It’s been more than a year now since my posts here on
The Archdruid Report veered away from the broader theme of
this blog, the decline of industrial civilization, to consider the rise and
impending fall of America’s global empire.
That was a necessary detour, and the points I’ve tried to explore since
last February will have no small impact on the outcome of the broader
trajectory of our age.
It’s only in the imaginary worlds erected by madmen and
politicians, after all, that the world is limited to one crisis at a time. In
the real world, by contrast, multiple crises piling atop one another are the
rule rather than the exception, and tolerably often it’s the pressure of
immediate troubles that puts a solution to the major crises of an age out of
reach. Here in America, at least, that’s the situation we face today. The end of the industrial age, and the long
descent toward the ecotechnic societies of the far future, defines the gravest
of the predicaments of our time, but any action the United States might pursue
to deal with that huge issue also has to cope with the less gargantuan but more
immediate impacts of the end of America’s age of empire.
This latter issue has a great deal to say about what
responses to the former predicament are and aren’t possible for us. Among the minority of Americans who have
woken up to the imminent twilight of the age of cheap energy, for example, far
and away the most popular response is to hope that some grand technological
project or other can be deployed in time to replace fossil fuels and keep what
James Howard Kunstler calls “the paradise of happy motoring” rolling on into
the foreseeable future. It’s an understandable hope, drawing on folk memories
of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. There are solid thermodynamic reasons why no
such project could replace fossil fuels, but let’s set that aside for the
moment, because there’s a more immediate issue here: can a post-imperial
America still afford any project on that scale?
History is a far more useful guide here than the wishful
thinking and cheerleader’s rhetoric so often used to measure such
possibilities. What history shows, to sum up thousands of years of examples in
a few words, is that empires accomplish their biggest projects early on, when
the flow of wealth in from the periphery to the imperial center—the output of
those complex processes I’ve termed the imperial wealth pump—is at its height,
before the periphery is stripped of its movable wealth and the center has slipped
too far into the inflation that besets every imperial system sooner or
later. The longer an empire lasts and
the more lavish the burden it imposes on its periphery, the harder it is to
free up large sums of money (or the equivalent in nonfinancial resources) for
grand projects, until finally the government has to scramble to afford even the
most urgent expenditures.
We’re well along that curve in today’s America. The ongoing
disintegration of our built infrastructure is only one of the many problem lights
flashing bright red, warning that the wealth pump is breaking down and the
profits of empire are no longer propping up a disintegrating domestic economy.
Most Americans, for that matter, have seen their effective standard of living
decline steadily for decades. Fifty years ago, for example, many American
families supported by one full time working class income owned their own homes
and lived relatively comfortable lives. Nowadays? In many parts of the country, one full time
working class income won’t even keep a family off the street.
The US government’s ongoing response to the breakdown of the
imperial wealth pump has drawn a bumper crop of criticism, much of it well
founded. Under most circumstances, after
all, an economic policy that focuses on the mass production of imaginary wealth
via the deliberate encouragement of speculative excess is not a good idea.
Still, it’s only fair to point out that there really isn’t much else any US
administration could do—not and survive the next election, at least. In the
abstract, most Americans believe in fiscal prudence, but when any move toward
fiscal prudence risks setting off an era of economic contraction that would put
an end to the extravagant lifestyles most Americans see as normal, abstract
considerations quickly give way.
Thus it’s a safe bet that the federal government will keep
following its present course, pumping the economy full of imaginary wealth by
way of the Fed’s printing presses, artificially low rates of interest, and a
dizzying array of similar gimmicks, in order to maintain the illusion of
abundance a little longer, and keep the pressure groups that crowd around the
government feeding trough from becoming too unruly. In the long run, it’s a fool’s game, but
nobody in Washington DC can afford to think in the long run, not when their
political survival depends on what happens right now.
That’s the stumbling block in the way of the grand projects
that still take up so much space in the peak oil blogosphere: the solar
satellites, the massive buildout of thorium reactors, the projects to turn some
substantial portion of Nevada into algal biodiesel farms, or what have you. Any
such project that was commercially viable would already be under
construction—with crude oil hovering around $100 a barrel on world markets,
remember, there’s plenty of incentive for entrepreneurs to invest in new energy
technologies. Lacking commercial viability, in turn, such a project would have
to find ample funding from the federal government, and any such proposal runs
into the hard fact that every dollar that rolls off the Fed’s printing presses
has a pack of hungry pressure groups baying for it already.
