Think you still live in the last, best hope of mankind? Get over yourself. That’s the basic message of National Journal correspondent Paul Starobin’s new book, “After America,” which can only be classified as a clarion call to Americans to downsize their expectations for the future.
The Falls Church resident acknowledges in his book that “optimism stands out as a signature trait of the American mind-set,” but his outlook for the future of the United States is anything but. “America has reached the end of its political and economic cultural ascendancy,” he told me in an interview from Los Angeles. In his view, there’s nowhere for us to go but down.
The downward trajectory won’t necessarily be “off the cliff,” Starobin assured me. “What’s next? It could be chaos, a multi-polar world, a collection of city-states or a global government scenario,” he said. “It’s not all gloom and doom. But we have to wake up and see that this is already happening and figure out ways to adjust to it.”
Starobin takes direct aim at what he calls “America’s most cherished myth, the myth of American Exceptionalism.” In his view, the nation that gave the world the U.S. Constitution, and invented the telephone, automobile, airplane, computer, elevator, skyscraper, conquered malaria and even sent a man to the moon is just not that special after all.
Those cockeyed optimists among us – who grew up believing that people who were free to follow their own dreams would produce unimaginable advancements for all humanity – were apparently just fooling ourselves.
Americans, who voluntarily give away more material assistance than most nations produce, are no better than anybody else. We must give up our arrogant sense of superiority and “leave behind the ethos of hyperhubris ingrained in Henry Luce’s vision of America as teacher and preacher to the world,” according to Starobin.
But the new multicultural dogma Starobin is peddling demands meek acceptance of the easily refutable idea that all cultures are equal. Some countries are better than others, which is why people from all over the world still uproot themselves to come here, even though it sometimes looks as if we have lost our moral compass.
If you want to see what Starobin’s concept of what a post-America will look like, check out California, where “the growth of multiculturalism, the transition to a post-imperial politics and economy, and the immersion in a globalized world” has led it to the brink of bankruptcy and impending social chaos. I can’t wait.
Ironically, Starobin sounds like a flat-Earther when he blames at least part of the demise on the government. “Things don’t get done. It’s too bureaucratic with its centralized decision-making power,” he told me. “It’s a very top-heavy system of government. Something smaller would make decision-making more streamlined.”
As the great American empire collapses in on itself, he suggests, the devolution may well produce a situation where “more powers will be exercised at the local level. For instance, we may not need a Department of Education.”
That kind of thinking used to be called federalism. The system of decentralized power set up by the Founding Fathers, which put strict constitutional limits on what the federal government could and could not do, was designed precisely to protect us from the kind of rapacious abuse of power we are now witnessing in Washington.
It’s been ignored for generations, but the federal government’s out-of-control spending, which threatens to impoverish our children and grandchildren, may very well be the catalyst for a new generation of Americans to rediscover their age-old wisdom.
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” Starobin quotes historian Arnold Toynbee. Call me crazy, but I can’t quite believe that the majority of my fellow Americans are ready to drink the Kool-Aid just yet.
Barbara F. Hollingworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
