Liberties

Encompassed with domestic conspiracy, military sedition, and
civil war, they trembled on the edge of precipices in which, after
a longer or shorter term of anxiety, they were inevitably lost.

EDWARD GIBBON, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

In a widely noted coincidence, the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations were both documents of 1776. In a less well-known accident of fate, the Declaration of Independence dovetailed with the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, yet another monument of Enlightenment thought, though not one that created a new nation or established a new method of understanding political economy. Gibbon’s inquiry into the history of an ancient empire passed quickly over its rise. He focused instead on the centuries of decline preceding the fall. These were contrasting endeavors: Jefferson’s excitement about the rights and the liberties of a newborn republic and the learned British historian’s inquiry into the logic of decline in the most paradigmatic of empires. Gibbon’s autumnal epic was peripheral to the creation of a nation. The proper companion for the birth of the American republic, which was destined to be prosperous, was a philosophy designed to unlock the wealth of nations. For a long time, that was the obvious conclusion to draw. Like it or not, Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and philosopher, was a patron saint of the American republic.

Three and a half centuries later, the coincidences of 1776 strike us differently. Even if Gibbon is not being revisited in American intellectual life, his preoccupation with decline is now ubiquitous, a settled thesis in search of fresh evidence. Donald Trump may be the face of American decline, not just the president for four years but the monster waiting to finish the work of destruction that he began. Joe Biden may be the face of American decline, America’s oldest president when he was elected and clearly not the FDR he was made out to be after the election. Decline is now etched into the American landscape — its poverty, its inequality, its racism, its weakening manufacturing base, its debts, its environmental crises, its rusting bridges and pockmarked roads, its moneyed anomie, its decadent elites, its unending polarization, its despair, its surliness. And decline is etched into American foreign policy, too, most vividly in the images of the ignominious retreat from Kabul, of partners and innocents abandoned, of theocrats and terrorists resurgent in the age of American flight.

When will the barbarians arrive at the gates? Or are those of us within the gates the barbarians? When will the once-mighty city fall? And what will the ruins look like after the fall? These are the questions of the hour, and they are surging across the political spectrum.

Before addressing these questions, let us take a closer look at Gibbon and the subsequent career of the declinism that he pioneered. Enduring and worthwhile as the decline of empires is for historians, it is an elusive subject. An aesthetic of decline can certainly be captured — the Goths rampaging through the streets of Rome, Constantinople besieged and then erased by Ottoman armies, Tsar Nicholas II and his family executed outside of Yekaterinburg — and made into the whole of the story. But it is not the whole of the story. It is immensely difficult to explain imperial decline or to disentangle its constituent elements, which usually include individual mistakes, financial ruin, military defeat, intellectual confusion, and the loss of legitimacy. No decline is ever preordained. More carefully considered, the fall of empires can appear accidental. Nicholas II was not obligated to blunder into World War I; many of his ministers tried to argue him out of the mobilization that brought Germany into the war; the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Romanov rule in 1913 was enormous and heartfelt and implied a degree of popular backing that could have enabled the monarchy’s survival for decades to come. Until it happened in 1917, Lenin did not expect to see revolution in his lifetime. Such are the contingencies that complicate every generalization that can be drawn from the annals of failing powers. Decline is not inevitable. It is a consequence of human choice.

Gibbon’s history begins with the Roman empire at its apex. Its splendor in the second century CE was manifold: Roman law, Roman military superiority, and Roman engineering, but also an intellectual culture of balance and beauty. For Gibbon, religious toleration was a precondition for Rome’s flourishing. It produced “not only mutual indulgence but even religious concord.” Religion and philosophy worked hand in hand: “in their writing and conversation the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason; but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and custom.” A capital of religion, philosophy, and politics, the city of Rome was “the common temple of her subjects,” the heart of a “polite and powerful empire” and in its architecture attuned to the “liberal spirit of public magnificence.” Rome united the rulers and the ruled. Gibbon attributes a literary cast to Roman political order — “the love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement.” The second century CE was — and Gibbon generalizes here about all ascendant empires — “an age of science and history.” (By history, he meant that empires in their golden age produce first-rate historians.) Finally, Gibbon identified a spirit, a set of principles and practices, that ornamented Rome’s politics in its heyday: “that poetic courage which is nourished in the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the pressure of danger and the habit of command.”

So what undid all this stability and excellence? Gibbon supplies three reasons for the Roman empire’s decline and fall. Of these the first is probably the most familiar. It is what we would call overreach. In Gibbon’s words, those entrusted with the habit of command “gradually usurped the license of confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth.” The empire became too big, too difficult to defend. It attracted too many enemies, diminishing even the colossal city of Rome. A second cause of decay was the destruction of the Roman Senate that was achieved by the emperor Septimus Severus circa 193 CE. Gibbon bluntly asserts that he was “the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire,” the figure who cleared the path to full-out despotism. A third cause was to be found in what Gibbon called manners and in what we might call values. The commitment to “a rational freedom” dissipated. Several millennia before social media, Gibbon noted that “a crowd of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of letters, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.” The result was “an opulent but feeble country,” though it took time for Rome’s adversaries to see through the imposing edifice. Roman power had been slowly hollowed out, and by Romans.

