The War Over An Imaginary Past and an Imaginary Future

America is in decline because it cannot escape its mythologized past. What happens now rests on whether we chart a new course or collapse under the weight of the lie.

What makes discourse in America difficult is that we are all living in separate realities. This is an understood, if not constantly debated, topic - the existence of objective versus subjective reality. A society, however, depends on something approaching a consensus state of being with laws and history and facts that are roundly accepted and held. When those agreements are stretched and eventually weaponized, the results are often catastrophically tragic.

America is a special case. The United States is a historically significant and unprecedented power that, in its power and influence, arguably dwarfs any empire that has come before it. As an anonymous Bush Administration official (many believe it was propagandist Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

This was both true and undeniable. What this quote acknowledged was that reality is fungible and controllable, primarily by those with a monopoly over power. As the sole surviving superpower following the Cold War, America waded into world affairs, using its economic and military might to demand that all other nations live within its sphere of influence and chosen reality. In doing so, the U.S. created infrastructure for a new global structure tuned explicitly to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful. Unfortunately, rather than prioritizing freedom, liberty, or human dignity, it settled humanity into a system of exploitation and suffering.

The reality the U.S. relied on was a mythology with enormous power. With every action, America pointed to its storied history and position as “champion of freedom,” rationalizing and laundering everything it did. Over time, however, as that system of exploitation grew more and more concrete and inescapable, the illusion flicked and dimmed, lessening its power and influence.

We now live in a strange world that is escaping the domination of America and becoming something new. Around the world authoritarians are gaining control of nation states and aiding antidemocratic movements around the world, including here in the United States, where a new ideology threatens to destroy democracy. The fight we are experiencing, this constant nagging war, is to determine who controls the past and the future, but America’s reliance on its mythologies has created an intractable situation that cannot be solved by traditional means. The tension and polarization that has resulted must be vented or redirected lest it result in widespread violence and bloodshed.

But any action that might change this course for the better must begin with a recognition that we are stuck in a destructive stasis that lies between an imaginary past and an imaginary future.