The decline and fall of us.
It's worth reading Gibbon. The language is fun in itself. The narrative is full of sex and gore. And the tale shows exactly why Rome fell. And we are going to.
The similarities are uncanny. Two productive successful countries. Each large enough and so geographically situated there was no reason they could not feed and clothe themselves forever.
But Rome didn't. Gibbon shows the day it all started to go wrong. Rome was doomed once the Praetorian Guard crossed the river. It was going to take a while. Centuries. But it was going to happen. Decisions have consequences.
In our case Robert Skidelsky does it-by implication- in a current New York Review article:
"The World Financial Crisis & the American Mission".
We were doomed not by one decision but a handful taken between the elections of Ike and Nixon. Which can be roughly summarized with the words: Globalization, Taxes, the Pentagon.
First, remember the country at the middle of the last century. No unemployment. A woman could actually dance in Central Park at midnight-like Fred and Ginger. Doctors lived down the street and made house calls. The military had shrunk to its pre war size and mostly just paraded on Patriotic occasions. What's not to like?
What happened to zero unemployment? We sent the jobs to Bangalore. In a series of decisions, which will cause future historians to shake their heads in astonishment, we adopted trade policies, which meant that Joe Lunchpail in Detroit or Raleigh was competing with workers paid pennies an hour in Asia.
Apart from causing tremendous personal grief to car and clothing workers this also converted the blue-collar class from a source of government revenue to a drain on our finances. If you don't work you don't pay taxes. You collect Welfare.
Which left us dependent on the income of the white-collar class. As Skidelsky puts it "this enabled financiers and businessmen to earn huge profits". Incredibly we dealt with this dependence on upper income Americans with a series of tax reforms eliminating our progressive tax code. I remember demonstrating to my secretary in 1975 that if I paid her an extra thousand dollars the tax on it would be the same as if the State paid it to Nelson Rockefeller.
So a country which had exported the jobs which were the main stay of a taxable blue collar class."reformed " the tax code so that the white collar class equally ceased to be a source of government revenue.
But nevertheless our response like that of the Caesars was to create a Praetorian Guard. Out of out greatly impaired income we choose to fund a military budget equal to that of the rest of the world put together. And to strengthen our similarity to Augustus, Tiberius, Constantine et al we also provided a circus to divert the no longer fully employed masses: a space program
The path ahead is clear. Those whom the gods will destroy they first encourage to implement Globalization, non-progressive taxation and a consequently unaffordable Praetorian Guard.
Good blog. Would be even better with a link to the Skidelsky article.
August 3, 2009 7:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. Didn't think of that. I assume it's online.
August 3, 2009 8:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here it is:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22898
August 3, 2009 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks. You're right. I should have done it myself.
August 3, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm just trying to get you more readers, dude. I like your posts. ;-)
August 3, 2009 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
You don't have to go back to Rome.
The United States is in the same position as the Hapsburgs prior to the Thirty Years War, as France prior to the Revolution/Napoleonic Wars, and as the British prior to WW I&II. See also War Cycles
Actually, the United States is more like pre-WW I Britain in terms of our military and economic hegemony, but more like the pre-WW I Austro-Hungarian Empire in terms of the ossification of our government, multi-ethnic composition and lack of social cohesiveness.
August 3, 2009 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right now, I'm reading Bad Money, by K Phillips. He gives a pretty convincing argument how the U.S. looks like Britian in many ways prior to their loss of superpower status. From economy to energy usage, we look a lot like the pre-fall U.K. (e.g., Britain was dependent upon coal and didn't transition to oil well. The U.S. was positioned to take advantage of oil, the next energy source, and therefore took superpower status. Of course, that's a really simplistic argument and ignores a couple "minor" details like WWII, the Cold War, etc.)
August 3, 2009 4:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
The analogy between pre-WW I Britain and the US is the clearest, because each achieved military and economic hegemony at the end of a period of total war, and each kept their position for upward of 50 years thereafter.
However, I think that Philips and other commentators, such as Niall Ferguson, are too Anglo-centric and miss important differences. In particular, the British Empire maintained a strong, unified, and patriotic ruling class, along with a vast set of imperial possessions right up until WW I. It's government was also fairly cohesive and effective.
The reason for looking to the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not to suggest that the waning Hapsburgs were in a dominant position, but rather to compare the problems they faced with those of the United States.
One issue was the set of fractious minorities, especially the Hungarians, but also Czechs, Slovaks, Galicians, Jews, Roumanians, Romany, Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, etc. This was all ruled by an enervated German nobility. The parallel here is the WASP leadership that predominated at the end of WW II, but is no longer able to lead in the face of competition from a variety of ethnic groups. Its resentment bubbles up in the form of various right-wing movements, just as in Austria.