It’s easy to insist that solar satellites are more important
than, say, jet fighters, the Department of Education, or some other federal
program, and in a good many cases, this insistence is probably true. On the other hand, jet fighters, the
Department of Education, and other existing federal programs have large and
politically savvy constituencies backing them, which are funded by people whose
livelihoods depend on those programs, and which have plenty of experience
putting pressure on Congress and the presidency if their pet programs are
threatened. It’s easy to insist, in turn, that politicians ought to ignore such
pressures, but those who want to survive the next election don’t have that
luxury—and if they did make it a habit to ignore pressure from their
constituents, where would that leave the people who want to lobby for solar
satellites, thorium reactors, or the like?
Meanwhile the broader economic basis that could make a
buildout of alternative energy technologies possible has mostly finished
trickling away. The United States is a prosperous country on paper, because the
imaginary wealth manufactured by government and the financial industry alike
still finds buyers who are willing to gamble that business as usual will
continue for a while longer. Mind you, the government’s paper wealth is finding
a dwindling supply of takers these days,
Most treasury bills are currently being bought by the Fed, and while any
number of reasons have been cited for this policy, I’ve come to suspect that
most of what’s behind it is the simple fact that most other potential buyers
aren’t interested.
If the law of supply and demand were to come into play,
interest rates on treasury bills would have to rise as the pool of buyers
shrank. That’s not something any US government can afford—the double whammy of
a major recession and a sharp rise in the cost of financing the national debt
would almost certainly trigger the massive economic and political crisis both
parties are desperately trying to avoid. Instead, the torrent of paper
liquidity allows the same thing to happen more slowly and less visibly, as
creditor nations take their shares of that torrent and use it to outbid the
United States in the increasingly unruly global scramble for what’s left of the
planet’s fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources.
A great many people are wondering these days when the
resulting bubble in US paper wealth—for that’s what it is, of course—is going
to pop. That might still happen,
especially as a side effect of a sufficiently sharp political or military
crisis, but it’s also possible that the trillions of dollars in imaginary
wealth that currently prop up America’s domestic economy could trickle away
more gradually, by way of stagflation or any of the other common forms of
prolonged economic dysfunction. We
could, in other words, get the kind of massive crisis that throws millions of
people out of work and erases the value of trillions of dollars of paper wealth
in a matter of months; we could equally well get the more lengthy and less visible kind of crisis, in which
every year that passes sees an ever larger fraction of the population driven
out of the work force, an ever larger fraction of the nation’s wealth reduced
to paper that would be worth plenty if only anybody were willing and able to
buy it, and an ever larger part of the nation itself turning visibly into one
more impoverished and misgoverned Third World nation.
Either way, the economic unraveling is bound to end in
political crisis. Take a culture that assumes an endlessly rising curve of
prosperity, and put it in a historical setting that puts that curve forever out
of reach, and sooner or later an explosion is going to happen. A glance back at
the history of Communism makes a good reminder of what happens in the political
sphere when rhetoric and reality drift too far apart, and the expectations
cultivated by a political system are contradicted daily by the realities its
citizens have to face. As the American dream sinks into an American nightmare
of metastatic poverty, disintegrating infrastructure, and spreading
hopelessness, presided over by a baroque and dysfunctional bureaucratic state
that prattles about freedom while loudly insisting on its alleged
constitutional right to commit war crimes against its own citizens, scenes like
the ones witnessed in a dozen eastern European capitals in the late 20th
century are by no means unthinkable here.
Whether or not the final crisis takes that particular form
or some other, it’s a safe bet that it will mark the end of what, for the last
sixty years or so, has counted as business as usual here in the United States.
As discussed in an
earlier post in this series, this has happened many times before.
It’s as old as democracy itself, having been chronicled and given a name,
anacyclosis, in ancient Greece. Three
previous versions of the United States—call them Colonial America, Federal
America, and Gilded Age America—each followed the same trajectory toward a
crisis all too familiar from today’s perspective. Too much political power diffusing into the
hands of pressure groups with incompatible agendas, resulting in gridlock,
political failure, and a collapse of legitimacy that in two cases out of three
had to be reestablished the hard way, on the battlefield: we’re most of the way
there this time around, too, as Imperial America follows its predecessors
toward the recycle bin of history.
Our fourth trip around the track of anacyclosis may turn out
to be considerably more challenging than the first three, though, partly for
reasons already explored in this sequence of posts, and partly due to another
factor entirely. The reasons discussed before are the twilight of America’s
global empire and the end of the age of cheap abundant energy, both of which
guarantee that whatever comes out of this round of anacyclosis will have to get
by on much less real wealth than either of its two most recent predecessors.
The reason I haven’t yet covered is a subtler thing, but in some ways even more
potent.
