Law professor Ronald Dworkin has a short note in the current (9 December 2010) issue of the New York Review of Books on the midterm election of November. Marveling at the American voters’ ability to self-destruct by handing the GOP a landslide victory, he points out that their real dissatisfaction with the government—articulated most energetically by the Tea Party folks—is the feeling that they are losing the country, and they are desperate to take it back. “All their lives,” he writes,
“they have assumed that their country is [sic] the most powerful, most prosperous, most democratic, economically and culturally the most influential—altogether the most envied and wonderful country in the world. They are coming slowly and painfully to realize that that is no longer true; they are angry and they want someone to blame.”
“Our requests and demands are more and more ignored in foreign capitals,” he goes on; “our vaunted military power suddenly seems inept: we are unable to win any war anywhere.”
All this was very interesting for me to read. In The Twilight of American Culture I argued that we were in a state of collapse and had no real future as a nation—a provocative, perhaps even aggressive notion at the time. Ten years later, this argument is, at least among American intellectuals, no longer that controversial. Indeed, it’s becoming a truism, and Dworkin represents nearly mainstream thinking on the subject. I just found it satisfying to see it in print, with no editorializing about it: the US is finished, and that’s just the way it is. History did not work out in our favor; what could be more obvious? Let’s call a spade a spade, and not try to put a positive spin on it, for chrissakes.
If this is now being articulated clearly among the intellectual class, it is nevertheless being felt subjectively by a great majority of American citizens, as Dworkin points out. Although objectively speaking, they cannot reverse the decline, they nevertheless are pissed as hell about it, and are lashing out in a futile attempt to reverse history. It’s a purely emotional reaction, without an ounce of intelligent reflection behind it; but then the latter has never been America’s strong suit.
Just coincidentally, while I was reading that issue of the NYRB, I was also reading the work of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani (or as the Japanese would write it, Nishitani Keiji). Nishitani wrote a book in 1949 called Nihirizumu (Nihilism), which was subsequently translated into English as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. In the postwar period, Nishitani was concerned about what he regarded as the emptiness of Japanese culture, and regarded the various manifestations of the latter as “mere shadows floating over the void.” Nishitani, who died in 1990, was of the Kyoto School, a city associated with medieval Japan and the world of craft, meditation, and religious traditions. The “centering” of the latter was giving way to the commercial chaos of Tokyo, the world of Sony and Mitsubishi and the economic frenzy of modern Japanese life. Nishitani felt Japan’s only hope was to recover its traditions (of course the Japanese paid no attention to this, and are now in a major economic tailspin); he did not feel that either the American or Soviet model could solve the problem at the core. He wrote:
“Today non-European powers like the United States and the Soviet Union are coming to the fore; in any event, they are the players who have stepped on to the stage of history to open up a new era. But neither ‘Americanism’ nor ‘communism’ is capable of overcoming the nihilism that the best thinkers of Europe confronted with anxiety, the abyss of nihility [sic] that opened up in the spiritual depths of the self and the world. For the time being they are managing to keep the abyss covered over, but eventually they will have to face it.”
As we all know, the USSR had to face it in 1989-90; the Leninism and Stalinism of the previous seventy-odd years were, in Nishitani’s words, “mere shadows floating over the void.” America, for various reasons, had a more impressive run: about 400 years, I would say, of doing something very similar, if with a different ideology. Its crackup began around 1971, and has proceeded in a much slower manner than that of the Soviet Union. But there is no papering it over any longer, as both Dworkin and the Tea Party understand (if in rather different ways). The hollowness that haunted us from the beginning is now terrifyingly present; the Void, like Mephistopheles, has come to collect its due. As in the case of the USSR, there is no stuffing it this time around, and Mr. Obama has proven to be representative of our emptiness, not a remedy for it. He’s nothing more than a logo, a guy who is all dressed up with no place to go.
So now Russia has become a kind of wasteland, governed by crony capitalism and KGB-style autocracy. Our own wasteland will probably take the form of crony capitalism and American Idol vapidity. Orwell in the one case, Huxley in the other, might be another way of putting it. But there is finally no hiding from the reality of all this. “The wasteland grows,” proclaimed Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra; “woe to whomever conceals wastelands!” Wise words, sure to be ignored by the American public and government alike.
©Morris Berman, 2010
December 04, 2010
November 26, 2010
November 23, 2010
Taking It Up a Notch
Journalist Ted Rall recently published a remarkable book, The Anti-American Manifesto. It is not remarkable for its all-too-familiar argument that the US is a violent nation, by now almost totally dysfunctional and in the hands of a plutocracy. Anyone familiar with my work, or (much more likely) that of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Chalmers Johnson et al. will not be shocked by this argument. What distinguishes Rall’s work is the explicit call for violent overthrow of the American government as the only serious way of addressing our situation. It is, thus, a courageous book; he worries that he could wind up in jail, or at the very least see his career destroyed, which is hardly a far-fetched scenario (informal censorship is very powerful in the US). But he is committed to putting the case before the American people (or more realistically, a tiny fraction thereof), that there is simply no reforming the system; that it is simply beyond repair, and needs to be replaced by something completely different.
