One of the things I’ve learned repeatedly over six and a
half years of writing Archdruid Report posts is that it’s a
waste of time to try to predict which posts will appeal to my readers and which
ones won’t. Last month’s narrative is a case in point. My original plan was to
devote one post to a very brief scenario of American imperial collapse. By the time I got the thing written, even
after a great deal of trimming, it was the size of five regular posts; I
decided to run it anyway over five weeks, since it did a good job of
illustrating the themes I’ve been developing since February of this year, but I
figured that it would be just another ordinary month for the blog.
Somehow that didn’t happen. Last month, The Archdruid
Report had the second highest page view count of any month in its
history; the first episode in the narrative is this blog’s most-viewed page
ever, and the others are climbing rapidly to comparable positions. It’s
interesting to reflect on the reasons why that happened, but I suspect that the
most significant of those reasons is also the simplest: the narrative that I
sketched out presented the decline and fall of the United States not as the end
of the world, nor as an excuse for yet another wearily unthrilling Tom
Clancyesque thriller, but as an ordinary historical event.
I’d like to expand on that a little, because—as regular
readers of this blog already know—history is the primary resource I use to
guide what’s posted on this blog. The
core hypothesis shaping my view of the future is the proposal that our time
differs from the past only in the way that one past era differs from
another. The notion that the present
epoch is utterly unique in history, popular as that is, fails to convince me,
and the habit of using that notion as an excuse to project an assortment of
utopian and apocalyptic fantasies on the inkblot patterns of the future strikes
me as frankly delusional. It makes more sense, I think, to recognize that
imperial overstretch is imperial overstretch no matter what technologies the
empire in question happens to use, and that trying to make sense of the future
on the basis of historical parallels is a more useful strategy than insisting
that the future must conform to our desires, our fears, or both at once.
Thus I’d like to walk through some of the historical events
I used as models for the trajectory of decline and fall in “How It Could
Happen,” and talk a little about why those models are relevant.
The overall scenario of failed military adventurism leading
to a crisis of legitimacy and the collapse of a government? That was modeled on the Falklands War of
1982, though I could have used any number of other examples. In the case of the Falklands crisis, the
government of Argentina, facing a rising spiral of economic and political
problems, gambled that it could improve its situation by seizing a set of bleak
little islands in the south Atlantic, then as now owned by Britain and claimed
by Argentina, on the assumption that Britain would be neither willing nor able
to mount an effective military response.
It was a disastrous miscalculation; by the time the smoke cleared,
Britain had retaken the islands by main force, the Argentine military had suffered
a humiliating defeat, and the crisis of legitimacy that followed promptly
toppled the Argentine government.
It’s worth noting that if the war had gone the other
way—say, if Argentina had been armed with a hundred Exocet antiship missiles,
rather than the five they had, and sent most of the British fleet to the
bottom—Margaret Thatcher’s government would likely have fallen in short
order. The difference, of course, is
that the transfer of power in Britain would have followed the normal rules of British
politics; there would have been a vote of no confidence in the House of
Commons, somebody else would have moved into No. 10 Downing Street, and that
would have been that. In Argentina, things were not so simple, because there
was no straightforward way to get rid of an incompetent leadership and its
policies without taking down an entire system of government and replacing it
with something else.
One of the points of the narrative, in turn, is that the
United States just now is a great deal closer to the Argentine situation than
to the British one. Here in America, we’ve just spent a year seeing which of
two interrchangeable candidates will take the presidential oath of office this
coming January. Those of my readers who are Republicans, and downcast by
Obama’s victory last night, should take heart; the policies we’ll see for the
next four years will be exactly the same as the ones that we would have had if
your candidate had won, and now you have the freedom to criticize them, while
the Democrats have to put up with another four years of pretending that the man
they helped put into office isn’t betraying every principle they claim their
party stands for. The blustering and violent pursuit of the same failed foreign
policy, the eager pursuit of national bankruptcy in the name of global security,
the tacit refusal to prosecute even the most egregious financial crimes, the
whittling away of civil liberties, the gargantuan giveaways to corrupt but
influential industries, and the rest of it:
the whole package that’s been welded in place since the days of George
W. Bush was guaranteed to continue whoever won.
Previous posts here have discussed the reasons why the
policymaking machinery of the US government has jammed up, leaving this
particular set of failed policies to play over and over again like a broken
record. Sooner or later that process will end, if only because a government
that fails often enough goes out of existence sooner or later. The scenario I traced out in the narrative
suggests one way in which the jam could be broken; there are plenty of others,
but most of them involve the end, in one way or another, of the particular form
of constitutional government we have in America today.