The United States also inherits a set of social and intellectual attitudes from the Central European immigrants that came between the Civil War and World War II. Large numbers of faculty in our universities are more a product of Central European traditions than they are of England. In economics, for example, the Austrian school has been influential. In foreign policy, we have Kissinger and Brzezinski. Madeline Albright's father was Czech ambassador to Belgrade.
Another feature of Austria-Hungary was the powerful executive, the ineffective legislature, the overweening bureaucracy, and the stultifying legal systems. The US is also highly bureaucratic, and the legal/regulatory system has had over 2 centuries to become progressively more complex and cumbersome, without significant reform and renewal. The Senate has become a body unable to act without a supermajority.
Lastly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire burdened itself by ill-advised wars against Islam, then in the form of the Turks. At the same time, it greatly feared Russia. Its paranoia about the Serbs and the Turks, the war-mongering of its military leadership, and its miscalculations of the reactions of other states all set the stage for WW I.
August 3, 2009 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some interesting ideas here. But the major point of interest for Phillips was falling dominant powers (Rome, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Britain). The Habsburg Empire in the early 20th century doesn’t fit into that framework. By that time the empire had split into Austrian and Hungarian parts (the Dual Monarchy) with significant friction between the parts. Sort of like if instead of a Civil War the North and South had decided to share one president but have separate congresses and laws (pretty bizarre idea, isn’t it?).
(Maybe you could say Phillips is Anglo-Dutch centric since the Dutch got more attention than Rome or Spain.)
August 3, 2009 7:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Phillips appeared to choose his countries in order to build a particular argument about economic decline. In terms of Great Powers whose overall decline sets the stage for the succeeding episode of total war, the reign of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna from 1576-1812 is as instructive as a precursor to the Thirty Years War as is the history of Spain in the same period. Rudolph pursues an unwise war against the Turks. This weakens his rule, and he loosens his control of the protestants in Bohemia. When his successor attempts to tighten control, it leads to the Defenstration of Prague and the start of the Thirty Years War.
Similarly, the Dutch reach their zenith well before the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The reign of Louis XV of France is more to the point. Inheriting the throne at age 5 in 1715 he continues as monarch until 1774. Again, unwise foreign policy, unsuccessful wars, and failed attempts at reforming French institutions during the last decades set the stage for the French Revolution and all that followed.
August 3, 2009 10:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Passage written in 1957 by Pat Frank. Nobody listen then...nobody's listening now.
Too much thought for a society that is emotionally and intellectually lazy. When black and white emotional response to problems is the norm.
C
August 3, 2009 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your analogy is pretty good. The warnings are clear. But your last-minute dig on the space program didn't fit in with the rest of your argument.
For one thing, the Space program has nothing on the Roman Circus. What's more entertaining, mortal combat, intense chariot races, or an excruciating space walk that lasts all day and involves putting together a porch on the Japanese portion of the space station? Sorry, if NASA's purpose was entertainment, then they should really try harder and toss the space station into the Pacific. A more entertaining idea is one I have for a program on cable along these lines:
When an unmanned probe discovers hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, watches volcanoes erupt on Io, finds water on Mars, or photographs amazing nebula where new stars and new planets are forming right now--we are discovering new things about the universe in which we live. If this is entertainment, then it's because discovery itself it entertaining. The Roman circus was a bit more pointless.
If you want to debate manned spaceflight's costs verses unmanned, you probably could make quite a few points how manned flight is expensive. If you want to question the idea of another manned flight to the moon and subsequently Mars, well it's within your rights and you probably can score a few points. If you want to argue that we don't get many technological/economical benefits as a whole from the space program, you can make an argument (I'll oppose it, but that's just me). But you equated the space program to a circus.
I consider the entire space program's "good" to far outweigh its "not-so-good". It takes up a tiny bit of the nation's budget, has tangible technological and scientific results, and in my opinion actually advances the country and humankind. Most military spending not only is throwing money away, but lives and goodwill as well. To me, the space program is a lot more valuable than our military, and a helluva lot more valuable to us than a modern analog to Rome's version of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Baily.
August 3, 2009 3:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've been to the launches. They're exciting. Even beautiful. The surrounding atmosphere is easy to get caught up in: the Cocoa beach restaurants filled with important scientists. The motel signs afterwards saying Super Shooting.
I also knew enough about the shuttle program so when the first launch was counting down I went outside and walked in the parking lot-away from the ubiquitous radios, because I was aware of the far too high probability of failure. The program began under Carter's pressure for economy and the response of the Agency was to cut corners.Dangerously.