Rall’s documentation of how violent we are and have been, and of our present decay and corruption, is quite elaborate, and certainly worth reading even if you already know the score. Thus on pp. 72-81 he compiles a table of wars the United States has been involved in over the period 1798-2007. It’s quite breathtaking, and would seem to confirm the argument I’ve made elsewhere that the country derives its identity via opposition, i.e. the creation and pursuit of enemies. (Cf. Walter Hixson’s thesis that war is at the center of American identity, as he presents it in The Myth of American Diplomacy.) The data of our dysfunction are supplied more or less randomly throughout the text: Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of almost every other developed country, ranking 42nd in terms of life expectancy; the top 10% of wage earners receive nearly 50% of all national income, and hold 80% of the nation’s wealth; a murder is committed every 31 minutes in the United States, and a rape every 5.8 minutes; more than 47 million of us live in poverty (with the definition of the term very conservatively drawn); more than 3% of the adult population is in jail, on probation, or on parole (actually, 1 out of every 31 people--!); 1 out of 5 of us is unemployed, with little prospect of altering our situation for years to come; the national debt is off the charts (see the previous post on this blog); and so on. His first conclusion, that we are in a state of advanced collapse, is by now a truism, though most of the country is in denial about this, or just simply blind to it.
Rall’s second conclusion is that there is no real political left to speak of, in the sense that it is, at best, a collection of wimps. Radical groups spend time selling newspapers on college campuses; organizations such as Democracy Now! or Common Dreams threaten no one, as the US government well knows. American college students do not call for replacing that government with something better, and if you go to the website of the CPUSA (American Communist Party), it says that it is not, and never was, “a supporter of violent revolution”—“as though impotence was something to brag about,” Rall wryly remarks. As for Michael Moore, an “agent non-provocateur,” “the best the official Left has to offer,” Rall regards the man as little more than a joke. Moore declares that the system is “fundamentally corrupt and undemocratic,” but keeps on rooting for Obama to rectify the situation. When one interviewer asked Moore, apropos of his film Capitalism: A Love Story, “Short of revolution, what can people do?”, Moore lamely replied that the purpose of the film was to open the audience to new ideas. He never questioned the interviewer’s premise, writes Rall, that a solution should fall short of revolution. “He thinks he’s dangerous,” Rall comments sarcastically.
This brings him to his third, and major, conclusion, that we must forsake the pseudo-left, start amassing an arsenal, and take over the government by means of violent uprising. This is how history works, he tells us, and of course he’s right (Gandhi excepted, I suppose). The problem I have with this, and which haunts the book, is the inability to say, precisely, who “we” is. This is the Achilles heel in the whole argument, an argument that Rall himself undercuts quite decisively at various points. For “we” seems to be basically, “the good guys”—folks like Rall, or the ones he calls “people of good will.” His definitions are as follows:
We: “Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people”
They (i.e., the enemy): “Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives.”
And this is where things fall apart, because the stats don’t bear Rall out. By and large, Americans are not thoughtful and freedom-loving; instead, they are reactionary, stupid, greedy, shortsighted, and given a chance would like to be corporate executives raking in $50 million a year. They don’t vote for Nader or Kucinich; 99% of the electorate just wants the American Way of Life, which is stupid, greedy, shortsighted, etc., to continue. There is no interest in rebellion here: as Rall himself notes, the public collectively shrugged after the Supreme Court stole the election for the GOP in 2000, and didn’t care all that much that no WMD’s were found in Iraq three years later. Contrary to all common sense, 91% of Americans regard themselves as middle class (this from a 2008 Pew Charitable Trust poll). Americans, says Rall, believe that they are better than everyone else and so deserving of more than anyone else, and this is their religion—what he calls “the Cult of the Asshole.” So in 2009 CNN found that 50% approve of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding—torture apparently being an effective way to ensure the continuation of our Asshole way of life. Rall writes that “we” have to educate people about what is wrong with the country, and teach them how to think—“propaganda comes first,” he says—but adds that “the ability to absorb it intelligently is required before propaganda can become effective.” Meanwhile, he admits that a large fraction of the American public is illiterate, and that (CBS News poll, 2004) 55% of Americans don’t believe that man evolved (actually, I think it’s closer to 67%). “How does one reason [with them]?”, he rightly asks. Hence, “The number of truly independent-minded Americans willing and able to commit to what can and should and must be done at this time is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.”
Then what, Mr. Rall, are we talking about? There is an endless call in this book for the reader to “stand up and act.” Again, who is We? And what is it We should do? We and whose army? A revolution requires having the military on your side, or at least remaining neutral during the uprising, and the American military is generally conservative and committed to following the government’s orders. Rall’s prescription for action is that “we” form cells and cadres—talk to a friend, spread the word, develop a decentralized revolutionary network. Meanwhile, he again undercuts his argument by observing that it is the right wing in this country that is armed and ready to take action, not the (nonexistent) left. Anger, he admits, exists on the political right; the rest of the populace is docile. It is the right that is opening camps in rural areas, accumulating weapons, training new recruits, etc. They are, he points out, preparing for war, exchanging information about these weapons and stockpiles and discussing various strategies. Rush Limbaugh, it turns out, has actually endorsed such activity, whereas there is no influential figure on the left crazy enough to publicly endorse a similar left-wing mobilization. Nor is there any popular interest in it; that strikes me as being too obvious to warrant comment.
Rall’s description of the state of disintegration and decay of the United States is right on the money. Given the stupidity and docility of the American public that he himself documents, the most likely scenario is further disintegration and decay, until, like Rome or England, we drift away to nothing. That process is, in fact, well underway. And yet, Rall persists in the fantasy that American rage will boil over into left-wing revolution; that the segment of the population that is “in the know” will obtain guns and learn how to use them; that they will take out “the idiotic, incompetent, greedy, evil, and stupid people who are ruining our lives,” even if they have to work with racist skinheads in Idaho to accomplish their goals (which Rall says might be necessary). “Unless you choose to lay down and die,” he tells the reader, “there is no other choice.” Don’t worry, he concludes: millions will be with you.