Ancient Rome is famously redolent of decadence, and Gibbon details the affinity between political decline and cultural decadence. Of the late-imperial Romans, Gibbon writes that “as long as they were indulged in the enjoyment of their baths, their theaters, and their villas they cheerfully resigned the more dangerous cares of empire to the rough hands of peasants and soldiers.” More pivotal than the love of leisure and luxury, though, was the intellectual corruption that Gibbon detected in the aging empire, “when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery.” This slavery was reflected in “the decline of the arts” and “the gradual decay of discipline and courage.” A fall of character, we might say. In a turn of events more intellectual than military in nature, “the model of ancient freedom was suffered to sink into oblivion.” Yet the most striking aspect of Rome’s decay, as narrated by Gibbon, is the fatalism of the Romans themselves. Their “minds [were] afflicted by calamity and contempt for mankind.” In natural disasters such as earthquakes, “their fearful vanity was disposed to confound the symptoms of a declining empire and a sinking world.” Catastrophism took root. Beneath its dark star, the collapse of the empire, when it came, must have been a relief, a deliverance from the burdens of a rational freedom and a blissful surrender to anxieties that had long ago been internalized as inevitabilities. A culture of decline preceded the fall, a dark mood, a proliferating suspicion of apocalypse.

The American Gibbon is Henry Adams, a virtuoso pessimist and a connoisseur of political and cultural decline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when by every empirical standard the United States was a rising power. Democracy, his satirical novel of 1880, was a tale of the decline of manners, and dedicated to the proposition that democracy itself, and the race for money and status, had undone a once glorious republic. The American experiment was no longer what Jefferson had hoped it would be. It was not much more than a sham. Adams also intuited — with genuine brilliance — the ethical danger in the cult of the “dynamo,” the veneration of technology. He examined the German guns on display at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and started to picture a war along the gruesome lines of World War I; he envisioned civilization moving backward. His memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, was an ironic homage: it portrayed a country endowed by its Creator with an inalienable talent for wasting its promise — from the magisterial John Adams (his great-grandfather) to the formidable John Quincy Adams (his grandfather) to the diminutive Henry Adams, proof positive of the decline of genius.

World War I precipitated the decline and fall of many European empires. It validated the seductions of decline, popularizing a largely unreadable book by Oswald Spengler, an eccentric German intellectual. In Das Untergang des Abendlandes, or The Decline of the West, Spengler concerned himself less with empire than with civilization. What fascinated him was the efflorescence and then the decay of civilizations over time — architectural, literary, and religious constellations that rose up, blossomed, and were replaced by other architectural, literary and religious constellations. Spengler devised a “morphology” of civilizations, a map of their natural life cycles. For him, civilizations were organisms that would grow for a while, then mature, then sicken, then die. Unlike Gibbon, who was precise, elegant, spare in style, Spengler was oracular and vague and obtrusively mystical. What he captured best in the multiple volumes of his popular work was the allure of decline, the fascination with catastrophe, the hypnotizing effect of the car crash from which one cannot avert one’s eyes. He had “the imagination of disaster,” in a phrase of Henry James’s, a twilight sensibility that was complicit with catastrophe.

Regardless of how many or how few people read Spengler’s books, regardless of what they actually learned from him, he was immortalized in the adjective “Spenglerian.” Spengler tried to keep his distance from National Socialism, but Hitler and his acolytes had a Spenglerian view of the world; they read him as a forerunner. Germany faced one abyss in the East, the Soviet Union, and another in the West, the Anglo-American democracies. By its own lights, fascism was an effort to “save” a faltering Western civilization, to restore it to health by excising the cancers of internationalism, of finance capitalism, and of Bolshevism, which in practice meant excising Jews from the European body politic. Ironically, the emergence of fascism also inspired a Spenglerian pessimism among its opponents. The decline of the West, the sinking of Europe, had arrived with Mussolini’s and Hitler’s deviation from democracy, the barbaric irrationalism and the boundless militarism of the fascists. Once decline was accepted as a given, its political functions could vary. Declinism was broadly fashionable in the art and culture of the 1920s. In Europe and the United States, the specter of decline was hard to escape after the stock market crash of October 1929.

Spengler’s books showed up in the knapsack of George Kennan when, as a student, he traveled to Europe in the 1920s. Kennan admired Spengler and Adams, and he considered them profound because of their pessimism. As someone who idolized the agrarian Protestantism of nineteenth-century America, Kennan had the nostalgia that often shadows the intuition of decline. The longing backwards glance becomes the nervous look ahead. Kennan was also an enthusiastic reader of Gibbon and in fact extrapolated his theory of containment, the American Cold War strategy, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Kennan applied its lessons to Stalin’s Soviet Union, which was rapidly expanding at the end of World War II, an empire following in the footsteps of the Red Army. Dwelling on the theme of imperial overreach, Kennan noted risks for Moscow, and not just for the West, in a massive Soviet imperium. So let this empire grow brittle, Kennan advised. Contain its growth where this growth is unwanted: there is no need to go beyond containment. The risks of conflict are too great, whereas the potential for self-destruction, the likelihood of Soviet decline, is written in the stars.

