The end of the

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
New Year’s reflection on the future of our country

By
Mark Engler                                                                         Read Spanish Version

Over
the past year, the writer Naomi Wolf scored a significant hit with
her book The
End of America.
On October 31, just days before our recent presidential
elections, The
Independent of
London published a commentary by Wolf reiterating the book’s
argument that our country was descending into fascism. She wrote, “If
you look at history, you can see that there are ten steps for turning
an open society into a dictatorship.” She contended that the U.S.
government under Bush, with its warrantless wiretaps and
extraordinary renditions, was well on its way toward completing each
of these steps. Despite the strongly positive signs given by all
available polling evidence at the time, Wolf doubted that an Obama
victory could ever happen, saying that it would be “a miracle.”

The
notion that America is in a state of decay, whether moral or
political, was a popular trope long before Naomi Wolf ever took it
up, yet it grew ever more prevalent during the Bush years. Especially
in recent times the question, “What is happening to America?” has
invited the knee-jerk response that our country is going to hell in a
hand-basket. Last summer, my large extended family gathered in
Wisconsin for a reunion. A younger cousin of mine, an eighth-grader
with a precocious interest in politics, recruited me to help him
survey the political beliefs of our relatives. When asked whether
America was heading in the right direction, everyone in the family,
whether right or left, answered “No.” It was the one question in
the poll that everyone could agree on. 

Wolf’s
argument, however, always seemed profoundly flawed to me. No doubt,
the Bush administration perpetuated some frightening violations of
civil liberties and undertook a troubling centralization of state
power. But the idea that this represented a unique stroll down the
path toward totalitarianism relied on an ahistorical nostalgia for a
past United States, vigilantly lawful and democratic, that never
existed. Stolen elections are nothing new in American history — and,
as conservatives who ruefully remember Kennedy’s victory in Chicago
in 1960 will remind us, they have not always gone to the Republicans.
Although activists of past decades may not have been hindered by
Bush’s “no-fly lists,” they all too often faced Pinkerton
goons, Jim Crow lynchings, and COINTELPRO (**) raids.

If
the victory of Barack Obama does anything, I hope that it will bring
an end to the idea of “The End of America”– at least in this
most facile form — and force us to reckon both with our country’s
troubled history and with the more subtle challenges that remain
ahead. 

Amid
the current financial crisis and the disastrous war in Iraq, we are
now hearing a fresher set of doubts about America’s future. These
predict an end of empire. They suggest that our country’s
superpower will falter, for better or for worse, and that we will be
overtaken by rising rivals such as China and India.

These
concerns are closer to the mark. But they, too, echo familiar
choruses of the past. From the left we have heard persistent
intimations that each new economic panic might be capitalism’s
last. From the center and the right we heard in the 1980s the fear
that Tokyo was buying up America, and that we would soon be made to
bow down, at least in an economic sense, before our Japanese
overlords. 

I
worry that today’s talk of the loss of imperial power might form
another type of “end of America” rhetoric that does little to
advance progressive efforts. It contributes neither to shaping a
long-term vision of what our society might become nor to addressing
the political demands of the moment. The decline of an empire is
usually a decades-long process. Even if this is truly the fate of the
United States, we cannot afford to remain spectators during that
span.

In
the short term, our challenge today is to prevent the Obama
administration from following the same path as the last Democratic
White House. Social movements must mobilize to ensure that the new
president not only repudiates those brutish aspects of the Bush
administration that led some liberals to cry fascism. We must also
work to see that President Obama rejects the strategies of corporate
globalization and domestic neoliberalism — the rule of the market
over ever-greater swaths of public life — that flourished even
during the Clinton years. We must make sure that putting Wall Street
at ease is not the sole preoccupation of his public policy —
especially considering that it was Wall Street at its easiest and
most free-wheeling that created the economic crisis we are now
experiencing. 

In
the longer term, we must question whether a New New Deal is the best
future that we can hope for. Because, ultimately, we have good reason
to believe that it is not enough. 

In
response to the question, “What is the biggest open secret in
American life?” a fellow writer recently argued that the sprawling,
high-consumption form of American life that we have known in past
decades “is absolutely unsustainable.” I agree. A neo-Keynesian
strategy that uses government spending to revive the American
people’s appetite for spending and consumption might well succeed,
pulling us from what could have been a much deeper economic downturn.
We should hope that it does. But then we will have to reckon with the
fact that this very hunger is exactly what has been driving us toward
collective destruction by route of global warming.

The
hope that a future of complete tragedy might be averted does not need
to be based in a vision of a past America that was pure and good. On
the contrary, our best hope is in recognizing the deep national flaws
that previous generations have already confronted and overcome — in
acknowledging the work of movements that successfully brought about
an end to slavery and poll taxes, the widespread elimination of
domestic sweatshops and the creation of the weekend. 

At
their best, these movements have shown the ability both to adapt to
new troubles and to envision a country better than what ever existed
before. That, rather than yearning for a mythical early America or
satisfaction with a return to more recent economic comfort, is what
our future will demand.

—
Mark Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author
of How
to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation
Books, 2008). He
can be reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.

**
COINTELPRO
(an acronym for Counter
Intelligence
Program)
was a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation between 1956 and 1971
aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political
organizations within the United States.