There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them. – John Desmond Bernal
Some astute readers have pointed out that it sometimes seems as though I’m contradicting myself when talking about the future. On the one hand, I am optimistic that sex work will eventually be decriminalized, that prohibition as a concept will be tossed onto the ash-heap of history, and that future historians will look back at our ugly, warped, fear-haunted culture with wonder and pity. On the other hand, I say that the United States is a decaying fascist empire which has already passed the point at which future historians will declare it a different entity than the American republic which came before, just as they consider the Byzantine Empire a separate entity from the Roman even though the Byzantine rulers themselves made no such distinction. But these two points aren’t contradictory at all; I think the confusion derives from a kind of chauvinism which can’t conceive of a future in which the US either does not exist or doesn’t play a major role. But that’s not realistic, and I certainly don’t imagine the world that way; quite the opposite, in fact. I not only recognize that the US, like every single country which has preceded it since the invention of the nation-state and every single one which will follow it until that concept is itself tossed onto the aforementioned historical ash-heap, is mortal and will one day die; my optimistic predictions are predicated upon it.
I am an American, and I love the ideas that the American government was founded upon: minimal government, individual liberty and justice for all. But those ideas were neither understood nor believed nor practiced by the vast majority of Americans even at the time when the Constitution was drawn up; even the Founders themselves, the men who codified those concepts and built institutions upon them, made plenty of exceptions, compromises and caveats to their high-sounding principles (chief among which was tolerance of the odious notion that one human being could own another). And as time marched on and successive generations inherited the machinery of government, the safeguards installed by the Founders were undermined, abrogated, annulled, ignored and repealed to make way for laws and practices based upon the real beliefs of the majority of Americans: fear, hate, superstition, intolerance, greed, violence, control-freakishness, lust for power and, above all, prudishness. The intersection of all of these vile principles is the crowning achievement of the warped American mind: Prohibition, the deranged belief that some ruling elite has the right and duty to decide what’s best for everyone else, to ban everything that the elite decides is “bad”, and to dispatch an army of violent thugs to enforce those prohibitions by any means necessary, including (but not limited to) mass surveillance, witch hunts, perjury, robbery, rape, mayhem, murder and mass enslavement. The last, at least, was predictable; if even the men who so fervently believed in liberty for all that they founded a country on it were unable to let go of slavery, how could their barbaric inheritors be expected to?
I’m sure some of you will object that legal prohibitions have existed since the beginning of civilization, and you’d be right; however, isolated bans on this or that are no more equivalent to capital-P Prohibition as it exists in the United States, than isolated murders are equivalent to War. The idea that vast social resources should be devoted to warring upon the country’s own citizenry in order to stop them from consensual activities that the rulers disapprove of is a distinctly American form of collective madness, and the powerful influence American culture has exerted on the world for the past century (since the advent of mass media & American domination of same) is the only reason it has become at all prevalent in the rest of the world. After the United States dies, the evil of prohibition will (albeit gradually) follow it into Hell. The United States is but the latest in a long succession of great Western empires, each descending from the one before; it was originally a colony of Great Britain, which was in earlier times a province of the Roman Empire, which borrowed much of its culture from Greece, which previously conquered Persia, which rose to prominence after destroying Assyria, which had generations before conquered Babylonia, which had ruled over the cities that once made up Sumer. The next inheritor of this legacy probably already exists in one form or another; it will be up to that people to take the next step in the evolution of human civilization. And when they do, they will admire America for the ways in which she was great, and criticize her for the ways in which she was awful, just as Americans do the civilizations which came before her. And tourists from that future nation will one day visit the ruins of the great American cities, fascinated by the quaint customs of the locals, and enjoying the immense buying power their healthy currency has in the economically-devastated remnant of what was once the greatest power on Earth.
Those who would apply and operate such oppression upon others, will seek refuge in outragous moral rectitude as fake as it is grievously pernicious.
It is a deep need for power, that surely must have it’s origins as an evolutionary survival technique in a fiercely competitive world, and thus will not going away anytime soon.