Kennan did not limit his lessons from Gibbon to the Soviet Union. Kennan loathed the commercialism of America, its materialism, its cultural vulgarity. He especially resented what he construed as the depredations of multiculturalism. He regarded the Vietnam War as an instance of imperial overreach and was convinced that postwar American culture had fallen into chronic decadence. Kennan, who lived a long life, spoke out against NATO expansion in the 1990s and against the Iraq War of 2003, lamenting that Americans had come to be seen as the world’s “spiritual dunces.” The country that won the Cold War was not a serious country, in his mandarin opinion. Gibbon had tied Christianity to the decline of the Roman Empire. Kennan’s Spenglerian conservatism convinced him that a diminishing Christian piety marked the moral decline of the United States. He ended his life a despondent outlier in the American foreign-policy establishment. Where his colleagues heard the martial music of international engagement, he heard the tolling of imperial decline.

Kennan’s declinism was most in vogue nationally in the 1970s. Expressing a widespread sentiment on the American right, Ronald Reagan would later claim that Washington had been defeated in Vietnam by its own fecklessness. The United Sates had forgotten the can-do optimism of Franklin Roosevelt and the muscular anti-communism of Harry Truman. For those on the left, the cognate for decline was the Vietnam War itself, the mendacity of the Johnson administration, the imperial instinct that went back to the Spanish-American War of 1898, to the Mexican War of 1848, and to the theft of land from the Native Americans. In Vietnam, the United States was declining into the worst version of itself: the Cold War disingenuously imposed on the Soviet Union by Truman was nothing but a detour from America’s democratic potential. The scapegoat for the left was the liberal establishment. It had promised competence and progress and delivered incompetence and decline. It had used American idealism to betray American idealism, democratic rhetoric to mask imperial intent, all in the name of a lost war. Even within the government, decline was on the agenda in the Vietnam era. Henry Kissinger kept trying — with unknown results — to get President Nixon to read Spengler.

In the 1970s, the imagination of decline went beyond Vietnam. The energy crisis of the early 1970s halted the postwar economic boom, the trentes glorieuses or thirty years of prosperity, as the French refer to them, and launched a period of truncated social mobility and declining real wealth for the American middle class. Journalists avidly reported on the decline of American cities. The seaminess of Times Square in the 1970s was a metaphor not quite for Roman decadence, more for the depleted landscapes that connote an empire’s fall. The aura of decline inspired the cinema of the 1970s, whether it was the psychopathic rage in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (set in and around Times Square) or the emptied-out, traumatized community in The Deer Hunter. Parts one and two of The Godfather align the decline of the Corleone family with the nation’s gathering losses in the 1970s, loss of purpose, loss of strength, loss of integrity. In the late 1970s: President Jimmy Carter did not just suffer from the conventional setbacks of political life. He gave his infamous “malaise speech” in 1979, invoking the purgatory of decline, of a deflation of spirit, to which the United States had apparently condemned itself. It was a country that needed to be diagnosed, and in the 1970s the diagnoses were legion.

A bit like a pandemic, the attraction to decline comes in waves. By the 1980s, the Vietnam wave had crested. The Soviet Union was Brezhnev’s and no longer Stalin’s. It was ever more enmeshed in the decline that Kennan (channeling Gibbon) had foreseen. China was changing after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979 but was not yet a contender for great-power status. In the 1980s, the barometer of decline was Japan, an American ally and an economic behemoth. Japan’s future could look a lot brighter than that of the divided, confused, unproductive United States. Japan as Number One was the title of an influential book of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1987, the historian Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, retracing the Gibbon-inflected dilemma of imperial overreach. Kennedy identified a sweet spot of technological innovation, productive capacity, wealth, and military prowess that equals a great power’s rise. Over-extension, though, is hard to avoid, he argued, and over-extension shifts wealth into unproductive military assets. The economy that had supplied the great power in the first place loses steam, inviting the aggression of enemies. Rise engenders fall. Four years after Kennedy put out his book, the Soviet Union fell apart in a perfect confirmation of Kennedy’s rise-and-fall model. But the intended audience for his book had not been Soviet. It had been American.

The America of 1987 was rescued from inklings of decline by the Cold War’s sudden end. The vanquished Soviet Union shed a soft, attractive light on the United States. Having retired its malaise, Washington could share its wealth, the marvels of the American system, with the world. It could export the ingredients of its success: the rule of law that regulated commerce, the freedoms that underpinned the American university, the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley, the multiculturalism that made America America. A blend of free-market capitalism and democracy promotion became the “Washington consensus” of the 1990s, which bespoke a kind of optimism or, more precisely, a will to capitalize on the ascendance of the United States. Without a peer competitor, Washington sought partnerships with everyone under the sun of globalization: with Europe, with Russia, with China. Those recalcitrant areas whose tribalism evaded the Washington consensus could with engagement, with diplomacy, and if necessary with military force. The collective sense of power and right enabled the “humanitarian interventions” of the 1990s.

Even in this period of general optimism, decline was never forgotten. It silhouettes many of the big ideas that emerged after the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man was surprisingly melancholic. To win the political argument, as Fukuyama was certain the United States had done by the 1990s, was to lose the bracing headwinds of struggle. The last man would be no Achilles or Odysseus, no Pericles full of vigor and vitality. The last man would be a solitary consumer lulled into complacency by the absence of ideological strife. Or the last man would be a technocrat, a political manager pressing the buttons and pulling the levers of the machine known as liberal democracy. The End of History was an essay on the spiritual perils embedded in liberal democracy, though Fukuyama did not fret about excessive leisure and luxury, the slide into decadence and from there the descent into despotism. Nor did Fukuyama take up Spengler and regard liberal democracy as just the latest turn of the civilizational wheel. Liberal democracy was — to a certain extent unfortunately — destined to conquer. It was not long before history eluded the ending that Fukuyama wished to give it.

