Are Americans so angry about politics because the U.S. is declining as a world power?

[KingOrfeo]

The other day I heard Sasha Abramsky interviewed on All Things Considered regarding an article, "Look Ahead in Anger," he just published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Abramsky's thesis is that the level of anger we've seen in American political discourse the past few years, on all sides but on the right more than the left, is partly due to general frustration at the economy, etc.; and on the RW side, partly due to a factional split between the moderate and radical wings of the conservative movement; but, overall, mainly a reaction to America's declining position in the world which has parallels in many other countries' histories.

As America's undisputed global dominance ebbs—trimmed by China's surging economic might, by the European Union's growing presence as a global player (even given the travails triggered by the recent European debt crisis and the fears of a Greek default dragging the euro zone into a deeper recession), by the United States' own economic and military overstretch—the rage culture has matured to the point where it is coming to be a dark, and perhaps even a dominant, part of America's identity.

A stab-in-the-back narrative is being crafted within the world of conservatism: Things were going along just fine for a globally dominant United States (forgetting, conveniently, the depth of anti-American sentiment that developed around the world during President Bush's tenure, culminating in the financial collapse of 2007-8) until a radical President Obama decided to expand government, shrink the private sector, and traverse the world apologizing for America's purported past misdeeds. Like the decadent Europeans, guilt-ridden after their centuries of colonial dominance, so Obamians came into power intent on downplaying America's glory and its exceptionalism, and on talking up its sins.

<snip>

The stab-in-the-back narrative is a trajectory familiar to students of empire the world over. As the ground shifts under the feet of a dominant power, as the structures supporting dominance start to crack, so the public gets angrier. It looks at past glories and doesn't understand why the present situation is so much less resplendent. It blames the country's leadership, or minority groups, or national enemies. It grieves for lost influence, or fears the imminent loss of influence, and it shudders at an increasingly shabby present.

<snip>

Anger, per se, is nothing new in American politics. As the historian Richard J. Hofstadter detailed in his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," rage politics is as American as apple pie, or as the sunny, simplistic, homogeneous visions of community epitomized by the paintings of Norman Rockwell. But the presence of that anger was always partially mitigated by the apple pie and the Rockwell, by the pervasive optimism that has long been a core part of America's image. More often, despite episodic spasms of rage, the broader culture has worn a smile rather than a frown. With America ascendant, it was easy for the rage to be largely contained within relatively small subcultures—John Birchers, KKK'ers, the Weather Underground, anti-United Nations fanatics, some of the more extreme black-nationalist groups, and so on. That didn't mean the rage wasn't capable of inflicting tremendous hurt on society—witness the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr.—but our Rockwell side did serve to limit the extent to which the culture as a whole could come to be defined as rage-based.

What has happened recently seems to represent something new: The offsets that used to restrict rage's reach have started to break down; the walls sealing the anger off to a specific community or locale, or around a specific issue, have started to crumble. As a result, rage is becoming an ideology unto itself.

<snip>

It brings to mind a quote from William Hazlitt's 1826 essay "On the Pleasure of Hating": "The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others." Cultures that self-identify as victims and come to see their defining historical references as a series of grievances have a tendency to mutate in ways that range from unpleasant to catastrophic. Examples include the American South in the post-Civil War decades, Germany in the post-World War I years, the Soviet Union, post-Yugoslav Serbia, and Rwanda. One could argue, as well, that much of the potency of Islamicism today arises from similar forces, as does some of the extremism of the settler community in Israel and the occupied territories. As cultures, hate movements perform somewhat similarly to feuding families or clans, their raison d'être increasingly defined by violence and fury.

I do believe that American democratic institutions are particularly durable and resilient. But it is at least possible to envision a scenario in which, after years of high unemployment and declining living standards, the Tea Party essentially takes over the GOP. And it is possible to see how, over a series of election cycles, that movement could plant a brand of extremism in the center of American politics that would fundamentally change America's identity. It would very likely be characterized by a series of negatives: being anti-intellectual, anti-foreign, blustering in its assertion of an increasingly fragile American superiority, unwilling to engage with the rest of the world on environmental policy, nuclear disarmament, or human rights. A tapestry of rage defined by what its practitioners oppose rather than support.