Let’s move on. The constitutional convention that spun out
of control, and suddenly made the unthinkable a political fact? That was based on the opening act of the
French Revolution. The conflict between the states and the federal government
in the narrative was a deliberate echo of the conflict between the French
aristocracy and the king in the years before 1789. The aristocracy, struggling
to reclaim its lost privileges, managed to pressure Louis XVI into calling the
Estates-General, the rarely summoned national parliament of France, which had
very nearly the same powers as an American constitutional convention. Once the
delegates met, the crisis of legitimacy that had been been building in France
for decades exploded; attempts to keep the meeting focused on its official
purpose—solving the nation’s budget crisis—were overwhelmed by events, and over
the weeks that followed, a system of
government that had endured for centuries came apart forever.
The rush toward extremism on the part of the American people
in the months before the constitutional convention? That was the United States of America before,
during, and immediately after the 1860 presidential election. It took not much more than a year for
secession in most Southern states, and violent opposition to slavery and
disunion in most Northern ones, to make their respective transitions from minority
ideologies to popular causes for which hundreds of thousands of people would
fight and die. “The story of 1860,” wrote historian Bruce Catton in
The Coming Fury, “is the story of a great nation, marching
to the wild music of bands, with flaring torches and with banners and with
enthusiastic shouts, moving down a steep place into the sea.” (Catton’s book,
by the way, should be required reading for all those convinced that the
American political process is incapable of drastic change; for that matter,
it’s one heck of a good read, and the two subsequent volumes, Terrible
Swift Sword and Never
Call Retreat, are just as good.)
The dissolution of the United States via a never-used
provision of the Constitution? That was inspired by the fall of the Soviet
Union. On paper, each of the republics
that made up the Soviet Union had the right to secede from the union at any
time. In practice—well, would you have wanted to try doing that when Stalin was
in office? Under Gorbachev, though, Boris
Yeltsin could and did invoke that clause of the Soviet constitution without
risking sudden removal from office via a pistol shot and an unmarked grave, and
a Soviet system that was already in crisis came apart in days.
The failure of the military and of intelligence agencies to
stop the collapse of the government by force? That was based on events across
most of the Eastern Bloc right after the Berlin Wall came down. The Warsaw Pact
nations each had, in theory, more than enough soldiers and secret police to
prop up a troubled government by rounding up protesters and shooting them, say,
or doing the other things that embattled governments routinely do to their
people. In practice, the final crisis of
each regime saw military personnel standing aside or actively siding with the
insurgents, and left commanders looking nervously at their own troops,
uncomfortably aware that ordering them to attack civilians could quickly lead
to civil war or, on a more personal level, to a bullet in the back of the head or
a hand grenade tossed into a conference room, courtesy of their own
soldiers.
More generally, that’s the great weakness of every
government. The notion that the leaders
of a nation exercise power is a convenient but misleading shorthand for a much
more complex process, in which power is actually wielded by thousands of
ordinary soldiers, police officers, minor officials, and the like, in obedience
to dictates that come cascading down the chain of command through any number of
intermediaries. If anything happens to
the willingness of those thousands to follow orders, or to the ability or
willingness of the chain of command to function, the apparent power of the
leadership can evaporate like frost on a sunny morning. Whenever a government collapses, if it’s not
simply thrown out by some other nation’s invading troops, that’s far more often
than not the way that it goes.
Some of my readers will doubtless be objecting by this point
that it would have been just as possible for me to put together a different set
of historical analogies and tell a different story of the way that America’s
global empire, and America itself, went to pieces. That’s exactly the point I
hoped to make. The narrative presented in October’s posts, as I explained at
the time, is not my idea of the way that the American empire
will fall; it’s simply an account of one way that the
American empire could fall, and its details were chosen to
outline some of the most serious fault lines running through that empire and
the society that the empire supports.
Of course the end of America’s global empire could happen in
some other way. The utter failure of the political process might bring about a
collapse of constitutional government at the hands of some charismatic
demagogue or other; we could see a sustained insurgency break out in any of
half a dozen parts of the country, shredding the economy and forcing the
government to bring the troops home from overseas; a military failure of the
sort I’ve outlined, instead of triggering the rush to dissolution, could usher
in a long era of national retrenchment and reassessment, in which America’s
once-traditional isolationism reasserts itself and George Washington’s advice
about avoiding foreign entanglements once again becomes the centerpiece of the
nation’s policy. I chose a relatively untraumatic option, in large part because
so many people seem to find it impossible to remember that plenty of large,
heavily armed nation-states down through the years have collapsed in one way or
another without dissolving into civil war or assaulting the rest of the planet;
still, there’s no guarantee that this will be the way that things work out.
There are many options as we approach the post-American future.