Samuel Huntington was another melancholic of the 1990s. If the title of his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order sounds gung-ho, Huntington was no cheerleader of the West. In fact, The Clash of Civilizations is quite Spenglerian. The West’s decline, according to Huntington, is its loss of conviction and inability to defend itself, perhaps even to know itself. No amount of military power could mask the West’s cultural decline, as Huntington portrays it: universities that are no longer teaching the canon of Western civilization, a rampant commercialism, the blinders of a callous universalism, a failure to see that there is such a thing as civilization at all. Enamored of the “Washington consensus,” the West has gradually usurped the license of confounding itself with the globe of the earth. Thus might an inner cultural emptiness and lack of curiosity conspire with an appetite for imperial overreach. The West is claiming the globe of the earth as its dominion, unprepared for the immense civilizational backlash that this arrogance will engender. Much like Kennan before him, Huntington could combine ideas from Spengler with those from Gibbon into an ominous synthesis. Decline was the connecting link.

Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s were voices from the political center. To their right, decline had a much more forthright post-Cold War exponent. Patrick Buchanan will haunt the history of the twenty-first century United States: he is the tragic Henry Adams, pining for past glory, reincarnated as a cable-TV farce. Buchanan had worked in the Nixon White House. He ran for President in 1992, losing to George H.W. Bush in the primaries. Losing suited him: it proved his point. At the convention the theme of his fire-and-brimstone speech was that Americans were losing their country. In Buchanan one can find another mingling of Gibbon and Spengler. The Spenglerian element was cultural or moral decline, civilizational self-destruction — achieved, according to Buchanan, by immigration, multiculturalism, and the embrace of homosexuality. The Gibbonesque element was, as usual, imperial overreach. The Cold War was over, Buchanan reminded his audience, and the Cold War’s imperial temptations had to be set aside. Only a return to republican virtue and to traditional Christianity and to the fantasy of an ethnically homogeneous (read: white) society could silence the siren song of a great power’s decline.

The White House beyond his reach, Buchanan charted the decline of the United States in books. Their elaborate titles tell his story: The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (1998); A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (1999); The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002); State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006); and Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025 (2011). These are not good books. They are bigoted, hyperbolic, sensationalist, dogmatic, and studded with celebrations of the Confederacy and nineteenth-century European imperialism. Yet they are historically more important than either The End of History or The Clash of Civilizations, as they so perfectly anticipated the presidency of Donald Trump. George H.W. Bush eventually lost his argument with Buchanan, at least within the Republican Party. Buchanan’s books reveal Trump’s political secret, which is his sensitivity to the appeal of decline to the American electorate. “Make America Great Again” is the slogan of a declinist.

The causes of decline are many, according to the contemporary right. Foremost is the claim that the country has lost its moral compass. The problem is secularism, or a post-religious culture that is revolutionizing the triad of sex, family, and gender. A Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition through which chastity until marriage and stable gender roles were publicly endorsed and enshrined in law has been demolished. Without this tradition, they contend, the country cannot go on. It will cease to be what it is, having abnegated its moral self, and it will come to political ruin in the process. The decadence of ancient Rome is relevant for them. Closer in time is the storied decadence of the Weimar Republic, too exhausted by its transgressions to defend itself from Hitler and his National Socialists. In 2017, the Orthodox Christian conservative Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. America as such is a lost cause for Dreher, a pagan desert, Babylon. A retreat to the available oases of Christian faith, the Benedict option, after the founder of Benedictine monasticism, is his recommendation for escape from the abyss.

Another pillar of declinism on the right is socio-economic. It was one of Buchanan’s recurrent subjects in the 1990s and thereafter: that global capitalism benefits a small cadre of cosmopolitan elites and leaves everyone else behind. (This was the thesis of the left-wing blockbuster Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which appeared in 2000, and thirteen years later of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century.) Applied to the United States, the right-wing theory of socio-economic decline goes as follows. Business and foreign-policy elites colluded in the 1990s to compromise borders and to liberate capital flows so that they might grow richer. Manufacturing jobs leaked out to China and other countries. While the financial districts of American cities flourished, the nation’s heartlands were bled dry. This was the “carnage” to which Trump referred in his inaugural address. At issue was no neutral economic process. At issue was the malice of the American ruling class, which had happily sacrificed real progress to its own short-term cupidity. America’s death is the life of its craven, sybaritic, and post-national elites. The stage was being set in these narratives for a populist backlash.

A third reason for decline in the new American conservatism is an alleged loss of nationhood. The conservatives watch with horror as a progressive elite elevates a critique of American nationhood into a “woke” religion, which tethers every facet of American identity to white supremacy, to patriarchy, to assertions of heterosexual privilege. The moment of national origin has been pushed back from 1776 to 1619, from heroism to exploitation, from the founding of the republic to the arrival of the first African slaves on the American continent. Even Abraham Lincoln belongs to this narrative of woe, as another white supremacist. Left to their own devices, according to the right, the progressives will turn every university, every museum, every magazine, every Hollywood studio, and every public school into a thorn in the side of American nationhood. Recall that the Soviet Union was not felled by a coup d’etat and was never defeated on the battlefield. It just stopped believing in itself. It canceled itself, and a mere thirty years after the Soviet Union’s demise a similar inner collapse awaits the country that triumphed over it.