Nevertheless, we are a very young species, and I have hope for the (distant) future, especially while such ‘fille de joie’ as this eloquant and admirable author to whom I offer my kind regards, walks with us.
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1826, of Thomas Jefferson. His self-written epitaph reads, “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia”. Nothing about slaves, though.
Jefferson and John Adams both.
I don’t see the concept of a nation going away, though all nations will be replaced by others.
The general problem is that over time, every nation-state accumulates more and more power until eventually it needs to be overthrown. Jefferson recognized this and planned for it, as did Locke before him. The specific problem is how to design a government that will both last and stay limited, even though it will inevitably attract officials who want to increase their powers. The Articles of Confederation and US Constitution, I believe, were only the second and third serious attempts to achieve this, the first being the Magna Carta. We should definitely try again, and be sure to learn from the parts that didn’t work the last time through.
Jefferson’s epitaph lists his proudest acts.
“I’m sure some of you will object that legal prohibitions have existed since the beginning of civilization.”
Yes, and that’s why I’m afraid I have a hard time being as optimistic as you claim to be. Because along with the above, the idea of a Leader that everyone else obeys (whether voluntarily or not), whether they are called a king, chief, brahmin, pope, premier, prime minister, sultan, president, or CEO, has also existed since the beginning of civilization.
I’d be curious to know what you think the future nation you describe toward the end of this column is. Is it one that currently exists on the map? Because those supposedly ‘enlightened’ citizens will more likely than not say, “These Americans, too bad they couldn’t make it work. Too bad they didn’t have someone like OUR glorious Leader. He/She knows what’s truly good for a people.”
Furthermore, you speak of the idea of the nation-state eventually being rejected as well. That seems a more palatable idea than America being replaced by another nation that will just make the exact same mistakes. But I don’t see it coming because humanity literally cannot conceive of what can replace the nation-state and still sustain 7-9 billion people on this planet. Not to say there haven’t been those who’ve tried (the Founding Fathers did, though they ultimately failed) but unless there is a group of people somewhere with a mighty big surprise up their sleeve, it would probably take either an extinction event on par with the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, or a visit from a benign extraterrestrial entity that is capable of demonstrating another way of organizing ourselves (without Leaders) to cause that desired next evolutionary step. Monkey see, monkey do.
I know you don’t care about the current election, however I would be very intrigued by how many people vote for Donald Trump for the same reason I remember Krulac saying he voted for Barack Obama; if Trump as President is anywhere near as destructive as the Left claimed George W. Bush to be, and as the Right claims Obama has been, then that collapse is much closer than anyone might think.
The EU, icky as it is in some ways, seems to have lost the urge to exalt a Glorious Leader. Compare China …
A few years ago, someone remarked that the Chinese Communist Party gets away with more than a Glorious Leader can, because its leadership was mostly self-effacing. The present administration is unraveling that policy; the consequences will be interesting.
Somewhere in my office I have an article (from an old issue of “The Atlantic,” I think) whose author argues that the USA is too large. The genius of local representation inherent in the House of Representatives cannot work when members of congress must answer to many tens of thousands of constituents. Add the dreary and endless cultural conflict in this country (between urban and rural, the coasts and the interior, the north and the south) and one begins to wonder if the US will not so much be extinguished as it will devolve into several smaller regional countries (New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, certainly Texas, which has been making noises in that direction for decades). Such an arrangement would perhaps be not all that different from what many in the original 13 states expected and desired after the revolution. After all, the federalists very nearly did not win the argument.
In any event, I wonder if Prohibitionism is merely the American variant of the urge toward totalitarianism that shows up in almost every culture at one time or another.
Well, I WAS in a good mood this morning. I can’t tell you how much I hate agreeing with you on this…but I’ve read enough history to see the same signs that you do. The country is run by the bureaucracy, we have zero input to our government because of this and the elections are all show.
I feel so bad for my kids and grandkids.
Sad to say, I’m with the quietman in my lack of optimism for your cause. Whatever or whoever takes over here or in the world at large will be very authoritarian. The Chinese? Resurgent Russia? Other than the flag I’m afraid I don’t see much difference in what they are and what we’re becoming. 🙁
The odious notion is not simply that one person can own another, but that persons are such things as can be owned, that “owned by” is a meaningful thing to apply to a person. The libertarians don’t get this, declaring that a person is owned by themself. The problem being that ownership can be transferred, it can be forfeited.