The one thing that isn’t an option at this point, I would
argue, is a continuation of American global dominance for more than a short
time to come. Like the British empire a
century ago, the American empire is visibly cracking at the seams as the costs
of maintaining a global imperial presence soar and the profits of the imperial
wealth pump slump. Funds the nation can
no longer afford to spend are being poured into military technologies that
presuppose a way of war that’s rapidly approaching its pull date, while rising
powers less burdened by the legacies of the past circle around, waiting for the
first signs of weakness. Which of those
rising powers will turn out to be the next generation of global hegemons is a
good question; China certainly seems like the most likely candidate just now,
but then Germany looked like the most likely candidate for Britain’s
replacement in 1912, and we know what happened thereafter.
What does a post-American future look like? To begin with, here in America, it’s a future
in which the vast majority of us will be much less wealthy than we are
today. The American standard of living
has been propped up since 1945 by the systemic imbalances that gave a quarter
of the world’s energy resources and a third of its raw materials and industrial
product to the five per cent of humanity that lives in the United States. Everything we consider normal in American
life today is a function of that flow of imperial tribute, and as that goes
away, most of what we consider normal in American life is going to change. The
economic troubles that have been ongoing since 2008 are the foreshocks of that
seismic shift, which will see most American incomes drop to Third World
levels.
Those of my readers who are incensed by the extreme
disparity in wealth between the rich and the rest in this country should
remember that most of that disparity consists of paper wealth, much of it of
very questionable value. Trillions of
dollars worth of dubious derivatives, asset-backed securities backed by wholly insecure
assets, loans that will never be paid back, and equally hallucinatory stores of
wealth currently pad the notional net worth of America’s rich; in any
imaginable post-American future, all that will be reassessed at its real value,
which in most cases amounts to zero.
Just as the Great Depression saw huge income and net worth disparities
in American society drop like a rock as vast amounts of paper wealth turned
into mere paper, the Greater Depression that will follow the end of American
empire will almost certainly see the same phenomenon on an even larger scale.
One moral to this story is that any of my readers who have their wealth tied up
in paper assets of any kind might be wise to think, hard, about how long they
want to leave it there.
Outside the United States, circumstances will no doubt
vary. Those nations that have linked
their welfare or their survival too closely to American empire will be dragged
down in their turn; those who align themselves with one or another contender
for America’s replacement will rise or fall with their choice, while those that
have the good sense to step back into neutrality until the smoke clears, and
then make arrangements with the new hegemon, will doubtless do well. I suspect, though, that Japan and western Europe
in particular will be in for a rough awakening.
For decades now, they’ve reaped the benefits of having their national
defense backstopped by gargantuan US defense budgets, and the end of that cozy
arrangement will force them to choose between spending a great deal more money
on their own militaries, accepting a new overlord who may be a good deal less
congenial than the one they have now, or accepting a position of extreme
vulnerability in an epoch where that may turn out to be an exceptionally risky
thing to do.
Still, all these concerns are secondary to the most crucial
factor, which is that the post-American future will still have to deal with the
head-on collision between a global economic system that requires perpetual
growth, on the one hand, and hard planetary limits on the other. The end of America’s empire does not mean the
end of industrial civilization; nor, for that matter, will it solve the twin
problems sketched out decades ago in the prescient and thus profoundly
unfashionable pages of The Limits to Growth: the exhaustion
of necessary but nonrenewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, and the
buildup in the biosphere of ecologically and economically damaging pollutants,
particularly carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Those forces are still the dominant fact of
our time, and the end of America’s empire—traumatic as it may well be, and not
only for Americans—is simply one more roadbump along the route of the Long
Descent.
****************
****************
Regular readers of The Archdruid Report
will be interested to know that the anthology of post-peak oil science fiction
stories that came out of last year’s contest here is now available in print and
e-book formats. After
Oil: SF Visions of a Post-Petroleum World features twelve stories set
in futures of the kind we are most likely to encounter, in the largely
unexplored territory off beyond today's tired fantasies of limitless progress
and sudden apocalypse. Many thanks to all the contributors, and to Shaun
Kilgore of Founders House Publishing, who made this project possible!
****************
End of the World of the Week #47
If your last name is Prophet, you have certain advantages in
setting up shop as a New Age teacher, and the redoubtable Elizabeth Clare
Prophet took advantage of those advantages in a big way. All through the 1970s and 1980s, her books
could be found in every New Age bookstore worth the name, and her
organizations—the Summit Lighthouse and the Church Universal and
Triumphant—were significant presences across the New Age scene of the time, and
remain active today.
A detailed account of Prophet’s writings, teachings, and
activities would fill plenty of pages. Her place here in the End of the World
of the Week rests, though, on one detail of her teaching—her repeated
insistence that the end would come via nuclear war on April 23, 1990. She
apparently received this information from the Ascended Masters, advanced
spiritual beings who also dictated her many books. Still, the Masters
apparently weren’t ascended enough to get their dates right, and April 23, 1990
passed without incident, like so many other purported doomsdays before and
since.
