Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

197 Pages·2011·1.17 MB·English

by  Morris Berman

Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: The Pursuit of Affluence
Chapter 2: The Reign of Wall Street
Chapter 3: The Illusion of Progress
Chapter 4: The Rebuke of History
Chapter 5: The Future of the Past
Acknowledgments
Index
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
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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 Canada”—T.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 States—
Civilization. 2. Regression (Civilization) 3. National charateristics, America. 4.
United States—Politics and government. 5. Imperialism—History. 6. United
States—Social conditions. 7. Social change—United States—History. 8. United
States—Economic conditions. I. Title.
E169.1.B48 2011
973.9—dc23
2011026140
For Ferenc M. Szasz (1940–2010)
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 don’t 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 Hakluyt’s 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 economy—affluence—and endless technological innovation
—”progress.” A nation of hustlers, writes McDougall; a people relentlessly on
the make.1
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 best—a move that didn’t 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.2
I am not, in any case, going to be talking about organized socialist opposition
to the dominant tradition in this book, although I will talk about social concern
and social safety nets. That organized, political socialism never had a chance in
the United States is a theme well-explored by sociologists from Werner Sombart
to Seymour Martin Lipset. The general consensus is that unlike Europe, where
the working class resented social inequality and formed viable left-wing
(including Communist) parties, in the United States the lower classes could
always be bought off by Horatio Alger stories and the myth of the self-made
man. In fact, the statistical evidence clearly shows that the vast majority of
Americans die in the same social class into which they are born. No matter; Bill
Gates is a hero to most Americans because they nurture the misguided belief
(“hallucination” would be closer to the mark) that they too may someday have
$50 billion in the bank, enjoy celebrity status, and entertain on a lavish scale.
That there might be something perverse about a system that allows a single
individual to accumulate that sort of wealth never crosses their minds. Thus
despite the fact that America does not really provide its citizens with the basic
needs for a happy, fulfilling life, in the United States the rich sleep easily in their
beds.3
It also can be argued that in terms of substantive critique of the dominant
culture, socialism falls quite short. As Jackson Lears correctly notes (in No Place
of Grace), “the acids of modernity are often as corrosive under socialist as under