Morris Berman - Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

Contents

Books by Morris Berman

Social Change and Scientific Organization

Trilogy on human consciousness:

The Reenchantment of the World

Coming to Our Senses

Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Sprituality

Trilogy on America:

The Twilight of American Culture

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

A Question of Values (essays)

Counting Blessings (poetry)

Destiny (fiction)

Copyright 2012 by Morris Berman. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berman, Morris, date.

Why America failed: the roots of imperial decline/Morris Berman.

p. cm.

Published simultaneously in CanadaT.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-06181-7 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-08794-7 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-08795-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-08796-1 (ebk)

1. United StatesCivilization. 2. Regression (Civilization) 3. National charateristics, America. 4. United StatesPolitics and government. 5. ImperialismHistory. 6. United StatesSocial conditions. 7. Social changeUnited StatesHistory. 8. United StatesEconomic conditions. I. Title.

E169.1.B48 2011

973.9dc23

2011026140

For Ferenc M. Szasz (19402010)

A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.

Thomas Lewis et al ., A General Theory of Love

The whole modern system seems to me to be grounded on a false view of man.... There is a spirit of self-confidence in it, which, left to its natural tendencies, will inevitably bring a deeper and wider woe upon man than earth has ever yet known.

Richard Henry Dana , 1853

Any history of capitalism must contain the shadow history of anticapitalism.

Joyce Appleby , The Relentless Revolution

Preface

When the dust finally settles on the American empire, and our history is rewritten from the vantage point of the post-American era, what will American civilization look like, in retrospect? The creation of the United States of America, writes the historian Walter McDougall, is the central event of the past four hundred years. No doubt. The question is, What was America ultimately about? What, in the fullness of time, did it really stand for? In fact, if we look in the right places, we really dont have to wait for 2040 or 2050 for an answer. As McDougall tells us, along with historians David Potter, William Appleman Williams, and a few others of note, America was from the outset a business civilization. Richard Hakluyts Discourse of Western Planting (1584), which McDougall calls a masterpiece of promotional literature, explained the strategic advantages England would gain by colonizing North America, including timber, fish, furs, and burgeoning markets for the woolen trade. Even in the sixteenth century, adds historian Leo Marx, the American countryside was the object of something like a calculated real estate promotion. This commercial orientation effectively became our trademark. The principal goal of North American civilization, and of its inhabitants, is and always has been an ever-expanding economyaffluenceand endless technological innovationprogress. A nation of hustlers, writes McDougall; a people relentlessly on the make.

Of course, a case can be made for the existence of an alternative tradition, essentially moral or spiritual in nature, that saw the pursuit of affluence as a shallow goal, devoid of any real meaning and a threat to any spiritual purpose the nation might hope to have. As I shall show in the pages that follow, this country has never lacked for spokesmen for that tradition, from Captain John Smith to President Jimmy Carter. Overlapping with this was a classical republican tradition that was opposed to luxury, and that defined virtue in terms of public service rather than naked self-interest (corruption). Indeed, a number of historians have argued that this tradition was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The problem is that in terms of actual behavior, as opposed to rhetoric, things such as Puritanism and republicanism proved to be no match for the dominant tradition. Especially after the War of Independence, the alternative critics were not able to change the vector, the general direction of America, in any substantive way. We can see the overwhelming power or momentum of this vector, for example, in the responses to the two great wake-up calls for laissez-faire economics during the past hundred years, namely the crashes of 1929 and 2008.

To take the aftermath of 1929, for example: what characterized the New Deal was not a serious reassessment and restructuring of the U.S. economy, but a few concessions to the poor and the working class. The historical role of Franklin Roosevelt, as most historians will tell you, was not to abolish capitalism but to preserve it; which is what he did. Similarly, the decision of President Obama to appoint neoliberal economic advisers (such as Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers) with close ties to the very banking industries they subsequently bailed out (to the tune of $12 trillion, and eventually much more) was an attempt to carry on with business as usual and hope for the besta move that didnt change anything for the millions of unemployed, and that lined the pockets of the rich. Branding these presidents as socialists is little more than the demented ravings of the political right.