If America is falling, what is it falling into?

Ben W. writes:

I’ve been reading Rod Dreher’s article, “How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire,” about Cullen Murphy’s book that compares America with the Roman empire (specifically its decline and fall). What Dreher doesn’t delineate is exactly what America would fall into. It has to fall from state X to state Y. What is that state Y?

Is state Y the inability of the U.S. to meet its international debt obligations, followed by a complete market crash? Would this make Americans unable to feed and house themselves?

Or is state Y the loss of the historical American identity such that American citizens come to suffer a type of cultural amnesia? What would be the effects of this psychological condition? Social anarchy with an uncontrolled outbreak of crime?

Could state Y be the inability of the U.S. to control its borders such that the population of the U.S. changes pigmentation?

State Y might be the lack of future influence on foreign affairs.

Whenever writers compare a possible American downfall with the Roman empire’s slide, they don’t specify concretely what condition the U.S. would slide into. There is simply the sense of a generic free fall.

But could the U.S. “fall” into a “fallen” state whatever that might be? America geographically will still exist from the Atlantic to the Pacific. What is it that America will fall into?

There is this fear of a decline and fall into an unspecified condition. This fallen state might be a conglomeration of those levels of descent enumerated above.

People like Dreher would have to stipulate what was or is state X from which we are slipping. Is it the historical American identity and culture? If so then they should specify what the components of that identity have been. And that I perceive they are not totally willing to do this because that might bring to light certain things they are not willing to consider … So they sketch out a general malaise without specifics. Nor do they outline concrete proposals to battle this malaise.

Gintas writes:

Dreher touches on the family, and I wouldn’t underestimate his point. When I look at long-running civilizations like China and India, they have a strength in the stability of their family structure, even though they’ve just been bumping along for hundreds of years, long past their Golden Ages. The West, though, is in the middle of overthrowing the basic family structure. Never mind contentedly bumping along on past glories, we are actively destroying one of the key foundations of any civilized order.

Charles G. writes:

I think what most people mean when they say that America is “falling” is that it is, or will, fall “apart” much in the same way that the old Austro-Hungarian and Soviet empires fell apart. They simply divided into various ethnic enclaves with similar outlooks and economic interests. An historian once wrote something which I saw exploring the possible outcome of a “fallen” United States. He had constructed a map showing how the U.S. was likely to break apart. I wish I could find the map. At any rate it was a lot different than you might expect. He drew up a map showing spheres of economic interest as well as historical ties, natural resources, natural barriers and communications arteries. Some regions were part of Canada. California was its own nation as I recall.

James P. writes:

“What Dreher doesn’t delineate is exactly what America would fall into. It has to fall from state X to state Y. What is that state Y?”

What liberals want America to fall into is … post-imperial Europe. They want America to be a flaccid demilitarized welfare state in which the people are obedient to government dictate and have minimal if any national / cultural consciousness.

One of the problems, however, is that although the Europeans fell from being aggressively nationalistic military empires, they haven’t stopped falling. Once you fall from empire, you fall past nation into a state of cultural and social disintegration. Yet their political elites just don’t care, and are even deliberately facilitating the process.

Perhaps to dismantle empire, you also have to dismantle nation and culture. But once you do that, you don’t get a peaceful socialist utopia, you get a vacuum into which more aggressive cultures are inevitably drawn.

N. writes:

I am not Rich Lowry and wouldn’t want to be him, frankly, but will take a stab at what America is falling into, and I take a longer view than “What Will Hillary Do.” Failure to control our border will lead to a partition of the U.S. along ethnic lines. Some liberals should and will welcome such a development, as a balkanized “spoils system” fits well into liberal politics-of-guilt as practiced for the last 40-odd years. Others may be uneasy, but won’t be able to bring themselves to oppose, say, the de facto partition of Southern California by Mexico. As long as tax moneys flow to Sacramento and DC, the respective governments won’t really care if narcotics gangs are running cities and essentially paying “protection” money to them, right?

Also, at some point, U.S. central government may well do something so profoundly stupid, so incredibly alienating to the majority of Americans that there will be a revolt, passive at first and quite possibly active not too much later on. This will lead to a further partition, with portions of the SouthEast, middle West and Rocky Mountain states effectively ignoring edicts from DC. The east and West coasts will, on the other hand, remain loyal to whoever/whatever is running things in DC. The trigger could be any number of things, from the much discussed “North American Union” to an imposition of UN “gun control” standards, etc. The key issue is this: enough people have to decide that they, and their children, are at risk of serious harm or death. The “militia” groups of the 1990s are a pale harbinger of what could, I repeat COULD, come to pass.

A house divided against itself sure isn’t going to be actively intervening in the world, and if China chose to supply the loyalists on the West coast with aid, a rather nasty war could break out.

I do not say these things will come to pass. But they could, and would represent a clear “decline and fall.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 01, 2007 05:52 PM | Send