September 15, 2006

DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

John Chuckman

The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.

The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II - industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats - has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.

The American establishment's vision of the future, implicit in its behavior and policies, has been that traditional manufacturing jobs will pass to developing countries while greater value-added high-tech jobs and intellectual property rights will provide America’s economic strength.

But that is a somewhat arrogant vision, because competitors like China and India do not plan to do only lower value-added work, and they are uniquely gifted to succeed. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have an extraordinary reservoir of natural mathematical and engineering talent – every international competition or test shows this starkly - that is only now beginning to be harnessed. There is every reason to believe that over any substantial time the US will decline to a secondary role in high-tech. China or India each likely have something on the order of three or four times the natural mathematical endowment of the US. Their new high-growth economies and emerging modern infrastructure prepare the way for full application of this priceless talent.

There are more forces at work on the place of the American Empire than the emergence of other economic powers, important as that is. Major studies of the decline of empire – from Edward Gibbon to William Shirer - speak to the overwhelming importance of the moral dimension in a society and of the crucial role of capable and responsible leadership.

Polls show that three years after launching its pointless war in Iraq, nearly half of Americans still believed that Iraq was involved in making weapons of mass destruction. Five years after 9/11, better than forty percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Both of these ideas have been proved complete fairy tales. But the concentration of American media and their shared establishment interests with George Bush have produced a fabric of omissions and exaggerations as great as we might expect in a non-democratic society like China.

So-called liberal media, the New York Times being the best example, do almost nothing seriously to correct these misunderstandings. Indeed the Times helped drum America into Iraq, an unforgivable manipulation from people who had the resources to know better, and it did the same thing for horrific failures such as the war in Vietnam. The American people are desperately misinformed. What is the good of a ballot where grave ignorance prevails and is indeed actively promoted?

A menagerie of vitriolic radio and television commentators plus a vast apparatus of phony think-tanks, propaganda mills subsidized by right-wing interests, help greatly in the effort to confuse public understanding. The vitriolic commentators, little more truthful or civil in their speech than those doing the same job for third-world dictators, reinforce popular myths and prejudices, appealing to people’s lowest instinct to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of others. The phony think-tanks, much like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pulling levers to generate puffs of smoke and dramatic noise, offer what passes for learned analysis. Both groups receive an immense amount of broadcast time and publication space in the United States.

Going back to the beginning, it can be argued that many parts of the American Constitution - regarded by Americans with a reverence usually reserved for scripture and a document that is close to impossible to change in any meaningful way - are seriously flawed and promote neither responsible government nor democratic principles. The right-wing commentator and think-tank crowd always play up to the quasi-religious notion that the Constitution is the most perfect political document ever conceived. A disgraced, crooked, nasty right-wing politician, Tom DeLay of Texas, always bragged of having a copy folded in his pocket, almost like a priest carrying a bottle of holy water.

The Constitution’s flaws leave little optimism for substantial political and policy change in the United States. It’s as though all important political institutions were trapped in amber. Without changing the Constitution's flaws, it is hard to see how America's destructive policies at home and abroad can be altered. There are many such flaws, but I’ll mention just a few.

One is the Electoral College. Many Americans do not understand that their vote for president technically does not count. The Electoral College, besides being remarkably anti-democratic, promotes corruption in elections with its winner-take-all provision in states. It is amazing that a country more than two centuries old and making great claims for democracy still can’t hold honest national elections, both of George Bush’s victories, but especially the first, being as dubious as something in an emerging nation.

Another ugly flaw in the Constitution is the power of the Senate. It can veto the more democratic House’s legislation. It must approve all major Presidential appointments and treaties. It is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution, for much of American history not being elected at all, but even now being elected in a staggered fashion that insulates its membership from issues of the day. Its internal sixty-percent rule for debate is plainly undemocratic. You only have to look at photos of American Senators to see the swollen, crinkled faces of arrogant (mostly) men, faces of bloated entitlement, grasping power into their seventies and eighties. They resemble the faces of heads of powerful families in the 16th century or, what is almost the same thing, Mafia godfathers. Surprisingly often sons, or other relatives, follow fathers as though they had inherited fiefdoms or money-minting American evangelism ministries.

The Senate’s two members for each state is an archaic nonsense that makes members from large states virtually unreachable demigods. The two senators from California each “represent