Is this analysis substantially correct? It seems depressingly persuasive to me -- and indicates American politics in general will not be getting any more reasonable or rational any time soon.

 

[John Doe]

I don't accept the premise of the question.

 

[firespin]

Is this analysis substantially correct?

Can you name anything you've ever posted with substantially correct analysis?

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Can you name anything you've ever posted with substantially correct analysis?

http://ic2.pbase.com/o4/97/388497/1/64021719.CHPTbjAb.applause.gif

 

[bronzeage]

The other day I heard Sasha Abramsky interviewed on All Things Considered regarding an article, "Look Ahead in Anger," he just published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

snip

There's your problem. He is one of those academic elitist eggheads. I bet he has a graduate degree and probably never did an honest day's work in his life.

 

[firespin]

There's your problem. He is one of those academic elitist eggheads. I bet he has a graduate degree and probably never did an honest day's work in his life.

That's pretty much the case for this guy, actually.

I realize you were trying to be sarcastic, but wrong target this time.

 

[RightField]

That's what Carter and his team thought too. Good thing we found Reagan and brought the economy steaming forward again.

I've seen more than one article saying that this administration is thinking in terms of "Malaise" similar to what Carter thought. What Carter didn't realize and what the current administration doesn't realize, but is clear to almost everyone else is that it's their democrat/marxist policies and weak leadership that is causing the malaise. Vote the bums out!

 

[KingOrfeo]

There's your problem. He is one of those academic elitist eggheads. I bet he has a graduate degree and probably never did an honest day's work in his life.

The same is true of William F. Buckley. So what? (Yes, I know he was in the CIA, but you said honest work. )

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

That's what Carter and his team thought too. Good thing we found Reagan and brought the economy steaming forward again.

I've seen more than one article saying that this administration is thinking in terms of "Malaise" similar to what Carter thought. What Carter didn't realize and what the current administration doesn't realize, but is clear to almost everyone else is that it's their democrat/marxist policies and weak leadership that is causing the malaise. Vote the bums out!

Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Reagan increase the deficit. Didn’t he give corporations tax breakes which they took before moving their companies off shore?

 

[notbert]

Companies are already moving out of China due to rising labor costs, plus when you get beyond cheap labor, conducting business in China basically sucks.

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

I could never understand why someone in this country never got labor and mangement on the same page for everyones benefit. I saw the problems whe I was a 18-19 year old working in a factory, why didn't they; why didn't some much smarter than me, in a position of power didn't do anything?

 

[eyer]

Declining? Hardly.

So I think when I see a picture of a Palestinian kid tearing-up Old Glory, wearing a Lebron James jersey.

Or maybe his ma just got it cheap @ the Wahali flea market...

 

[bronzeage]

That's pretty much the case for this guy, actually.

I realize you were trying to be sarcastic, but wrong target this time.

Oh no, I am being serious. The political battle cry was once "Don't trust anyone over thirty."

Today, it is "Don't trust anyone with over thirty semester hours."

Look at any egghead's diploma. Right across the middle, it will say, "College of Liberal Arts".

I bet he has long hair and a beard.

 

[blunt_aroma]

The other day I heard Sasha Abramsky interviewed on All Things Considered regarding an article, "Look Ahead in Anger," he just published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Abramsky's thesis is that the level of anger we've seen in American political discourse the past few years, on all sides but on the right more than the left, is partly due to general frustration at the economy, etc.; and on the RW side, partly due to a factional split between the moderate and radical wings of the conservative movement; but, overall, mainly a reaction to America's declining position in the world which has parallels in many other countries' histories.



Is this analysis substantially correct? It seems depressingly persuasive to me -- and indicates American politics in general will not be getting any more reasonable or rational any time soon.

The article/analysis is nonsense. U.S. will never decline as the only most powerful nation on earth. China will never become a world power with it's artificial currency control. There's madness in Russia. Great Britain is mired in the past. Japan will recall most of its technology. If U.S. goes down, the whole world goes down.