The crumbling of nationhood has international echoes on the right. The ur-text here is Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtues of Nationalism, which appeared in 2018. Hazony pins all foreign-policy errors on the neglect of nationalism. Empires homogenize and empires conquer, in Hazony’s reductive verdict. But nations hold back and nations nurture. The Soviet Union was an empire and went the way of empires. Nazi Germany, in Hazony’s bizarre reading of twentieth-century history, was an empire free from nationalistic tendencies. For nationalism, despite the many atrocities committed in its name, is for Hazony the stuff of human kindness. The Third Reich also went the way of empires. The European Union is an empire with an empire’s arrogance and dullness of mind. The United States is properly a nation, Hazony feels, though one that shows many signs of having metastasized into an empire. America at its worst is a progressive, faithless empire. America at its best is, well, Israel, a multi-ethnic Israel, as in the biblical Israel, a community with faith in its founding creeds, a nation that walks with God. Donald Trump’s “America first” foreign policy is admirable — in Hazony’s view — for its drive to reverse the post-national decline fomented by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the globalist elites who staffed their administrations and who justified the evils of their foreign policy.

The right’s most ambitious declinist text is Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, also from 2018. Deneen belongs to a coterie of Catholic conservatives who, like Rod Dreher, vociferously lament the fading of Christianity. For Deneen, this is no temporary disturbance of American manners. It is the malfunctioning of the system — a malfunctioning that Deneen describes in the past tense because liberalism has already failed. American liberalism, the Jeffersonian venture launched in 1776, cracked up because it gave individuals too much liberty. With their unbounded rights, Deneen believes, Americans accomplished only a transvaluation of values, a dissolution of community, a degradation of their own dignity, and the travesty of an environment-destroying capitalism. Deneen wavers between a populist conservatism, an incipient political movement, and a utopian dream of organic community knit together by faith, and economic equality, and the curbing of appetites. The future is hazy in Deneen’s writing. What he seems to really care about is cataloguing America’s day-to-day decline.

Meanwhile the American left is not to be outdone by the American right in its intimations of the end. Some of the gloomy analysis overlaps; much does not. There is a shared conviction that American political economy is out of whack. Manufacturing jobs are less the issue on the left, whose villain is not so much China as Wall Street and a predatory economic elite that has fixed the rules of the game. Since the government slavishly serves the one percent, the labor movement has been eviscerated and politicians routinely side with the plutocratic malefactors, giving them the assistance of the courts and the legislatures, and of lenient tax policies. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both speak as if something can still be done. They are not quite apocalyptic, but both are heavily invested in the theme of decline. For them, we are on a deteriorating path towards economic and social entropy. Absent systemic change, the progressives insist, this is the path to doom. Not exactly nostalgic and not exactly pragmatic, progressive leaders such as Warren and Sanders are consistently declinist in their attitude toward the country before their eyes.

For the past several decades, the academic left has tied class to race and gender. Its project can be literally progressive: the expansion of rights along a historical continuum — the New Deal welfare state and Great Society, the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, the successive feminist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Barack Obama liked to say “from Seneca Falls to Selma,” and he had Martin Luther King’s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice sewn into the Oval Office carpet. Obama’s own presidency was meant to demonstrate the reality of progress: he was the change we had been waiting for, a biracial man with a foreign-sounding name who would save the country from the regressive policies of George W. Bush and would do what he could do to help out poor and working-class Americans, to advance women’s and gay rights and to heal the country’s racial wounds. The victory of Obama’s Vice President in the election of 2020 revived the progressive hope that had once been the halo around Obama’s head. But even when Obama was in office, the left was moving on. In doing so, it ran up analytically against the inverse of progress, which is decline.

On race, the left-wing case for decline is tricky. That there has been progress is incontrovertible, but it has too often been brief and fitful — the heyday of the civil rights movements, or the twelve years of Reconstruction. To say that the civil rights movement has been betrayed is not to admit decline so much as to acknowledge the size and the scope of the countervailing pressures — the never-ending momentum in favor of white supremacy, its constant reinvention and repurposing. The 1970s witnessed Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The 1980’s witnessed Ronald Reagan’s racially motivated assault on the welfare state. The 1990s witnessed Bill Clinton’s prejudiced criminal justice reform. The months after Hurricane Katrina witnessed George W. Bush’s indifference to the suffering of African Americans. The Obama years witnessed one episode after another of racist police brutality, and 2016 witnessed the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s contempt for black Americans is plain and unapologetic, and it claims the allegiance of half the country. For the bleak picture developed on the left, America’s racial history can be said to culminate in the career of Donald Trump.