The crises that ended Colonial America, Federal America, and
Gilded Age America all happened in part because a particular vision of
what America was, or could be, was fatally out of step with the times, and had
to be replaced. In two of the three cases, there was another vision already in
waiting: in 1776, a vision of an independent republic embodying the ideals of
the Enlightenment; in 1933, a vision of a powerful central government using its
abundant resources to dominate the world while, back at home, embodying the
promises of social democracy. (Not, please note, socialism; socialism is state
ownership of the means of production, social democracy is the extension of
democratic ideals into the social sphere by means of government social welfare
programs. The two are not the same, and it’s one of the more embarrassing
intellectual lapses of today’s American pseudoconservatism that it so often
tries to pretend otherwise.)
In the third, in 1860, there were not one but two competing
visions in waiting: one that drew most of its support from the states north of
the Mason-Dixon line, and one that drew most of its support from those south of
it. What made the conflicts leading up to Fort Sumter so intractable was
precisely that the question wasn’t simply a matter of replacing a failed ideal
with one that might work, but deciding which of two new ideals would take its
place. Would the United States become an aristocratic, agrarian society fully
integrated with the 19th century’s global economy and culture, like the nations
further south between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego, or would it go its
own way, isolating itself economically from Europe to protect its emerging
industrial sector and decisively rejecting the trappings of European
aristocratic culture? The competing
appeal of the two visions was such that it took four years of war to determine
that one of them would triumph across a united nation.
Our situation in the twilight years of Imperial America is
different still, because a vision that might replace the imperial foreign
policy and domestic social social democracy of 1933 has yet to take shape. The
image of America welded into place by Franklin Roosevelt during the traumatic
years of the Great Depression and the Second World War still guides both major
parties—the Republicans, for all their eagerness to criticize Roosevelt’s
legacy, have proven themselves as quick to use federal funds to pursue social
agendas as any Democrat, while the Democrats, for all their lip service to the
ideals of world peace and national self-determination, have proven themselves as
eager to throw America’s military might around the globe as any Republican.
Both sides of the vision of Imperial America depended
utterly on access to the extravagant wealth that America could get in 1933,
partly from its already substantial economic empire in Latin America, partly
from the even more substantial "empire of time" defined by
Appalachia’s coal mines and the oilfields of Pennsylvania and Texas. Both those
empires are going away now, and everything that depends on them is going away
with equal inevitability—and yet next to nobody in American public life has
begun to grapple with the realities of a post-imperial and post-industrial
America, in which debates over the fair distribution of wealth and the
extension of national power overseas will have to give way to debates over the
fair distribution of poverty and the retreat of national power to the borders
of the United States and to those few responsibilities the constitution assigns
to the federal government.
We don’t yet have the vision that could guide that process.
I sometimes think that such a vision began to emerge, however awkwardly and
incompletely, in the aftermath of the social convulsions of the 1960s. During the decade of the 1970s, between the impact
of the energy crisis, the blatant failure of the previous decade’s imperial
agendas in Vietnam and elsewhere, and the act of collective memory that
surrounded the nation’s bicentennial, it became possible for a while to talk
publicly about the values of simplicity and self-sufficiency, the strengths of
local tradition and memory, and the worthwhile things that were lost in the
course of America’s headlong rush to empire.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the way that this nascent vision
helped guide the first promising steps toward technologies and lifestyles that
could have bridged the gap between the age of cheap abundant energy and a
sustainable future of relative comfort and prosperity. Still, as we know, that’s not what happened;
the hopes of those years were stomped to a bloody pulp by the Reagan
counterrevolution, Imperial America returned with a vengeance, and stealing
from the future became the centerpiece of a bipartisan consensus that remains
welded into place today.
Thus one of the central tasks before Americans today, as our
nation’s imperial age stumbles blindly toward its end, is that of reinventing
America: that is, of finding new ideals that can provide a sense of collective
purpose and meaning in an age of deindustrialization and of economic and
technological decline. We need, if you
will, a new American dream, one that doesn’t require promises of limitless
material abundance, one that doesn’t depend on the profits of empire or the
temporary rush of affluence we got by stripping a continent of its
irreplaceable natural resources in a few short centuries.
I think it can be done, if only because it’s been done three
times already. For that matter, the
United States is far from the only nation that’s had to find a new meaning for
itself in the midst of crisis, and a fair number of other nations have had to
do it, as we will, in the face of decline and the failure of some extravagant
dream. Nor will the United States be the
only nation facing such a challenge in the years immediately ahead: between the tectonic shifts in geopolitics
that will inevitably follow the fall of America’s empire, and the far greater
transformations already being set in motion by the imminent end of the
industrial age, many of the world’s nations will have to deal with a similar
work of revisioning.
