The Ebb of Empire

We are living in an age of American decline. That means a lesser standard of living, increasing radicalization, and less rights. But it doesn't have to.

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When I titled this Dispatches From A Collapsing State, I wasn’t being clever. In the past few years my research has centered on figuring out exactly what was happening in the United States, which is an increasingly complicated and bizarre question. My inquiry began in 2016 when I reported from a Donald Trump rally and was somehow thrust into the public arena and needed to make sense of why Trump had gained traction and why the people I talked to, the people I encountered, the people I knew, had begun not just embracing this obvious charlatan, but a whole host of dangerous ideas.

Over these last six years I have pored over history and research in search of an answer. In my last book, American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, I wrestled with American history and found a semblance of an answer. The myths that I’d been taught, the stories and mythologies that populate much of our conventional understanding of ourselves and our country, were wearing thin, revealing a shoddy structure dedicated exclusively to power.

In preparing my forthcoming book, The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, I found something even more disturbing. By expanding the scope to the construction of the modern world, I discovered larger cycles of history. Periods of growth and decline that changed everything about the nature of reality. And, very quickly, it became apparent what was happening.

America, the defining power of the 20th and early-20th century, is in decline.

Some of us are old enough to remember when it felt like the United States was still reaching its zenith. In large part, this was a shared mythology perpetuated by politicians like Ronald Reagan and a daydream supported by mass media and popular culture. The story goes like this: after defeating Nazism and Fascism in the Second World War, the United States then squared off with the Soviet Union in an apocalyptic showdown to determine if the future belonged to freedom or totalitarianism.

That now feels so long ago. Many, many lifetimes removed. It was a fantasy that felt good, that held power, that seemed almost irrefutable, even as things got tough. There were people who understand it to be a myth, particularly people of color, indigenous people, the LGBTQ+ community, the poor. The myth was insulting. But to others, particularly white people, it was a bedrock principle that could not be shaken.

Donald Trump was a severe wake-up call. His absurd rise to power and obviously incompetent and criminal president were the equivalent of being shaken awake by an early morning earthquake. But the signs had been there.

It was there in 2008, when boldfaced greed melted down the economy and nearly threw us into a depression.

It was there during the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror.

It was there in 2000, when the Republican Party stole the presidential election with the help of the Supreme Court.

And it was there as wages flat-lined, exploitation grew worse, and trillions upon trillions of dollars were funneled from the bottom-up, from the poorest to the richest.

Now, the global order that accompanied the rise of the American Empire is fraying. The war in Ukraine is one obvious sign that the supposed “everlasting peace” of globalism was a myth all along. The burgeoning war with China, now obvious not only in our rhetoric but in the investment of billions to restart homegrown industry as to not rely on our rival. Globalism, after all, was supposed to be an unstoppable system of growth and cooperation.

And it is groaning like a bridge in Middle America decades overdue for repairs.

The crisis I warn about, brought on by an authoritarian movement obsessed with dismantling democracy, is predicated on this changing moment. While media members and politicians who should recognize the problem, who should be proactively cutting the danger off while creating alternatives, are either still lost in the fantasy or else busy getting rich off selling what remains of it for spare parts.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the growth period of empire are falling away like so many dead leaves.

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THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS is the story of how white supremacist lies, religious mythologies, and dangerous conspiracy theories created the modern world and now threaten to plunge us into a nightmare future. This is how we’ve come to live in this strange time, but also what we must do to escape it and make the world fairer, better, and more human. Preorder your copy now.

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I want to talk about rights and protections.

Right now the Supreme Court, having been stolen by the Republican Party, is weighing rolling back huge portions of Affirmative Action, a policy undertaken to address obvious and destructive prejudice at the heart of the United States. This prejudice has been there since the beginning. It is literally baked into our laws, our structures, and our culture.

This, of course, comes after the Court has overturned Roe V. Wade, stripping women of their right to reproductive choice and bodily autonomy. There were many who believed this could never possibly happen. That we could never go back. But it did and we are.

Unless this threat is dealt with head on and unless those who should know better treat it seriously or decide justice and human dignity are more precious than wealth, these will hardly be the only tragedies of the moment. As I have warned about for years, this Court and the Republican Party, both completely dedicated to the whims of a small, small number of wealth individuals and corporations, will relentlessly chop away every piece of progress from the 20th century.

This seems shocking. And that’s because we see these rights as self-evident. We see a nation state like the United States and think, as the most powerful country in the history of the world, the very least it can do is protect its people and their rights. This is correct, but it is also not how these things work. These rights that we have so often taken for granted are side-effects of America’s growth. As we were expanding our reach, as the empire was growing and constructing the world order which is unraveling now, a system of interlocking markets and an unrivaled hegemonic structure dedicated to America’s whims, these rights became possible. There was more wealth to go around. More resources.

But now, as we decline, as that order is crumbling and as the unipolar world becomes bipolar or even multipolar, the slowing and reversing of growth will have massive effects on our lives. It shows in recessions, depressions, and lesser standards of living. It’s a lot like a job with dwindling resources and budget cuts. It might sound crass to say it, but it’s like going into the break room and discovering there’s no coffee anymore. Then your colleagues are packing their things in boxes and being escorted to the parking lot.

These rights are ours. We’ve earned them. The right to our bodies and our fates. But also the other parts that accompanied the rise of empire. Social Security. Medicare. These were benefits of America’s growth, but they were also fundamentally right. They should have been there from the beginning, ensuring people could live decent lives without undue and unnecessary suffering.

It does not have to be this way. There are options. One of the main reasons this crisis has come to pass is an accumulation of wealth in too few hands. The neoliberal agenda that Ronald Reagan assisted by selling us that fantasy took our money and handed it over, creating historic inequality and also starving the system of the funds needed to perpetuate the social safety net and ensure a sustainable future. We could address these problems. We could recognize that a few billionaires controlling our media, fielding their own space programs, and growing so powerful and so “indispensible” to the operation of what remains of the empire that they cannot be reined in by the government itself is not only wrong, but an abomination.

Our rights should not be sacrificed. We should not march into a dreary future where brutal, backbreaking work is the only reality we know. We should not have to sacrifice our lives for a few exorbitantly wealthy oligarchs to “carry our light into the stars.” We should not face, under any circumstances, the fates of those who came before us, who struggled to make this possible, whether it was living through a torturous depression, struggling under apartheid America, or sending their children into the mills and mines.

There is no time to waste carrying these exposed and collapsing fantasies. The American Empire is in decline. But it doesn’t mean we have to go back.