There are still no intelligent political threads on the GB. Let's appreciate pictures, instead.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

I don't accept the premise of the question.

Me either.

I think declining world influence might be more accurate. There's not a chance we're declining in world power.

 

[notbert]

Me either. It's kind of astounding that anyone might.

You know no one's even close, right?

enlighten us

 

[Wrong Element]

The so-called decline of the United States is mostly a decline in relative terms only. Growing economies like China's, India's, Brazil's--there's not a whole lot we can do about that, and those don't have to be negative developments for the U.S. We were at our absolute peak of relative dominance in the summer of 1945, but I don't think anyone would want to go back to those days.

I don't think there's any evidence at all that we're losing our relative dominance in military terms, since the percentage of the world's military spending accounted for by the U.S. has stayed pretty steady over time, and no one else has the means or the desire to maintain a global military presence.

I do think the "take our country back" rhetoric on the right is mostly a product of people who equate recent social changes with "decline;" and since most of those changes are highly unlikely to be reversed (e.g the decreasing percentage of Americans who are white and who are practicing Christians), they're bound to continue to be disappointed. Though it is highly unlikely we will still have a black president by January 2017, meaning that at least one of the major contributors to the insanity will cease to exist.

 

[firespin]

Oh no, I am being serious. The political battle cry was once "Don't trust anyone over thirty."

Today, it is "Don't trust anyone with over thirty semester hours."

Look at any egghead's diploma. Right across the middle, it will say, "College of Liberal Arts".

I bet he has long hair and a beard.

The nice thing about non-conforming individuals is they are all so similar.

http://writing.ucdavis.edu/faculty-staff/directory/sashaabr/image

 

[KingOrfeo]

The so-called decline of the United States is mostly a decline in relative terms only.

Well, yes. The average Brit is probably better-off and richer now than when Britain had an empire. Still, losing it was a hard thing for many of them to take, as Abramsky writes:

Less dramatically, as Britain's position as a pre-eminent power collapsed post-World War II, the country responded with a strange mixture of fury and resignation. "I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American age, apart from if you're an American, of course," opined the drunken, nihilistic, spiteful, and utterly depressive Jimmy Porter, bitterly, in Look Back in Anger, the famous postwar play and later film about British angst and the loss of illusion. John Osborne's creation was the quintessential rage drama in a Britain when young people could still recall a childhood living in a land of undisputed supremacy, and could look forward to a middle age of mediocrity in a victorious but bankrupt kingdom and to an old age of national insignificance. And when they were angry enough about it to be shouting bloody murder and casting around for people to blame.

Half a generation later, as the British public grew more accustomed to the country's diminished role in world affairs, at least some of the anger had changed to sarcasm, humor, and self-denigration. The era of Monty Python had commenced. National quirks that previously signified greatness were now derided. Stiff upper lips, the queen, Winston Churchill, those were now the stuff of jokes rather than the majesty of empire.

That said, the anger never entirely dissipated: The 1970s, the era of London punk rock, saw a surge in fascist street politics in many poor communities. The 1980s were pockmarked by skinhead violence and football hooliganism. And today anti-immigrant parties like the British National Party are sometimes making electoral inroads, at the local if not the national level. Britain is a land that knows how to laugh at itself, but it is also a place still riven with a subterranean fury at the hand dealt it by recent history. "Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma?" Sloterdijk asks in his recent book.

America in 2010 hasn't reached the self-deprecating Monty Python stage yet, but it's not much of a stretch to see in Glenn Beck's tirades, Lou Dobbs's anti-immigrant screeds, and Sarah Palin's faux nostalgia for the sunshine days, the nastiness and anger, if not the poetry, of Jimmy Porter; the fury, if not the haircuts, of skinhead hooligans (although a fair number of white-supremacist and militia groups in America these days do seem to have numbers of skinheads in their midst). The hollow sounds of a skinhead rendition of "Rule Britannia" are echoed, in some ways, in the raucous chants of "USA, USA!" at Tea Party gatherings today.