And not merely people: our current legal notion is that anything can be owned – ideas, genes. It’s deeply flawed. The phrase “Intellectual Property” is a brilliant bit of propaganda, assuming the truth of a position that is very questionable.
Property is how we choose to manage the things that make up our world. It’s a useful convention, an agreement that people make among themselves. People can’t be owned, not even by themselves. It’s an idea that make no sense, is wrong, and needs to be abandoned.
Oh, I dunno, I think that, at the very least, those who make such claims understand that the very concept of ownership at all is predicated on an implied force to back it up. But that is not unique to the concept of ownership- its the core of existance, of the very nature of survival in the universe. Even the most liberal of libertarians understand that freedom requres a force to back it up, because otherwise you are a slave to something, circumstances, hunger, fear, society, or just some dude with a bigger gun.
So, while it would be nice if people were excluded from the list of “things that can be owned”, the fact remains that as long as there are at least two people who want the same stuff, the concept of ownership (in some form) will persist and be applied to anything and everything conceivable.
I don’t know that America as a political entity will ever truely vanish, at least not to be replaced by some other empire. In the modern world, there is just no real way for a country to be wiped out by another without taking out the planet. The destructive forces required would by their very nature leave us in a post apocalyptic waistland, with the face of the earth changed into an unrecognizable inhospitable tragedy.
I may be slightly naive in my beleif that humanity as a whole is smarter than that and, barring a truely spectacular combination of insain people getting ahold of weapons best left locked up and a complete meltdown of the safeguards that have been getting more robust (rather than less) since the end of the cold war, I think that the United States will last as long as the concept of central governments themselves exist.
Honestly, and unfortunetly (or fortunetly, depending on your comfort level with transhumanisn), I think that by the time fascism is behind humanity, humanity itself will either have wiped itself out or will have transformed into one of the many possible human/technology hybrids that are on the horizon.
I mean, prohibition just couldn’t hold up in a world where the definition of human itself is up for debate.
This reminds me of the scene in the TV series “Jericho” where a new history textbook refers to the post WW2 era as the decline of the first American Republic. Do the people living their daily lives in declining civilizations ever realize what is happening or is it only obvious in retrospect?
Only in retrospect. Click on the link in the line about Romans and Byzantines in the text above.
Very insightful, I like it. And well-written too. (Also matches what I expect to happen, so I am biased 😉 Even more impressive is to realize this while being right in the intense propaganda-storm of a slowly dying empire.
Still, I was never confused about your two predictions. Probably because I have no problem envisioning a world where the US is not important. I think that even a harsh crash at the end would not inconvenience the rest of the world too much.
What message do you consider to be at the center of that storm? Is there more than one?
I ask because it’s relatively east to go online or turn on the radio and find people (who have a significant section of the population agreeing with them) who are railing about how America is in decline. It’s become the running theme of the current electoral campaign. Granted, the pundits and candidates are coming to this conclusion for completely different reasons than Maggie and are proposing unworkable solutions, but I see very few people acting like everything is just fine.
As to your second point, maybe we’re not as much of an all-powerful evil empire as we thought if you think a collapse would “not inconvenience the rest of the world too much.”
Another little nugget of information:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/04/star-spangled-banner-national-anthem-british-origins
[…] https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/successor/ […]
How dare you say the United States is a decaying fascist empire!
On the contrary, it’s a very successful fascist empire, yuk yuk.
But if we use Rome, or Greece, or the British Empire as examples and assume the United States as a trendsetter will fall soon, their’ll be a power vacuum with no clear successor.
Also don’t diss the Byzantine empire.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Byzantine-Empire
I’d be curious to read the alternate history in which the Founders merely passively “tolera[ted] the odious notion” rather than providing for its enforcement.
I question the seriousness of saying one empire “descended from” another merely because it arose from part of the predecessor’s territory, over a thousand years after the collapse.