On gender, the fragility of progress similarly invites pessimistic scenarios. The fragility emanates primarily from the Supreme Court’s perceived role as the defender of abortion rights and of gay marriage, though state legislatures in red states have become more activist in recent years. Now that it has tipped in the wrong direction, the Supreme Court can render everything null and void. An alternate reactionary future is hardly inconceivable. In 2016, the year of Donald Trump, a television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale explored the reversibility of women’s rights via a Christian patriarchy of Orwellian hue, a 1984 for the twenty-first century. Without implementing Atwood’s dystopia, Trump traduced everything that progressives cherish concerning gender: he appointed almost no women to senior cabinet positions in government; he regularly demeaned women and mocked their physical appearance; his administration did not respect the rights of transsexuals; it ceased speaking out on behalf of women’s rights internationally. In the figure of Mike Pence it signaled a disapproval of homosexuality. A Handmaid’s Tale could almost be viewed as a roadmap of the GOP’s intentions. A falling away from gender equality, the progressives warn, is terrifyingly close at hand.

In American foreign policy, schemes of decline cross party lines. The idea that 9/11 sponsored imperial overreach is widespread on the left and the right. Trump rode this idea to the White House. For the left, the domestic consequences of an activist, even interventionist American foreign policy issue in depleted budgets and in techniques of surveillance and military control that may have been officially intended for counter-insurgency overseas but have been unofficially deployed on American streets. The killing of George Floyd, it is said, can be traced back to a criminal war on terror, the empire’s core corrupted by the chaos projected onto its periphery. In a recent book pointedly titled Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn indicts America’s military interventions abroad as imperialism. A veneer of humanitarian moralizing covers an insatiable lust for power — the old Chomsky point. The collateral damage is hidden from view by drone warfare and by a population and an intelligentsia inured to the human costs of American foreign policy. As with the Vietnam War — from a left-wing point of view — the violence of today’s declining empire is made worse by the futility of its aspirations. To survive, the United States needs to end its addiction to neo-colonial “forever” wars. And there are many on the right who wholeheartedly agree.

On climate change, however, the left is singular in its prophesies of decline. Trump’s Republican Party pretends that the problem does not exist. Their denial sharpens a left-leaning panic about climate change as an existential threat to cities, to communities, to human life as we know it. Al Gore’s inconvenient truth has taken on the proportions of an overwhelming truth. The nineteenth-century eft had placed its bets with industrialization, which if intelligently guided would bestow abundance and happiness upon the proletariat. The twenty-first century left cannot afford this optimism: the rape of the planet has come about through industrialization, through mass consumption, through the insanity of unchecked economic growth. Adam Smith’s wealth of nations has turned to dust. A Green New Deal might thread the needle, containing climate change and granting equality in one blow, but the details and the feasibilities of such a vast plan are sketchy. On the left, the foreboding is more vivid than the sense of agency. So far, it is the poor, the less powerful, the migrants and minorities of the world and of the United States, who are paying the price for climate change. Throw in a global pandemic and Spengler’s musings on civilizational decline are a genteel footnote to the future we have before us. What is the decline of the West compared to the decline or the extinction of the human race?

In our savagely polarized country, then, there is one widely shared perception: that it is almost closing time. Declinism is trending. It is also self-fulfilling and mutually reinforcing. Each side has persuaded itself that the other is a vehicle of decline: the next terrible chapter is only a mid-term or presidential election away. The rising level of antagonism has attracted a third school of declinism, call it the centrist school, which posits political polarization itself as the catalyst of democratic decline: a “democracy deficit” in the America once rhapsodized by Walt Whitman as the beau ideal of openness, freedom, and the common man. This interpretation has a pre-history extrapolated from the electoral maps of 2000 and 2004, parts of which were red and parts of which were blue. In 2008, Sarah Palin was a sign of the coming red-blue war, though the race between John McCain and Barack Obama was polite, as was the race between Mitt Romney and Obama in 2012. Those were not duels to the death. Obama even campaigned against the diminishment of America into red and blue quadrants.

Trump disagreed. He applied his cunning in marketing and branding to a movement based on his authoritarian personality and on a series of vague promises. Trump also applied his rhetorical gifts — crude but effective — to the demonization of his opponents, constructing a trap into which his enemies quickly jumped. They responded to his invective by demonizing him and his followers. Hillary Clinton dismissed Trump sympathizers as “deplorables.” The vituperation proliferated. Trump profited enormously from this degradation of political culture and from the melodrama of polarization that gave the media endless stories that wrote themselves. And the vortex of polarization, once entered, has been punishingly difficult to leave. It could justify impatience or rage against the procedures of democracy, which rest on a degree of civility, of give-and-take, of reasonableness, and on the acceptance that the defeat of one’s party is never an ultimate defeat. Setbacks happen, and they can be endured because not living with them leads either to revolution or to civil war. The Democratic Party struggled to stay civil as long as Trump was in office, and it succeeded. Biden ran sincerely as a Democrat and as a democrat in 2020. He did well as both. As a referendum on politics, the 2020 election illustrated Trump’s limitations and democracy’s fortitude. The less polarizing candidate came out ahead.