Where these millions are going to come from, of course, is not clear, for this “Rall Call” ultimately has no basis in reality, and this by the author’s own admission. The author is honest in recognizing that there can be no substantive social change in this country short of revolution; and that no matter whom we elect, no matter how many books Noam Chomsky publishes or movies Michael Moore makes, none of it redistributes power, none of it makes any difference for how business and government are actually conducted. His strange, even bizarre, error is to think that this sad and stupefied population will somehow transform itself from sheep into (left-wing) wolves. When pigs fly, is the only thing I can say in response.
©Morris Berman, 2010
Rall’s documentation of how violent we are and have been, and of our present decay and corruption, is quite elaborate, and certainly worth reading even if you already know the score. Thus on pp. 72-81 he compiles a table of wars the United States has been involved in over the period 1798-2007. It’s quite breathtaking, and would seem to confirm the argument I’ve made elsewhere that the country derives its identity via opposition, i.e. the creation and pursuit of enemies. (Cf. Walter Hixson’s thesis that war is at the center of American identity, as he presents it in The Myth of American Diplomacy.) The data of our dysfunction are supplied more or less randomly throughout the text: Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of almost every other developed country, ranking 42nd in terms of life expectancy; the top 10% of wage earners receive nearly 50% of all national income, and hold 80% of the nation’s wealth; a murder is committed every 31 minutes in the United States, and a rape every 5.8 minutes; more than 47 million of us live in poverty (with the definition of the term very conservatively drawn); more than 3% of the adult population is in jail, on probation, or on parole (actually, 1 out of every 31 people--!); 1 out of 5 of us is unemployed, with little prospect of altering our situation for years to come; the national debt is off the charts (see the previous post on this blog); and so on. His first conclusion, that we are in a state of advanced collapse, is by now a truism, though most of the country is in denial about this, or just simply blind to it.
Rall’s second conclusion is that there is no real political left to speak of, in the sense that it is, at best, a collection of wimps. Radical groups spend time selling newspapers on college campuses; organizations such as Democracy Now! or Common Dreams threaten no one, as the US government well knows. American college students do not call for replacing that government with something better, and if you go to the website of the CPUSA (American Communist Party), it says that it is not, and never was, “a supporter of violent revolution”—“as though impotence was something to brag about,” Rall wryly remarks. As for Michael Moore, an “agent non-provocateur,” “the best the official Left has to offer,” Rall regards the man as little more than a joke. Moore declares that the system is “fundamentally corrupt and undemocratic,” but keeps on rooting for Obama to rectify the situation. When one interviewer asked Moore, apropos of his film Capitalism: A Love Story, “Short of revolution, what can people do?”, Moore lamely replied that the purpose of the film was to open the audience to new ideas. He never questioned the interviewer’s premise, writes Rall, that a solution should fall short of revolution. “He thinks he’s dangerous,” Rall comments sarcastically.
This brings him to his third, and major, conclusion, that we must forsake the pseudo-left, start amassing an arsenal, and take over the government by means of violent uprising. This is how history works, he tells us, and of course he’s right (Gandhi excepted, I suppose). The problem I have with this, and which haunts the book, is the inability to say, precisely, who “we” is. This is the Achilles heel in the whole argument, an argument that Rall himself undercuts quite decisively at various points. For “we” seems to be basically, “the good guys”—folks like Rall, or the ones he calls “people of good will.” His definitions are as follows:
We: “Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people”
They (i.e., the enemy): “Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives.”
And this is where things fall apart, because the stats don’t bear Rall out. By and large, Americans are not thoughtful and freedom-loving; instead, they are reactionary, stupid, greedy, shortsighted, and given a chance would like to be corporate executives raking in $50 million a year. They don’t vote for Nader or Kucinich; 99% of the electorate just wants the American Way of Life, which is stupid, greedy, shortsighted, etc., to continue. There is no interest in rebellion here: as Rall himself notes, the public collectively shrugged after the Supreme Court stole the election for the GOP in 2000, and didn’t care all that much that no WMD’s were found in Iraq three years later. Contrary to all common sense, 91% of Americans regard themselves as middle class (this from a 2008 Pew Charitable Trust poll). Americans, says Rall, believe that they are better than everyone else and so deserving of more than anyone else, and this is their religion—what he calls “the Cult of the Asshole.” So in 2009 CNN found that 50% approve of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding—torture apparently being an effective way to ensure the continuation of our Asshole way of life. Rall writes that “we” have to educate people about what is wrong with the country, and teach them how to think—“propaganda comes first,” he says—but adds that “the ability to absorb it intelligently is required before propaganda can become effective.” Meanwhile, he admits that a large fraction of the American public is illiterate, and that (CBS News poll, 2004) 55% of Americans don’t believe that man evolved (actually, I think it’s closer to 67%). “How does one reason [with them]?”, he rightly asks. Hence, “The number of truly independent-minded Americans willing and able to commit to what can and should and must be done at this time is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.”
Then what, Mr. Rall, are we talking about? There is an endless call in this book for the reader to “stand up and act.” Again, who is We? And what is it We should do? We and whose army? A revolution requires having the military on your side, or at least remaining neutral during the uprising, and the American military is generally conservative and committed to following the government’s orders. Rall’s prescription for action is that “we” form cells and cadres—talk to a friend, spread the word, develop a decentralized revolutionary network. Meanwhile, he again undercuts his argument by observing that it is the right wing in this country that is armed and ready to take action, not the (nonexistent) left. Anger, he admits, exists on the political right; the rest of the populace is docile. It is the right that is opening camps in rural areas, accumulating weapons, training new recruits, etc. They are, he points out, preparing for war, exchanging information about these weapons and stockpiles and discussing various strategies. Rush Limbaugh, it turns out, has actually endorsed such activity, whereas there is no influential figure on the left crazy enough to publicly endorse a similar left-wing mobilization. Nor is there any popular interest in it; that strikes me as being too obvious to warrant comment.