I also read Genius- about Richard Feynman with the long set piece about the disgraceful Challenger disaster , the result of a completely inappropriate "can-do spirit"
I accept there's an argument for an international effort to learn what our race can learn about the rest of the universe. But not for us to arbitrarily choose trips for humans to the moon, Mars or where-ever. Even if we could afford it.
August 3, 2009 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, let’s remember mid-century when women felt pressured not to work outside the home. And married women couldn’t have credit in their own name, could only use their husband’s credit. Where I lived at the time she couldn’t even use her own last name, had to use her husband’s. And... but I’ll stop before I get really indignant and start ranting. “What’s not to like?”
Not surprising it was easier to keep the unemployment rate lower when women mostly didn’t work. If half the population isn’t going to be looking for work, you only have to have half as many jobs for everybody who wants one to be able to have one. Once the other half starts looking for work, you need to create a lot more jobs to keep the unemployment rate down. Well, half is an exaggeration, since some women always did work; the general idea is the same whatever the actual fraction is.
But don’t expect me to advocate removing women from the work force. I remember as a teenager being infuriated by a novel that had been written in the 30s where the heroine gave up a good job because a nice young man with a family needed it more than she did - even though she was supporting herself and an orphaned nephew. Sounds so nice and noble and self-sacrificing - and stupid.
Other than the women’s rights aspect hitting a nerve, I tend to agree with much of what you say. It’s just that I can’t see that mid-century world in quite such idealized terms as you describe it.
August 3, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I recommend this comment.
August 3, 2009 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
great points all
August 3, 2009 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, it wasn't quite as oppressively doom and gloom as you remember it, either. Among the working class, women began working en masse in the early '50s, after getting a taste of a regular paycheck during World War II, when the workforce was man-poor. By the end of the decade, a new era had begun, one in which working-class and middle-class families were almost required to have two paychecks coming in.
What seem inequities and senseless limitations in the past were products of their times, and those times, like ours today, were complex combinations of myth and hopeful reality, of faith and custom. More than anything else, in this country, it was and is keyed to how social topography reacts to incessant change. It's as pointless to judge generalized mainstream of bygone eras as it is to ignore shortfalls of our present.
As Jon Taplin pointed out on these pages over the weekend, we have no industrial base anymore. It became cheaper for multinational companies to move manufacturing to countries without unions demanding outrages like fair pay and troublesome nonsense like workplace safety. Our working class is comprised of service workers, be they car mechanics toiling on someone else's Mercedes, or white-collar drones freezing painfully in keyboard-induced carpal tunnel syndrome.
When they have nothing to service, these workers will be imminently disposable. Actually, they have already, and jobs - real jobs - are evaporating. That is the dilemma we should attend... now.
August 3, 2009 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good comment Curt. It has become a self full filling prophecy. Almost recursive, one might say.
C
August 3, 2009 5:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don’t think it was all oppressively doom and gloom. On the other hand, I very much doubt you were told as a child that it was ”OK to get good grades but not the best grades in the class because boys don’t like girls who get better grades than they do and if they don’t like you in grade school they won’t date you in high school and if they don’t date you in high school they won’t marry you and then where will you be?” And I very much doubt that you had a store refuse to take your check because there was a woman’s name on the check and they only took checks with a man’s name on them. I asked if I was understanding them correctly, that if my younger brother whose guardian I was presented his check with the same identification but in his name instead of mine, they would take his check without hesitation - even though as a minor he couldn’t be held legally responsible for his own checks and I had to sign for his account and I was just as legally responsible for his checks as I was for my own. They said yes, I understood them correctly.
And no, where I lived very few working class women were working when I was a child. If they did, it was part time for a short time, maybe to help out with Christmas expenses or some limited goal. That didn’t start changing dramatically until I was grown up. (By the way, that puts it in the early 70s.) I will grant you things may have been different in other parts of the country. But in general women were pushed out of the work force after the war and discouraged from getting back into the work force by the glamorization of being a wife and mother in the 50s and early 60s (think “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave It To Beaver” where mothers vacuumed in high heels and pearls).
I do agree that the exportation of jobs and loss of our industrial base is a big concern. I’ve been muttering about it for years. The one thing I really admire about Henry Ford is his realization that he could sell more cars if he paid his workers enough to buy his cars (other than that he had some crackpot ideas). Obviously a lot of people forgot this over the years. Obviously we should attend to this problem now. Just don’t let’s start thinking that there was ever this beautiful, ideal past that we want to get back to.
August 3, 2009 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Census Bureau and the BLS.