Then came the putsch of January 6. Even those who had been wringing their hands about polarization and its declinist overtones were shocked by what happened: the Capitol stormed, the confirmation of Biden’s victory delayed, a violent mob on the loose within the halls of power, a President watching delightedly on television after having told this same mob to go and “fight like hell” for him. The Republicans responded as they have usually responded to Trump’s disgraces: briefly horrified, they stuck with the boss. Trump was impeached but not convicted. Sizable numbers of Americans now believe that the election was stolen, and were Trump to come back as a candidate in 2024 it would be as a would-be autocrat. Trump is the symptom, it is often pointed out. Polarization is the disease. In an extraordinary essay in The Washington Post in September, Robert Kagan diagrammed the death of the republic. “The events of Jan. 6,” Kagan writes, “proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past.” The Republican Party is their accomplice, Bolsheviks who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes. How Democracies Die was the name of a book in 2018 by two political scientists which, when published, sounded abstract and speculative, a bit like a seminar subject. For Kagan, democracy’s death may be three years away. Driven by rival expectations of decline, by the swooning pessimism of the left and the right, polarization might be the accelerator of actual decline. Trump the believer in decline and Trump the raven of decline is also Trump the guarantor of decline, the Captain Ahab for the doomed Pequod of American democracy.

In 1978, Václav Havel wrote an essay on the political agency that had magically persisted in communist Czechoslovakia. Havel knew that people were living under despotism and that they were supposed to conform to the script written for them. Yet they had discovered countless subtle ways to expose the falseness of the power above them, and to resist it. Their small acts of honesty might blossom over time into something else, Havel speculated. His essay was called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in the years since it was written it has given heart to dissidents the world over. It described a political sphere that is accessible to those even in a tyranny, the inner freedom that may require courage to express and is noble and liberating when expressed. There are limits, Havel insisted, to how far even totalitarians can reach into the human spirit. Havel had never seen a Czech democracy with his own eyes. He knew only Soviet control, and 1978, when the Soviets were celebrating America’s humiliation in Vietnam and preparing to invade Afghanistan, was not an auspicious year for dissidents living under communism. Havel’s essay is astonishing not just for its trust in rational freedom, but also for its utter lack of anguish. He wrote confidently about the ultimate erosion of dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, when there was no empirical evidence to support such democratic assurance.

Is such democratic assurance available to us? We live in a country that is superbly well defended and rich, a country blessed with institutions and with rights that ensure bona fide civic freedoms, that has an effervescent cultural energy, and that is nevertheless beguiled by the possibility of its own decline. We prefer to believe in the powerlessness of the powerful — of ourselves, that is. The repetition of the declinist hypothesis has established it as a trope of our political culture, and tropes are hard to shake off. Declinism also meets the psychological needs of the pandemic, mirroring the pandemic’s reversals of fortune, its confirmation of threat and fear, and its curtailing of liberties that prior to covid were taken for granted. It may seem paradoxical to speak of the élan of declinism, but we are witnessing it. Since we are going under, we should discuss only the reason why we are going under. Gloom invites the consolation of further gloom. The gloom will only pass when the Untergang has reached its climax and that which we worried about losing is finally lost.

The pervasive sensation of crisis in America cannot be boiled down only to a mood or an attitude. It follows also from a coruscating convergence of real-life problems. Declinists of different stripes have correctly recognized the terrible disparities between rich and poor, urban and rural, and the unequal opportunities and prejudice facing many minority groups; the undercurrent of violence in American life; the oligarchic nature of much of the American business elite and of portions of the political elite; the assault on facts and on intellectual and journalistic authority that has arisen from multiple technological revolutions, from our own cult of the “dynamo,” from post-everything intellectuals, and from an overabundance of confident men and women; the waning effectiveness of American foreign policy; and the terrible pressures of climate change, which require in response a willingness to plan and to sacrifice that does not come naturally to materialistic societies. Covid has trained a brutal spotlight on health care in the United States. The means were there to beat back the pandemic — the overall wealth, the government institutions, the scientific know-how, the heroic first responders — but the national will was missing as well as the organizational talent and the social trust.This is not the best of all possible worlds. It is also not the best of all possible Americas. To tie the country’s many crises into a bundle and to impute progress to this bundle, to regard our time as a period of upheaval after which the promised land is bound to be entered, would be absurd. There is no guarantee that any of the country’s many crises will be adequately dealt with, no hidden Hegelian machine that will produce a better democracy from the punishing antitheses of the present moment. Declinism is valid insofar as it consists in the recognition of actual problems. But it honors the problems too much: it merges them into a fate and prefers the consequent fatalism to an educated hope. Strangely, a narrative of decline also soothes: it rescues us from our challenges, and it comforts us with the certitude that tomorrow’s problems will be worse than today’s. One need not be an optimist to tackle problems, but if good government is to be attempted, if intelligent policies are to be matched to pressing problems, this must be done with the rational and researched expectation that problems can be solved — that, in the language of the Federalist Papers, they can be solved through “reflection and choice” and not resolved through “accident and force.” It is declinism that favors accident and force. It does so by inhibiting reflection and choice.