Rall’s description of the state of disintegration and decay of the United States is right on the money. Given the stupidity and docility of the American public that he himself documents, the most likely scenario is further disintegration and decay, until, like Rome or England, we drift away to nothing. That process is, in fact, well underway. And yet, Rall persists in the fantasy that American rage will boil over into left-wing revolution; that the segment of the population that is “in the know” will obtain guns and learn how to use them; that they will take out “the idiotic, incompetent, greedy, evil, and stupid people who are ruining our lives,” even if they have to work with racist skinheads in Idaho to accomplish their goals (which Rall says might be necessary). “Unless you choose to lay down and die,” he tells the reader, “there is no other choice.” Don’t worry, he concludes: millions will be with you.
Where these millions are going to come from, of course, is not clear, for this “Rall Call” ultimately has no basis in reality, and this by the author’s own admission. The author is honest in recognizing that there can be no substantive social change in this country short of revolution; and that no matter whom we elect, no matter how many books Noam Chomsky publishes or movies Michael Moore makes, none of it redistributes power, none of it makes any difference for how business and government are actually conducted. His strange, even bizarre, error is to think that this sad and stupefied population will somehow transform itself from sheep into (left-wing) wolves. When pigs fly, is the only thing I can say in response.
©Morris Berman, 2010
November 16, 2010
The Age of Austerity
The current issue of Foreign Affairs has a remarkably sobering article by Roger Altman and Richard Haass entitled "American Profligacy and American Power" that seems, if I read it correctly, to spell out the death knell of the United States. In a word, they argue that we are going broke. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, they point out, will reduce federal revenue by more than $2 trillion over ten years. This, and federal spending, make the Bush years the period of "the largest fiscal erosion in American history." (Note that Haass, who is President of the Council on Foreign Relations, was Director of Policy Planning at the State Dept. during 2001-3.)
It gets worse. The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.6 trillion, or nearly 12% of the GDP--the largest in US history. The federal debt itself went from 35% of the GDP in 2000 to 62% of it in 2010. Given the corresponding rise in interest rates on all this, annual interest expense will begin to dwarf all domestic discretionary spending (including infrastructure, education, energy, and agriculture), requiring the Treasury to borrow $5 trillion annually to finance it. "Yet the real outlook for deficits and debt," the authors write, "is much worse than these forecasts." In fact, "The post-2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic." The Congressional Budget Office projects that official federal debt, excluding government-sponsored enterprises, could hit 110% of the GDP by 2025 and 180% by 2035. China is the biggest lender--i.e. purchaser of our debt--but it and the other lenders "have no strategic reason to continue holding US dollars." True, they would suffer losses if the dollar fell, but the consequences would be much worse for us.
The authors make it clear that US politicians have the choice of being proactive, moving to soften this scary trajectory to the extent that they can; or--more likely--fail to act, in which case the solution to the US out of control will be "a solution imposed on the United States by global capital markets." Things may be calm today (really?! I had the opposite impression), write Altman and Haass, but this "will not last in the face of the United States' disastrous financial outlook." Whether we act or don't act, in other words, there is no escaping a rather bleak fate. The only issue is the intensity of that fate, its degree of darkness. Either we attempt to manage our "transition into austerity," they say, or we don't; but either way, austerity is our future. We can expect smaller budgets, with major cuts in entitlements and domestic discretionary spending. The American citizen is going to suffer, and in a major way.
So far, so good; I mean, bad. But in terms of really understanding what has happened to us, it's at this point that the authors drift into a kind of doublespeak, while being oblivious to it. Consider the following two paragraphs:
"A related cost of the United States' debt has even greater consequences [than the transition to austerity]: the diminished appeal of the American model of market-based capitalism. Foreign policy is carried out as much by a country's image as it is by its deeds. And the example of a thriving economy and high living standards based on such capitalism was a powerful instrument of American power, especially during the Cold War, when the American model was competing with Soviet-style communism around the world.
"Now, however, the competition comes from Chinese-style authoritarianism: a top-heavy political system married to a directed and hybrid form of capitalism. The recent stellar performance of China's economy in the midst of Western economic troubles has enhanced the appeal of its system. Reinforcing this trend is the reality that the US approach (one associated with a system of little oversight and regulation) is widely seen as risk-prone and discredited after the recent financial crisis. If the United States is unable to address its own debt crisis and a solution is forced on it, then the appeal of democracy and market-based capitalism will take a further blow."
So the authors don't say that there is something fundamentally wrong with our (sham) democracy and market-based capitalism, of which our massive debt crisis is the proof. No, it's rather, in their eyes, that the fact that we somehow went off the rails will tarnish the reputation of this way of life. There is a failure to grasp that the American Way of Life, the dream of unlimited economic expansion, was a mistake and an illusion even in the heyday of its supposed success. We were never living in reality; we thought infinity was a reasonable goal. We also defined the good life purely in terms of money, of material accumulation--really, our only value--and this, more than any other single factor (in my view), has brought us to our knees.