 

[KingOrfeo]

That's what Carter and his team thought too. Good thing we found Reagan and brought the economy steaming forward again.

I've seen more than one article saying that this administration is thinking in terms of "Malaise" similar to what Carter thought. What Carter didn't realize and what the current administration doesn't realize, but is clear to almost everyone else is that it's their democrat/marxist policies and weak leadership that is causing the malaise. Vote the bums out!

As Abramsky writes:

A stab-in-the-back narrative is being crafted within the world of conservatism: Things were going along just fine for a globally dominant United States (forgetting, conveniently, the depth of anti-American sentiment that developed around the world during President Bush's tenure, culminating in the financial collapse of 2007-8) until a radical President Obama decided to expand government, shrink the private sector, and traverse the world apologizing for America's purported past misdeeds. Like the decadent Europeans, guilt-ridden after their centuries of colonial dominance, so Obamians came into power intent on downplaying America's glory and its exceptionalism, and on talking up its sins.

According to this narrative, Obama's expansion of the welfare state represents an attack on both states' rights and individual freedoms that veers toward the treasonous. Here it gets murkier: Many of the more-extreme groups place his race, his otherness, his cosmopolitan leanings front and center. The president is out to destroy America because, put simply, he's never really been a true American in the first place.

Other, more-respectable branches of the anger coalition avoid such discussions, but talk instead about the anti-American presumptions behind the "socialization" or "Europeanization" project that Obama has embarked upon. Beck talks of a creeping Marxism taking over America. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went on Fox News early in the Obama presidency to declare that the new administration's stimulus package represented a "Europeanization of America." A National Review cover story by the political commentator Mark Steyn last year, titled "Our Socialist Future," said Obama's grand schemes were far larger, more "Europeanized" than were FDR's and LBJ's. A year later, the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, an editor-at-large at the National Review, warned his audience that "Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America."

"European" is becoming the new "E-word," a sneering, belittling term akin to the infamous denigration of "liberalism" a couple of decades ago. It is used to signify weakness, decadence, a loss of moral core. It is used to explain a creeping subversion of the American Dream.

The stab-in-the-back narrative is a trajectory familiar to students of empire the world over. As the ground shifts under the feet of a dominant power, as the structures supporting dominance start to crack, so the public gets angrier. It looks at past glories and doesn't understand why the present situation is so much less resplendent. It blames the country's leadership, or minority groups, or national enemies. It grieves for lost influence, or fears the imminent loss of influence, and it shudders at an increasingly shabby present.

 

[Ham Murabi]

From the OP:
"As America's undisputed global dominance ebbs—trimmed by China's surging economic might, by the European Union's growing presence as a global player (even given the travails triggered by the recent European debt crisis and the fears of a Greek default dragging the euro zone into a deeper recession), by the United States' own economic and military overstretch—the rage culture has matured to the point where it is coming to be a dark, and perhaps even a dominant, part of America's identity."


I think the premise is fucked up. China's economic might could be exposed as a myth in the next year or so. The EU is in trouble because they've been living the anti-business agenda pushed by Obama for years.
My anger, if you want to call it that, centers around economic policies that are doomed to failure, the high unemployment rate and the lack of confidence on Main Street.
Then there's the health care fiasco which will put another crushing burden on the economy, Obama's response to Arizona, cap and trade and, then, an ineffectual foreign policy that will, no doubt about it, result in a whole lot of people getting killed.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

The nice thing about non-conforming individuals is they are all so similar.

Mmm.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/fashion/stylephile/mad-men-2.jpg

 

[KingOrfeo]

I bet he has long hair and a beard.

If this pic is his, you're half right.

 

[Spider Rand]

I could never understand why someone in this country never got labor and mangement on the same page for everyones benefit. I saw the problems whe I was a 18-19 year old working in a factory, why didn't they; why didn't some much smarter than me, in a position of power didn't do anything?

Because someone smarter and in a position of power is usually in the pocket of either labor or management, it's against their interests to do anything.

 

[firespin]

Mmm.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/fashion/stylephile/mad-men-2.jpg

We all look alike, huh?