured and broken America? The popular consensus appears to be that we’d be absorbed into some giant, globalistic post-nationalist dystopia, the European Union on steroids. I disagree wholeheartedly. The idea that an all-powerful full-blown dictatorial state could ever exist in America akin to what we see in Orwell’s 1984 is contradictory from a pure historical and cultural standpoint.
Of course, we can look to China as a real-life example in modern times with mass censorship, worship of money and the state, social credit scores, the silencing of political dissidents, and concentration camps among other things. We also have to consider that strong-man style authoritarianism has been a consistent, re-occurring theme in Chinese culture for thousands of years; we can see these attitudes very prominently displayed in the works of Confucius and even the Tao Te Ching. We also know from pure historical context that when a strong man isn’t in power in China, the land devolves into something akin to the Warring States period (475-221 BC).
If Andrew Breitbart is to be believed when he says that “politics is downstream of culture”, a culturally Chinese style of governance, communist or otherwise, would not work in America, just as the American Establishment once had the hubris to believe that Western-style democracy could ever work in the Middle East and Central Asia. Another example—many Americans wonder why the European Union hasn’t simply collapsed or outright dissolved as a failed experiment. Of course we would think like that because our politics concern itself with “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, “rugged individualism”, and the “pioneer spirit” that defined America in the ages past. Europe never had that for the most part, which is why it’s hard for Americans to wrap our minds around the fact that Western Europeans culturally have a fetish for rampant legalism and overly bloated bureaucracies. As we have seen time and time again, installing a government in a place where the culture doesn’t support it will always lead to conflict. America is no different.
But yet, there may be some compelling arguments that support why may disagree with this notion; the establishment has 24/7 surveillance, illegal wiretaps, a powerful propaganda apparatus to make your friends and family believe that you’re the crazy one for fighting the power, and even the full strength of the military-industrial complex. With all of that in their corner, the situation appears to be hopeless, right?
As George Orwell once said “all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force”. While in some instances the fraud involves stuffing some ballot boxes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, governments spend an exhaustive amount of time, energy, and resources into perpetrating the fraud that their power is unwavering and incapable of being challenged. This is why the three-letter agencies work as part of an unelected, permanent bureaucracy, not to actually fulfill their respective mission statements, but to further the illusion that the government is omnipresent and omnipotent. Here’s the secret—anyone who has ever worked in government understands full well that government is inefficient, disorganized, and corrupt. One thing my time in the Army has taught me is that many things fall through the cracks simply due to nothing else besides the sheer incompetence of individuals who were never up to the task, but were placed there except to fill a quota or were promoted due to how well liked they are. It has also proven to me that the illusion of omnipotence, at least in my humble opinion, is perhaps the largest fraud of all.
When the illusion it’s broken, as Orwell correctly surmised, the government has no choice but to act in force to expel doubt from the citizenry. A poignant example of this is from what we had observed in Ottawa quite recently. Protesters were being beaten, gassed, trampled, harassed, and arrested for protesting peacefully in order to end nationwide vaccine mandates in Canada. What they are truly guilty of is embarrassing the Canadian government and making them look impotent; the violence against peaceful protesters was a last-ditch effort of what effectively is a government that is nearly completely powerless to challenge the will of its people. This is perhaps one example where the use of force might not be enough. Thus, neither fraud nor force from even the most powerful entities will ever be enough to compel a culturally foreign population to “eat the bugs”, “live in the pod”, “take the vax”, or “support the current thing”, whatever that may be.
So then what does the inevitable era of post-whimper America look like? In my opinion, it doesn’t look too much different than what it is now, except with far fewer government services, widespread violent crime, rampant disease and starvation due to crumbling infrastructure, about two hours a day of electricity, and much more poverty due to reduced economic stability. In other words, we would be relegated to the level of a third-world power much like the respective territories of the former Roman Empire had.
However, the United States has a unique feature that is different from most countries in that it is essentially, and always has been at its core, a federation of states that you can almost look at as their own independent countries. What we will see is a federal government drunk off delusions of grandeur, longing for days’ past when their grasp on power was much stronger. They’ll rant and bloviate about how powerful they are, yet they’ll become gradually more toothless to exercise any real power; the IRS will become nothing more than an empty suit edifice. On the other hand, we will see that a lot of these taxes will be levied and collected by the States that must now provide essential government services with varying degrees of success—try as they might.
One thing that is known is that there would be absolutely no guarantee that every state will work together in a unified spirit of cooperation. Our ability to administer might break down to the level of fiefs and city-states. We might even see some states combine together to form super-states while other states splinter into three or four others. While I can’t pinpoint exactly how or why this would happen, one things for sure is that any mergers or demergers would not occur as the result of a clean blue versus red rivalry, or even establishment versus populist ideologies like we see now.
Once a centralized establishment edifice no longer truly exists – the combined strength of government, media, and corporations – people will find an incredibly wide variety of topics to bicker about. Depending on the relative strength of some of these state governments, you may even see entire territories owned by corporations, by a militia, or even by a tribal war chief of sorts. However, this would also allow for many individuals concerned with single-issue interests to formulate policy and local laws with the consent of like-minded people. More importantly, it would serve as a release valve that would quell tensions once mainline issues are being solved. In this case, you could see hundreds of “cantons” among the original States. You could see a canton that establishes itself as a Christian theocracy with an Archbishop (or denominational equivalent) as the head governor. You could see a canton that does nothing but host P2P servers, tor nodes, and VPN concentrators that centers itself around the principles of privacy. You could see a canton that is just a giant commune for hippies similar to Freetown Christiania. The possibilities are endless.
Of course, these are all nothing but predictions based upon what we have seen in history so far. There is a very good chance that I’ll be proven wrong in some regard, and that I hope I’m proven wrong insofar that a peaceful resolution is obtainable. Yet, all things have to come to an end. Sometimes the lights slowly brighten as the credits roll at the end of a good story; the good guys win the day. Perhaps the movie was a Red Dawn-style tragedy where the bad guys won. More often as we see in history, there’s no curtain call. Individuals will simply wake up one morning, look around in their neighborhoods, and really not notice much of an immediate change in their situation. Maybe one day they may not think of themselves as an American, perhaps more of a Missourian, a Floridian, or a Texan, but, then again, these are all arbitrary distinctions. We may come to live through the big whimper and realize it’s perhaps the most anticlimactic experience we have ever lived through, not even worth marking the day on a calendar. Yet, in the entire span of human history where every state entity has a 0% survival rate, a whimper is the most dignified exit we can hope for.