And of course, the American public went along with all this, and with the notion that any form of socialism was evil. Indeed, it regarded any kind of social safety net as equivalent to communism, and regarded those who saw it differently as traitors. But in fact, the Soviet Union was hardly the only alternative model around; and here the authors make their second big mistake, for they put Europe into the same category as the US, and say that America's fate will be Europe's as well. But as Steven Hill shows in his book Europe's Promise, the European socioeconomic model--Scandanavia's in particular--is very different from America's, and Europe is doing fairly well with it. Thus the authors fail to connect the disintegration of our way of life with the inherent nature of that way of life, and in classic Cold War style, seem to believe it's either us or the Reds. As I have said over and over again on this blog, it's not just the man in the street who has been brainwashed. The "best and the brightest," to borrow an old phrase from David Halberstam, don't really understand the base-line problem of America, what America finally is, and that it did itself in by being precisely what it is. ("Character is destiny"--Heraclitus) The brightest, in short, are not really very bright at all (an argument most recently made, for US foreign policy, at least, by Derek Leebaert in Magic and Mayhem).
In a word, the authors seem to be blaming Bush Jr. for our no-exit situation, when the groundwork was laid with James Madison ("Extend the sphere," he wrote, and "you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens." In other words, any demands for a more equitable type of economy could be defused by opening up "surplus social space.") Historian Walter McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner) locates it nearly 200 years earlier, describing a commercial hustling mentality on the American continent that can be dated to the late sixteenth century. And because Altman and Haass have no understanding of the dialectical nature of history, and seem to believe that "a system of little oversight and regulation" is a recent phenomenon, they treat our current economic failure--basically, our collapse as a nation--not as the consequence of our very "success" (which turned around and bit us in the ass), but as something that descended accidentally, as it were--practically came out of nowhere; as a big surprise. The point, as the historian William Appleman Williams repeatedly made, is that we could have had a different type of nation, a social democratic one; but we made choices early on that precluded that, and then sit around wondering why we're screwed.
But we can nevertheless give credit where credit is due. Altman and Haass make no attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour, as so many other pundits do; to paint a rosy picture that the American public is always so desperate to have. No: it's pretty obvious we are doomed, on a downhill slide of increasing suffering and austerity with only some type of "crisis management" possibly acting as a modifying influence. Nor do they think that we shall act in a proactive, intelligent way. Rather, circumstances will force us into austerity against our will, they suggest, and it will not be a pretty picture.
Kurt Vonnegut summed it up pretty well, some years ago: "There's a shit storm coming." Get out your umbrella.
It gets worse. The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.6 trillion, or nearly 12% of the GDP--the largest in US history. The federal debt itself went from 35% of the GDP in 2000 to 62% of it in 2010. Given the corresponding rise in interest rates on all this, annual interest expense will begin to dwarf all domestic discretionary spending (including infrastructure, education, energy, and agriculture), requiring the Treasury to borrow $5 trillion annually to finance it. "Yet the real outlook for deficits and debt," the authors write, "is much worse than these forecasts." In fact, "The post-2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic." The Congressional Budget Office projects that official federal debt, excluding government-sponsored enterprises, could hit 110% of the GDP by 2025 and 180% by 2035. China is the biggest lender--i.e. purchaser of our debt--but it and the other lenders "have no strategic reason to continue holding US dollars." True, they would suffer losses if the dollar fell, but the consequences would be much worse for us.
The authors make it clear that US politicians have the choice of being proactive, moving to soften this scary trajectory to the extent that they can; or--more likely--fail to act, in which case the solution to the US out of control will be "a solution imposed on the United States by global capital markets." Things may be calm today (really?! I had the opposite impression), write Altman and Haass, but this "will not last in the face of the United States' disastrous financial outlook." Whether we act or don't act, in other words, there is no escaping a rather bleak fate. The only issue is the intensity of that fate, its degree of darkness. Either we attempt to manage our "transition into austerity," they say, or we don't; but either way, austerity is our future. We can expect smaller budgets, with major cuts in entitlements and domestic discretionary spending. The American citizen is going to suffer, and in a major way.
So far, so good; I mean, bad. But in terms of really understanding what has happened to us, it's at this point that the authors drift into a kind of doublespeak, while being oblivious to it. Consider the following two paragraphs:
"A related cost of the United States' debt has even greater consequences [than the transition to austerity]: the diminished appeal of the American model of market-based capitalism. Foreign policy is carried out as much by a country's image as it is by its deeds. And the example of a thriving economy and high living standards based on such capitalism was a powerful instrument of American power, especially during the Cold War, when the American model was competing with Soviet-style communism around the world.
"Now, however, the competition comes from Chinese-style authoritarianism: a top-heavy political system married to a directed and hybrid form of capitalism. The recent stellar performance of China's economy in the midst of Western economic troubles has enhanced the appeal of its system. Reinforcing this trend is the reality that the US approach (one associated with a system of little oversight and regulation) is widely seen as risk-prone and discredited after the recent financial crisis. If the United States is unable to address its own debt crisis and a solution is forced on it, then the appeal of democracy and market-based capitalism will take a further blow."
So the authors don't say that there is something fundamentally wrong with our (sham) democracy and market-based capitalism, of which our massive debt crisis is the proof. No, it's rather, in their eyes, that the fact that we somehow went off the rails will tarnish the reputation of this way of life. There is a failure to grasp that the American Way of Life, the dream of unlimited economic expansion, was a mistake and an illusion even in the heyday of its supposed success. We were never living in reality; we thought infinity was a reasonable goal. We also defined the good life purely in terms of money, of material accumulation--really, our only value--and this, more than any other single factor (in my view), has brought us to our knees.
And of course, the American public went along with all this, and with the notion that any form of socialism was evil. Indeed, it regarded any kind of social safety net as equivalent to communism, and regarded those who saw it differently as traitors. But in fact, the Soviet Union was hardly the only alternative model around; and here the authors make their second big mistake, for they put Europe into the same category as the US, and say that America's fate will be Europe's as well. But as Steven Hill shows in his book Europe's Promise, the European socioeconomic model--Scandanavia's in particular--is very different from America's, and Europe is doing fairly well with it. Thus the authors fail to connect the disintegration of our way of life with the inherent nature of that way of life, and in classic Cold War style, seem to believe it's either us or the Reds. As I have said over and over again on this blog, it's not just the man in the street who has been brainwashed. The "best and the brightest," to borrow an old phrase from David Halberstam, don't really understand the base-line problem of America, what America finally is, and that it did itself in by being precisely what it is. ("Character is destiny"--Heraclitus) The brightest, in short, are not really very bright at all (an argument most recently made, for US foreign policy, at least, by Derek Leebaert in Magic and Mayhem).
In a word, the authors seem to be blaming Bush Jr. for our no-exit situation, when the groundwork was laid with James Madison ("Extend the sphere," he wrote, and "you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens." In other words, any demands for a more equitable type of economy could be defused by opening up "surplus social space.") Historian Walter McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner) locates it nearly 200 years earlier, describing a commercial hustling mentality on the American continent that can be dated to the late sixteenth century. And because Altman and Haass have no understanding of the dialectical nature of history, and seem to believe that "a system of little oversight and regulation" is a recent phenomenon, they treat our current economic failure--basically, our collapse as a nation--not as the consequence of our very "success" (which turned around and bit us in the ass), but as something that descended accidentally, as it were--practically came out of nowhere; as a big surprise. The point, as the historian William Appleman Williams repeatedly made, is that we could have had a different type of nation, a social democratic one; but we made choices early on that precluded that, and then sit around wondering why we're screwed.
But we can nevertheless give credit where credit is due. Altman and Haass make no attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour, as so many other pundits do; to paint a rosy picture that the American public is always so desperate to have. No: it's pretty obvious we are doomed, on a downhill slide of increasing suffering and austerity with only some type of "crisis management" possibly acting as a modifying influence. Nor do they think that we shall act in a proactive, intelligent way. Rather, circumstances will force us into austerity against our will, they suggest, and it will not be a pretty picture.
Kurt Vonnegut summed it up pretty well, some years ago: "There's a shit storm coming." Get out your umbrella.
October 28, 2010
A Question of Values
Dear Friends:
For those of you who have suffered thru my various postings for 4.5 years, you now have an opportunity to relive your suffering in paperback form. Yes, it's finally available on Amazon, the collection of essays known as A Question of Values. As Amazon hasn't posted the description of the book just yet, let me do that now:
"A Question of Values is Morris Berman's seventh book of cultural history and social criticism, and his first book of essays, which were written during
2007-10. Timely and uncompromising, they range across four principal topics: American culture and politics; the human existential condition; a close look at the nature of "progress"; and some thoughts on where Western civilization, in general, is headed. These articles pull no punches regarding our current situation, and represent some of Berman's finest writing to date. He challenges his readers to rethink the accepted mainstream system of values, and argues that in the end, our problems are as ethical in nature as they are political. In the context of a value system that is rapidly turning against us, Berman's message is simple: change or die."
Christmas is almost upon us, so this would make an excellent stocking-stuffer; and if you send it to your mainstream, centrist friends, an excellent garbage can stuffer as well! (These folks need to be harassed, as I'm sure most of you will agree. Watch them read the book and chew on rugs, or beat their heads vigorously against the wall, just to relieve the ensuing tension.)
As some of you know, no publisher wanted to touch the book (this more for commercial than ideological reasons, although in the US the two tend to run together), so I am grateful to Amazon and their CreateSpace department for making self-publishing a possibility. They did a beautiful job with this, imo.
BTW, for you hispanohablantes out there, the Spanish translation of the book is being published in Mexico City by Sexto Piso, and should be out in February or March at the lastest: Cuestion de valores. Disfrutanlo!
In other news: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, is in the page proof stage and should be available (I'm hoping) sometime next month; the publisher is Cervena Barva Press. And, mirabile dictu, I'm in the process of signing a contract for the third volume of my American Empire series, entitled Capitalism and Its Discontents. (Some publishers do have cojones, I'm happy to report.) This should hit the bookstores by summer of 2011, if all goes well. I'm still struggling to get my novel, Destiny, published; I'll keep you posted on that one.
Thank you all for your support; it's been quite a ride, and I'm grateful to all of you for joining me.
-mb
For those of you who have suffered thru my various postings for 4.5 years, you now have an opportunity to relive your suffering in paperback form. Yes, it's finally available on Amazon, the collection of essays known as A Question of Values. As Amazon hasn't posted the description of the book just yet, let me do that now:
"A Question of Values is Morris Berman's seventh book of cultural history and social criticism, and his first book of essays, which were written during
2007-10. Timely and uncompromising, they range across four principal topics: American culture and politics; the human existential condition; a close look at the nature of "progress"; and some thoughts on where Western civilization, in general, is headed. These articles pull no punches regarding our current situation, and represent some of Berman's finest writing to date. He challenges his readers to rethink the accepted mainstream system of values, and argues that in the end, our problems are as ethical in nature as they are political. In the context of a value system that is rapidly turning against us, Berman's message is simple: change or die."
Christmas is almost upon us, so this would make an excellent stocking-stuffer; and if you send it to your mainstream, centrist friends, an excellent garbage can stuffer as well! (These folks need to be harassed, as I'm sure most of you will agree. Watch them read the book and chew on rugs, or beat their heads vigorously against the wall, just to relieve the ensuing tension.)
As some of you know, no publisher wanted to touch the book (this more for commercial than ideological reasons, although in the US the two tend to run together), so I am grateful to Amazon and their CreateSpace department for making self-publishing a possibility. They did a beautiful job with this, imo.
BTW, for you hispanohablantes out there, the Spanish translation of the book is being published in Mexico City by Sexto Piso, and should be out in February or March at the lastest: Cuestion de valores. Disfrutanlo!
In other news: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, is in the page proof stage and should be available (I'm hoping) sometime next month; the publisher is Cervena Barva Press. And, mirabile dictu, I'm in the process of signing a contract for the third volume of my American Empire series, entitled Capitalism and Its Discontents. (Some publishers do have cojones, I'm happy to report.) This should hit the bookstores by summer of 2011, if all goes well. I'm still struggling to get my novel, Destiny, published; I'll keep you posted on that one.
Thank you all for your support; it's been quite a ride, and I'm grateful to all of you for joining me.
-mb
October 25, 2010
Super Sad Love Story
Maybe there really is a zeitgeist floating around. Some time ago, I posted an article on this website entitled “How Chic Was My Progress,” depicting an end-of-empire scenario in which everything was going to hell in a basket, but nobody was that concerned because they had some state-of-the-art laptop or cellphone into which they could stare or talk, thereby feeling that all was right with the world. At the same time that I was writing this, give or take, the Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart was putting the finishing touches on his spectacular novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which precisely that scenario plays out in the United States. In his version, Americans are on their digital screen device—“apparat” (umlauts over the a’s)—24/7, except when they are sleeping. Relationships of any kind, whether with a book or another human being, are pretty much passé; the screen, along with mass consumerism, has become a total world. In many ways, SSTLS reads like the fictionalized version of my last two books, The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America. I knocked it off in two days, but it was an eerie read.
My own vision of the collapse of America is based on the Roman Empire model, which is one of slow disintegration. Sure, there are “nodes” that punctuate the process, such as 9/11 or the crash of 2008, but all in all one day is pretty much like the next, another step on a downhill slide. Not so for Shteyngart. Given his Russian background, he sees the U.S. following the Soviet pattern, in which a long period of decay issues out into a period of outright collapse, with the economy/society/culture imploding almost overnight. In SSTLS, the dollar is basically worthless, with the Chinese yuan becoming the de facto currency of the country. China effectively owns the United States, in this scenario, as Americans scramble just to survive (cafés have names like “Povertea,” and grocery stores sport signs saying “We accept only yuan sorry”). The government has tried everything—“privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs”—and the net result is zero. The nation “is no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.” Meanwhile the U.S. is, of course, engaged in another phony war, this time with Venezuela; except that in this case, it is clearly losing, as Venezuelan warships make their way up the Potomac. Human relationships are completely commercial, with Americans constantly using their apparati to calculate the “fuckability” of potential partners. If the novel is an absorbing read, it is also a bleak one, as the citizenry finally tries to escape to Canada or return to the land from which they originally emigrated. The most depressing aspect of the book is that much of what the author describes is already with us; the endgame feels like it’s only fifteen to twenty years away.
A few additional quotes might provide a more vivid portrait. The central character, Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s obvious alter ego), is returning to New York from Rome, where he spent a year escaping the United States. He is doing something unusual for an American: reading a book (Chekhov, appropriately enough). People on the plane are staring at him; the young man next to him says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Abramov records in his diary: “As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.” Lenny reflects on the life of one of his friends, Noah, now a trendy broadcaster of meaningless information, but prior to that someone who actually thought about things. “His personal decline,” Lenny writes in his diary, “paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store.” (Books are now popularly referred to as “doorstops,” inasmuch as that is seen as the only thing they are good for.) Sitting with Noah and a few other “Media” friends in a bar, Lenny and his mates talk about the latest disaster in the Venezuelan war (being managed by a Cheney-like character named Rubenstein, the Secretary of State); the near-collapse of a major credit bank (subsequently bailed out by the Fed); their shrinking stock portfolios; and “the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.”
A bit later, Noah has Lenny on his TV program, trying to get him to say whether he is sleeping with Eunice, the Korean-American girl he’s been dating. “I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America,” says Lenny. “But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this…What if we just went home and read books to each other?” Noah responds:
“Oh God…You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov…Okay, folks we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.” As it turns out, the American infrastructure is heading toward zero hour as well. Part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses, and the government’s response is to put up a sign that says “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge”.
Looking around the streets of New York, Lenny’s impression is similar to my own, when I last visited the city in May 2010 (see “An American Diary”):
“And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.” As one of Eunice’s Korean friends writes her in a text message, “This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.” After things collapse in earnest—officially labeled The Rupture—a taxi driver says to Lenny, “now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing.” (This parallels my experience of being in Berlin during the time that the Wall came down, and seeing tables set up near the Brandenburg Gate, where small-time entrepreneurs were selling Soviet artefacts, such as commissars' hats and hammer-and-sickle pins, now devoid of any real energy. One can easily imagine such a scenario for American flag pins and iPads.)
Finally, the ether grid breaks down, and the electronic devices to which Americans are enslaved fail to work. This leads to suicides, with people writing departing notes “about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati.” For one thing, it becomes impossible to buy anything. But the corporations are ready, as always, to capitalize on whatever is going on, The Rupture included. Signs go up in New York with messages such as “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?” Chic to the end; what can one say? Lenny does, however, manage to escape some of this cultural holocaust, spending time reading—from books—to his girlfriend. “Because we can’t connect to our apparati,” he writes in his diary, “we’re learning to turn to each other.” Lying with her in bed, he thinks, “I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?” (He’s not exactly representative of the rest of the country, needless to say.) Eunice, who is fifteen years younger than Lenny, tells him: “I never really learned how to read texts. Just to scan them for info.” He replies: “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age…How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear?” Eunice eventually gets a job selling wristbands featuring “avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC” for two thousand yuan a pop.
Meanwhile, the government-corporate plan is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” for the elite, the very wealthy, while the rest of the nation will be carved up by a group of foreign sovereign wealth funds. China may “get” New Jersey, for example, but apparently Norway and Saudi Arabia are interested as well. Order will be maintained by a private security company, playing the role of the former National Guard. And with this, the curtain falls.
Ezra Pound once remarked that artists were the “antennae” of the human race, but that the “bullet-headed majority” would never learn to trust them. We shall, of course, ignore Gary Shteyngart; that goes without saying. Which is a great pity: I have yet to find a more canny, intuitive, and yet, oddly enough, entertaining, description of America’s final days.
(c) Morris Berman, 2010
My own vision of the collapse of America is based on the Roman Empire model, which is one of slow disintegration. Sure, there are “nodes” that punctuate the process, such as 9/11 or the crash of 2008, but all in all one day is pretty much like the next, another step on a downhill slide. Not so for Shteyngart. Given his Russian background, he sees the U.S. following the Soviet pattern, in which a long period of decay issues out into a period of outright collapse, with the economy/society/culture imploding almost overnight. In SSTLS, the dollar is basically worthless, with the Chinese yuan becoming the de facto currency of the country. China effectively owns the United States, in this scenario, as Americans scramble just to survive (cafés have names like “Povertea,” and grocery stores sport signs saying “We accept only yuan sorry”). The government has tried everything—“privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs”—and the net result is zero. The nation “is no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.” Meanwhile the U.S. is, of course, engaged in another phony war, this time with Venezuela; except that in this case, it is clearly losing, as Venezuelan warships make their way up the Potomac. Human relationships are completely commercial, with Americans constantly using their apparati to calculate the “fuckability” of potential partners. If the novel is an absorbing read, it is also a bleak one, as the citizenry finally tries to escape to Canada or return to the land from which they originally emigrated. The most depressing aspect of the book is that much of what the author describes is already with us; the endgame feels like it’s only fifteen to twenty years away.
A few additional quotes might provide a more vivid portrait. The central character, Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s obvious alter ego), is returning to New York from Rome, where he spent a year escaping the United States. He is doing something unusual for an American: reading a book (Chekhov, appropriately enough). People on the plane are staring at him; the young man next to him says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Abramov records in his diary: “As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.” Lenny reflects on the life of one of his friends, Noah, now a trendy broadcaster of meaningless information, but prior to that someone who actually thought about things. “His personal decline,” Lenny writes in his diary, “paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store.” (Books are now popularly referred to as “doorstops,” inasmuch as that is seen as the only thing they are good for.) Sitting with Noah and a few other “Media” friends in a bar, Lenny and his mates talk about the latest disaster in the Venezuelan war (being managed by a Cheney-like character named Rubenstein, the Secretary of State); the near-collapse of a major credit bank (subsequently bailed out by the Fed); their shrinking stock portfolios; and “the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.”
A bit later, Noah has Lenny on his TV program, trying to get him to say whether he is sleeping with Eunice, the Korean-American girl he’s been dating. “I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America,” says Lenny. “But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this…What if we just went home and read books to each other?” Noah responds:
“Oh God…You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov…Okay, folks we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.” As it turns out, the American infrastructure is heading toward zero hour as well. Part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses, and the government’s response is to put up a sign that says “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge”.
Looking around the streets of New York, Lenny’s impression is similar to my own, when I last visited the city in May 2010 (see “An American Diary”):
“And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.” As one of Eunice’s Korean friends writes her in a text message, “This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.” After things collapse in earnest—officially labeled The Rupture—a taxi driver says to Lenny, “now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing.” (This parallels my experience of being in Berlin during the time that the Wall came down, and seeing tables set up near the Brandenburg Gate, where small-time entrepreneurs were selling Soviet artefacts, such as commissars' hats and hammer-and-sickle pins, now devoid of any real energy. One can easily imagine such a scenario for American flag pins and iPads.)
Finally, the ether grid breaks down, and the electronic devices to which Americans are enslaved fail to work. This leads to suicides, with people writing departing notes “about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati.” For one thing, it becomes impossible to buy anything. But the corporations are ready, as always, to capitalize on whatever is going on, The Rupture included. Signs go up in New York with messages such as “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?” Chic to the end; what can one say? Lenny does, however, manage to escape some of this cultural holocaust, spending time reading—from books—to his girlfriend. “Because we can’t connect to our apparati,” he writes in his diary, “we’re learning to turn to each other.” Lying with her in bed, he thinks, “I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?” (He’s not exactly representative of the rest of the country, needless to say.) Eunice, who is fifteen years younger than Lenny, tells him: “I never really learned how to read texts. Just to scan them for info.” He replies: “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age…How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear?” Eunice eventually gets a job selling wristbands featuring “avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC” for two thousand yuan a pop.
Meanwhile, the government-corporate plan is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” for the elite, the very wealthy, while the rest of the nation will be carved up by a group of foreign sovereign wealth funds. China may “get” New Jersey, for example, but apparently Norway and Saudi Arabia are interested as well. Order will be maintained by a private security company, playing the role of the former National Guard. And with this, the curtain falls.
Ezra Pound once remarked that artists were the “antennae” of the human race, but that the “bullet-headed majority” would never learn to trust them. We shall, of course, ignore Gary Shteyngart; that goes without saying. Which is a great pity: I have yet to find a more canny, intuitive, and yet, oddly enough, entertaining, description of America’s final days.
(c) Morris Berman, 2010
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