Declinist arguments are wielded for political effect at home. So, too, are they wielded for political effect internationally. They have become the mainstays of official Russian and Chinese messaging about American politics and American power. “American Decline” was the title of a piece in Russia Today, a state-run media enterprise in Russia, in 2018. “In America”, the article informs its readers, “the richest country in the world measured by raw GDP, children are getting sick from living in open pools of sewage.” A less vivid analysis surfaces in a recent interview on Frontline, Chinese state media, in which an expert declares that the United States “is declining because of its own internal contradictions, bad governance, inequality, injustice. But American elites don’t want to say so, so they blame it on China.” This is a misreading of American elites, who discuss American decline incessantly, blaming it squarely on the United States. The concordance between what decline-oriented American elites are saying and what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin say does not itself undercut the argument that the United States is in decline, nor are American pessimists the stooges of China or Russia. Yet the inward-looking tenor of the declinist narratives that are proliferating left, right and center are costly in two respects. Too often they fail to incorporate comparative assessments that could moderate the sensation of decline: they tend to compare America at its best or America at its imagined best with the unvarnished America of the present day and leave it at that, missing the anomalous stability of American politics (even in recent years) and the frequent instability of other political traditions. And these narratives unwittingly amplify Chinese and Russian propaganda. Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia do not just wish to see American decline. They also wish to engineer it.

Let us return to Gibbon. He can help to define political decline, which has a thousand different and mutually exclusive meanings in American debates. (Moral decline is notoriously in the eye of the beholder.) Gibbon’s three causes of Rome’s decline were imperial overreach, the crippling of the Senate, and the slipping away of rational freedom. The problem of imperial overreach may resonate today, as does Paul Kennedy’s association of debt with decline. But the United States is only imprecisely an empire. It lacks ancient Rome’s borderlessness and its appetite for conquest and occupation. The divisions of empire that Gibbon chronicles in his history, especially the empire’s separation into Eastern and Western halves and the transfer of the capital from Rome to Constantinople, have nothing in common with the United States as currently constituted. The United States is a geographically stable republic; Washington, D.C., is its indisputable capital; and it can determine the contours of its international commitments. It has no incentive to expand. Indeed, the United States faces no credible threats to the security of its homeland. No Roman general or Senator or Caesar could have imagined such a reassuring state of affairs.

As for the destruction of the Senate, Trump is no Septimus Severus. Trump had four years to erect an American despotism. He spent them feuding with his own party. The Senate cheerfully defied Trump on Russia policy and in many other areas (such as health care). In 2018, Trump irritated enough voters for them to hand the House of Representatives to the Democrats. In the 2020 elections, which Biden won by some eight million votes, Trump’s party lost the Senate. In the Senate chambers, Trump’s Vice President calmly gaveled in a Biden presidency on January 7. Republicans in many state senates blocked Trump’s attempts to steal the election. Dozens of the January 6 rioters are now in jail. What the Senate represents — the spirit of mixed government, the skepticism toward executive power, the resistance to despotism in the making — has been damaged by the collapse of reasoned debate and by the slings and arrows of outrageous partisanship, but it is hardly dead. Trump’s presidency had the unwitting effect of elevating the Bill of Rights, making it more necessary, more urgent. Whether he runs and is reelected or not, Trump will kick sand into the machinery of American democracy until his last breath, but he will not become an American Caesar. He cannot become an American Caesar unless the country throws up its hands and starts to cry “Hail, Caesar!” in unison.

Gibbon’s third cause, the divorce of a rational freedom from the life of the mind, is hard to measure. The religious tolerance that Gibbon lauded in pre-Christian Rome is active in twenty-first century America. It does not appear to be in remission. America continues to possess reservoirs of quotidian tolerance, the invisible successful negotiations of a richly heterogeneous society. Reason holds sway in the sciences, in medicine, in the study of law and economics: these are not negligible intellectual pursuits. And yet the “independent dignity of reason,” as Gibbon described this necessary attribute of ancient Rome’s success, is by no means in good shape. It has been battered by the stupidity of social media, the fads and fun-house-mirror politics of American universities, the perspectivist thrust of identity politics, the political wars on science and public health, the will-not-to-know on the right, and the soap-opera rhythms and ideological crusades of the news media. Consider this comment in an article on cancel culture in The New York Times: “The idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.” It was uttered by Phoebe Cohen, a professor of geoscience at Williams College, who may not directly oppose a rational freedom. She — a scientist, a professor — merely opposes everything that underpins it. Gibbon writes of the emperor Commodus having “an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal.” Many political figures, ancient and modern, have had this aversion. When it is shared by the teachers of the young, we are in trouble.

Gibbon’s most applicable insight concerns the fatalism of the late-imperial Romans. Our talk of decline fulfills itself, and usually results in intellectual muddle. Talk of decline stymies compromise, because nobody should compromise with a political opponent on the verge of cementing a nation’s decline. Worst of all, it inclines toward emotional paralysis, the obsession with decline shading into depression and, as Gibbon noted, into narcissism, into a “fearful vanity” through which we love by lamenting ourselves. Musing on Rome’s decline and fall, Gibbon characterized the human mind as depressed by civil and religious slavery — held down, weighed down, bogged down. Moving in circles, the encumbered mind is its own biggest obstacle. The Goths did not prevent the Romans from upholding their civil and religious freedom. The Caesars did not eliminate freedom of mind, not completely. In the unwinding of Rome’s decline and fall, mental slavery was self-imposed. It arose from a fashionable melancholia, a mass depression, and so the power of the powerful was misapplied or went unused. But in the United States the hour is not too late. There are no experts in the coming of apocalypse. Born in 1776, like Gibbon’s great and cautionary book, ours is a country awash in agency, with many roads and crossroads ahead of it. Our liberty is a truth that should still be self-evident. It is ours to lose, and it is ours to keep.