August 3, 2009 9:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me disabuse you of one filmy myth of your own, LavenderLightning: Henry Ford "gave" his workers goon truncheons and long hours on the assembly lines. And if they dared unionize, he gave them bullets and martyrs. Ford workers, like the American working class everywhere, pried loose everything they got from American industry's paymasters. The only "noblesse oblige" they were served was sacrifice and, frequently, blood.
August 4, 2009 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
As I said, other than that he had some crackpot ideas. Quite a few of them, in fact.
August 4, 2009 12:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
And I am aware of the UAW battles. My great-uncle was murdered before I was born. The family always had a nagging suspicion it was related to his union activities. They were apparently a bit surprised when Walter Reuther came to his funeral.
August 4, 2009 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey quit screwing around and blog you bastard. hahahahah'
and do it in anger. I already told ya, you are better when you are obscene. hahahahaha
August 4, 2009 1:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gibbon was a great writer but not much of an historian.
August 3, 2009 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Decline Etc. could still serve as a metaphor.
August 3, 2009 8:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
flavius - I hope my women's rights rant hasn't given you the impression that I thought there was anything wrong with your post. Quite the contrary. It was just that one little segment that sort of set me off.
August 3, 2009 8:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
You were quite specific.
My personal experience - from which I certainly don't generalize - was watching my mother greatly enjoy her job as a department store executive.
August 3, 2009 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that would have been nice. I had only one working female relative when I was growing up. My father’s sister, who never moved out of my grandparents’ house until after they died and she retired. She was a secretary at a Big 8 accounting firm and mostly didn’t seem to like it very much. In my mother’s family she was the only woman who’d had a job, as a secretary before she married my father. Only a few women in my neighborhood had jobs at all, and those not permanent. Hardly anybody I went to school with admitted to having a working mother. Women having a job seemed to be an embarrassment.
August 4, 2009 3:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
My mother couldn't wait for me to be old enough so she could get out of the house and go to work.
( I did the cooking which was horrible but not much worse than her's-which she wouldn't have admitted, not that she really cared).Started as a clerk and rose through the management levels like a rocket but ultmately had to resign for various family reasons.
For a few years thereafter her department store friends would visit her. Tough broads driving brightly colored Cadillacs. Great fun. Ultimately those contacts died and she was stuck with the limited resources of a -to her- boring small town. She'd have gone back to the store in a heartbeat given the chance.
I understand that Retail was an exception in that regard. . She'd probably have been equally happy driving a steam roller or running the Pentagon but as you point out that wasn't possible then.
August 4, 2009 10:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
If she waited until you were old enough to do the cooking, she was pretty patient!
August 4, 2009 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Rome is the best comparison. Once they had to fund their armies from distant fronts they were vulnerable at home (911). Then they over-reacted (Iraq). I am truly amazed at your ability to distill this as your have. It would have taken a book for most people.
Great blog. rec'd
August 3, 2009 8:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks.
Maybe there's something in human nature or organizational dynamics that explains the phenomenon. Or statistics. If you roll the dice often enough you're bound to get snake eyes.
August 3, 2009 9:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have always thought that future historians will date the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia as the symbolic moment of Imperial overreach and subsequent decline. It was right before Iraq, and on board had the first Israeli astronaut (which like America is a country founded and settled as an ideal) And most importantly, it was named the heavily symbolic Columbia.
Although I don't agree with your characterizations of the space program, I think that our exploration of space and the Apollo program represented the apotheosis of Pax Americana. And just like our corrupted ideals after Florida, Torture, and Iraq it is only fitting that we would crash from the highest point. Icarus comes to mind.
That said, I only see this as a symbolic turning point where the decline becomes obvious. There is much in your line of thought that I don't agree with (but much more that I do).
I don't think we are quite at Gibbon stages here. I mean Rome hang on for a long, long, time. I date the fall of Constinanople to the crusaders as the true fall. (and a pretty compelling argument could be made that the Pontif is still ruling the empire, just moved upmarket to intangibles-souls. Not really that different from the financial evolution if you think about it).
August 4, 2009 2:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gibbon seemed to think that Constantine's conversion marked the beginning of the decline and if not the ultimate cause. Which seems in conflict with his at theory assigning that to the crossing of the Rubicon.
As Ellen suggested Gibbon (and Macaulay)may not have been reliable historians but they sure could turn a phrase.
August 4, 2009 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
The crossing of the Rubicon was the fall of the Republic, not the fall of the Empire. The conversion of Constantine was beginning of the decline but Rome still lingered another 800 plus years as Roman Empire and then the Byzantine Empire. And see my church comments above.
BTW- I have learned on these boards that usually Ellen is right.
August 4, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wouldn't think of disputing Ellen. Except surreptiously.
August 4, 2009 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink