By and large, I agree with your post and the warning to go easy on the doom and gloom. But I have to respectfully disagree with how you’re framing the threat to American democracy. At this point, the gravest threat to American democracy is not coming from the prospect of a second Trump term. It’s coming from the fact that Trumpism has made right-wing authoritarianism cool here, and state government all over the country have gladly picked things up where Trump left off, which is hugely consequential given how much power states wield in our system. We’re seeing this in state legislatures’ systematic efforts to strip power away from local governments and even limit private businesses’ ability to run themselves as they see fit (e.g., by banning mask mandates); in renewed efforts to ban content or censor teachers’ speech in public schools (an effort which is sure to spread to private schools and higher education in 2023 legislative sessions); and in renewed efforts at gerrymandering, voter suppression, and politicization of vote-counting, which will also directly impact what the federal government looks like in coming years. And DeSantis has taken the state-level authoritarianism to a new level with his political retaliation at Disney for speaking their mind on the Don’t Say Gay law, which represents not just socially conservative policy (which is compatible with democracy), but a direct assault on rule of law. What’s worse, states are learning from each others’ illiberal experimentation. Just as states (and cities) are laboratories for democracy, apparently they can also be laboratories for democratic backsliding. While states aren’t necessarily dismantling separation of powers or checks and balances, they are systematically allowing an extreme, minority faction to seize all the levers of power and then use those levers of power to go after their enemies. If the Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin governorships flip in November, you can bet that those states will replicate what’s been happening this year in Texas, Florida and elsewhere. This isn’t a distant 2024 threat; it’s a real-time, bottom-up assault on democracy in the states.
Good post. Statistics may be boring, but they are always better evidence of trends than anecdotes. I'll disagree with you about Afghanistan, but to me it was a failure of judgment, not a symptom of weakness or will.
> Do you think a “failing empire” or Rome 2.0 or whatever your favorite historical analogy is
> could have executed such a quick and skillful strategy to parry, weaken, and ultimately
> defeat one of its biggest rivals?
Rome did exactly this at the same time the Republic was falling apart. The Mithridatic Wars from 89 to 63 BC defeated a skilled and effective antagonist in Mithridates, but Rome was in pretty bad shape at the time. There had been a literal civil war just the year before, the political system was polarized to the point of dysfunction, and the preexisting long slide into autocracy didn't stop.
I think the smart Roman analogy for modern America is not the late empire but the late republic -- sharply polarized, huge class divisions, saddled with a completely broken political system, but with great underlying strength.
For an individual perspective, it is more useful to look a real median HH income than looking at overall GDP. HH income has been pretty much flat since at the mid 80s. It's gone up 3% since 1989.
GDP overall is good for looking at the strength of the economy (and the nation!) but median income is better for looking at the quality of life of the citizens. A stagnant quality of life is going to cause general pessimism, especially when combined with increasing inequality. It's not surprising that individual Americans are negative.
I am really puzzled by the "Wage Growth Tracker" graph as it indicates that the 4th quintile has had higher income growth than the 1st quintile since 1998 and that doesn't seem right to me.
America is not "collapsing" I agree. But we are in relative decline and American hegemony is in decline. The recent Ukrainian events notwithstanding, we are in a gradual, probably inevitable situation where our economy will be a smaller percentage of total global GDP. And that's a good thing! Global poverty has been going down. China is still on track to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy in the next decade or so and India is growing fast.
We are transitioning to an economy that requires less fossil fuels but not very quickly and that puts us in competition with other economies that increasingly can afford to pay for oil. China will soon overtake the United States as the world's largest consumer of oil. These are long term secular trends that won't go away anytime soon.
People are particularly gloomy right now, especially as most Americans are seeing their actual standards of living go down right now due to high inflation and moderate wage growth. The top 70% of wage earners at least. And all the other factors Noah mentioned.
I am a glass if half full kind of guy and I appreciate the optimism, but it has to be tempered with some clear eyed consideration of where we are now and where global trends will take us.
I don’t find as much hope as some here. With the pretty much even split in every issue, and both sides saying they wouldn’t mind the other seceding those isn’t much Union in our Union these days. And both sides of the duopoly are still working for their rich contributors instead of their voters.
thank you. gold star to the only commenter acknowledging that our political so-called democratic "choice" is in fact none as long as the system is dominated by a two-headed, plutocratic beast.
I’d just add that excessive doomerism also carelessly legitimizes bad narratives.
For every leftist who buys “Rome 2.0”, there’s at least one lunkhead Roganite out there who’s making that same old dumb connection between Obergefell and Gibbon’s claim about homosexuality killing Rome, all because Joe Rogan Does His Own Research.
The problem is that we, as in most Americans, think dichotomously. Future history can only be Rome 2.0, or its opposite, the optimistic scenario that America will muddle on through somehow.
We should ponder how many other decline and collapse scenarios that are occurring right now and see that optimism has to compete with them and its odds are long.
Consider:
* Islam being remade in the image of Algazel. We probably know that Islam in its golden age was at the forefront of science, philosophy and thought endeavors. Then came "The Revival of Religious Sciences" and "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" which pivoted Islam away from secular inquiry and toward piety. It took centuries but this has been the path Islam has been on for much of its history.
In the U.S.? Notice how Trumpism is a galaxy of premodern anti-rational ideology, with the brightest constellation the Qanon religion. Looking past that, you have Christian fundamentalism, a rising Catholic radical traditionalism/integrism (like Christian fundamentalism, but with the restoration of the papacy to pre-Reformation majesty), unreconstructed fascism (i.e. nationalism), alt-right (the same characteristics as fascism but in a racial or masculine sense of nationhood), and lapsed libertarians crossing the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge over to neoreaction.
*The consequence of collapse of modern nation-states, notably Yugoslavia after Tito's death, the Rwandan civil war crescendoing into the 1994 genocide, and Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.
These are all recent historic events that much of the world has the lived memory of. What happened in each of these instances? When the nation-state collapses, and taking the government power and economy with it, societies will reorient around the next highest level of social organization. In Yugoslavia, it was ethnic and religious. In Rwanda, it was tribal. In Iraq, it was sectarian and tribal. With no government in the way, these social organizations will compete violently and use war as a means of settling historic scores.
*Geopolitical realignments. The U.S. has discredited itself on the world stage, Russia wants to be a great power again, China wants to be in the driver's seat of history. So does similarly sized and economically ambitious India. Mohammed bin Salman and Erdogan are aspiring to be modern caliphs who can reinvigorate Islam. Africa and Latin America, with their fortunes improving as a continent, may produce a charismatic leader who can unite a continent against greater powers on the world stage.
American exceptionalism owed to being impassable on two sides of water, keeping peace with its neighbors, and by and large feasting on the carcasses of European powers after wars small (all pre-WWI) and great (WWI and II). America is following a similar trajectory as post-imperial UK -- their prosperity owed to geopolitical dominance, but overrated when it comes to economic competition. Notice, in both the UK and the US, when an industrial competitor emerges, both nations have to rely on fewer and fewer regions to remain economically productive (i.e., the coasts and the Gulf of Mexico that ebbs and flows with the price of oil).
Now they've seen it can be done. Next time they'll be more prepared, and the next Trump won't be such a moron. Hard to feel super confident in the face of that. Although if they can sit on the Senate / SCOTUS / electoral college, an insurrection may not be necessary. I don't know if that's doomerism, but I am alarmed. I'm also concerned for the people of the nation more than the nation itself.
It just doesn't *feel* like the Democrats are up to the defense of democracy.
Good read, Noah. Society has been morbidly obsessed with the Apocalypse, in one form or another, my entire life. When we are not reaching for a WWII analogy, then we are on our soap boxes prophesizing the end of the world. People need to chill out and enjoy what will be recognized as the calm before the coming storm, assuming that Republicans sweep to power in 2024. Change will follow hard on its heels. That the country won't collapse is about all I'm willing to predict. Well, that and years of strong emotions and raw nerves.
"But now we have Twitter, so this rhetoric gets blasted out to millions of eyeballs and every journalist and politician in the land, while being amplified by every 13-year-old troll and foreign info-op account."
Serious people don't use Twitter. Personally, I only see it in columns where someone has inserted the Tweet. It has no bearing at all on what I think about issues. If everyone would take a month's vacation from Twitter. To paraphrase the great Jackie DeShannon song,
Not true. Twitter is full of serious people and by far the most intellectual network there is. The negatives are big enough to make me quit it, but not having it definitely sucks in a way not having Instagram or Facebook or Youtube doesnt.
How does this even get published? One of the stupidest essays ever written. "Yes, violent crime is up or inflation is up or American power is down, but it's not as bad as the all-time worst. America is not collapsing." What the left counts as genius couldn't build a lawn-mower.
"From the end of the Civil War through the mid-1930s, SCOTUS upheld segregation and enforced laissez-faire economic doctrine. We will get through this era just fine."
That's a period of 70 years. Hurray! Maybe when I'm dead and buried, my great-grandchildren might be able to see an unfucked Supreme Court.
Thank you for the engaging read. I think much of the doom-mongering stems from a person’s sense of perspective. In each of the cases cited, perspective greatly affects a person’s interpretation of events.
If you are a major supporter of the Roe v. Wade decision then the forthcoming Dobbs decision appears to be a crisis. However, if you have opposed Roe then the pending changes are a triumph. I personally oppose abortion on moral grounds and am pleased that the matter is transitioning from a judicial concern to a political one. The Dobbs decision does not undermine democracy but rather pushes the question of abortion to the States to be resolved as a political issue. The courts cannot mediate conflicting moral frameworks—that is a political task.
Regarding Afghanistan, I think you have under-emphasized a few things. After 2015 it was not really a military occupation by the USA and allies. A single aircraft carrier strike group has more military personnel than the US had in Afghanistan in the post-ISAF period. For all the flaws of the GIROA, it was still the democratically elected government of that country and it was adamant that the Resolute Support mission continue. By the time of the Doha Accords the Afghan conflict would best be characterized as a civil war with the US supporting the elected government against the rebels (Taliban, ISIS-K, etc…). The ANDSF conducted most of the fighting with Allied nations providing military enablers, training and advice. What shocked the world in 2021 was that the US essentially walked away from a sustainable situation (for America) that had broad international support. Now that the GIROA has collapsed and Afghanistan faces a severe famine, much of America has responded with a collective “meh”—as though its ally of 20 years means nothing to it.
If America were so willing to abandon a 20-year military partnership with the GIROA, would it do the same with Taiwan or Ukraine? An interesting question is whether Biden’s actions in Afghanistan factored into Putin’s calculus for invading Ukraine. How far will America go to press its interests? that question appears unresolved.
I by-and-large agree with the portions of your considerations you have fleshed out here. I find Noah to be wrong, in my opinion, about many things, but his delivery is honest and convicted. And he is brave to allow discourse contrary to his thoughts, feelings and beliefs. I have been called a troll on this forum by other posters, simply for strenuously (A Few Good Men) pushing back on "narratives." But I'm not a troll. I have no time for such tomfoolery. I also don't have time for mincing words and being politically correct.
"perspective greatly affects a person’s interpretation of events."
Yes, and this is what I was searching for as I scrolled through the comments. Perspective is worldview, Gestalt, and it largely defines us as individuals. In MY worldview, EVERYTHING is collapsing. Globally. Yes, the US losing its hegemonic advantage is troubling for me (I realize many US citizens actually cheer this on) but nationalism isn't an illegitimate fascist cult; it is core to the survival of a people, a country, a culture. And its dissolution paves the way for, yes, a "Great Reset" as the WEF boldly proclaims.
This dissolution of nationalism, then, is MY idea of "collapse." Full disclosure, I am a Christian. And, I'd like to think I am an intellectually honest and thoughtful one, besides.
When I see dissolution of nationalism and organizations as powerful and influential as the World Economic Forum and The World Health Organization boldly proclaiming their intent to place the entire planet under the power and control of a very small number of elites, in the interest of "Equity," (read "Marxism,") then I see "Collapse..." with a capital "C".
The United States, despite the post modern-account of its origins, WAS founded on Biblical Judeo-Christian principals. Even if the founding fathers weren't Christians themselves, they believed in the core principals of the history, traditions, tenants and culture of the faith. If you would be so kind as to accept that as a premise, and not wrestle in the mud with me about this point, then it becomes obvious (to me, and others whose perspectives are similar to mine) that to abandon the guideposts and guardrails provided by this ideology and worldview WILL send us to unparalleled reckless abandon. I.e., Collapse.
I see deliberate means to these ends;
Our pullout from Afghanistan was the best example of deliberate self-destruction I have ever witnessed in my 55 years of living. Whether we should have left the country is peripheral. The WAY we did it was criminal and deliberate. I say "deliberate" because NO ON is so stupid as to have "accidentally" monumentally effed something up in such a grand fashion.
Distributing six Trillion dollars out of the open doors of helicopters on the American populace was criminal. Not stupid, criminal. It destroyed the value of our currency, lost the confidence of other sovereign nations in our (then reserve) currency, discouraged people from working (read: the great resignation) stopped production of goods and services while at the same time increasing the demand for said goods and services... ECON101 tells you what happens next.
Not stupid, criminal.
Encouraging the riots (yes, ENCOURAGING) during the "Summer of Love" while censoring, incarcerating and convicting those who (idiotically) showed up at the capitol of January 6th is such a wild double standard I can't wrap my head around it; the "democracy" was never in peril! The confirmation vote occurred, nonetheless, mere hours later! This narrative that the "democracy" was in peril is puerile and pathetic on its face. What an idiotic and simplistic read! Citizens who buy this narrative should be ashamed for their lack of investigative intellectualism. Meanwhile, the future vice president of the United States of America was, quite literally, bailing out those who tried to burn cities to the ground in 2020. Albeit ("peacefully.")
These are NOT minor differences between us as a people; The abortion civil war is further dividing us. We The People are disintegrating in real time, right before our very eyes.
I think the complete and nearly-instant collapse of the Afghan state works against your argument. If the only thing keeping the Taliban from casually walking into Kabul is the presence of American soldiers then you don't have an independent state with its own sources of legitimacy, you have a client that cannot survive even with massive injections of money and material from its great power benefactor.
As we see in Ukraine, people are willing to fight, even if no one else will, when they believe in the cause of their country and government. I dare say that the Taiwanese would behave similarly if the PRC invaded.
In Afghanistan, rather, the moment Americans withdrew soldiers, the army melted away in days. That indicates to me that GIROA had no real popular base of support but rather rested primarily on the promise of the direct application of American military power. When that was no longer available, GIROA found that no one was willing to fight for it. And a state that no one will fight for is not a real state.
I believe the Taliban represent in general bad things for Afghanistan. But you cannot say that they do not have people willing to fight for them. So, in the absence of a large and overriding American interest, I see no reason why Americans should spend blood and treasure and reputation to fight for a govt that the Afghani themselves will not. If the Taliban are to fall, it should and will be the people of Afghanistan who make it so.
How many people have to die fighting for a cause to conclude that there was widespread support? This is a Biden Administration talking point from circa August 2021. There is a general estimate that 60,000 ANDSF personnel died in the war. This is a factor of 30 times more deaths than the US suffered. There were factions in Afghanistan heavily invested in the GIROA and there were factions set against it—hence my description of the Afghan War as a kind of civil war.
Afghanistan is probably one of the worst places in the world to attempt to govern. It simply would have been impossible for the GIROA to establish effective governance in the country until a critical mass of the nation bought into its legitimacy. My argument is that this was occurring in the period 2015 – 2018 (before the Doha Accords). After 2015, the ANDSF never lost a major provincial or district center. All the strategically important parts of the country were in GIROA control. The Taliban were left to contest the countryside, small villages and/or conducting targeted assassinations.
The nature of Afghanistan is such that insurgents have significant advantages and even the best-trained, equipped and experienced armies struggle there (unless they are willing to commit mass atrocities as the Mongols did). The reason is very simple; the insurgent tries to topple the government whereas the government must stamp out the insurgent while simultaneously trying to govern the country and advance the welfare of the people. The difference in difficulty between those two tasks is immense as the Taliban are presently discovering.
The GIROA governed while also working to advance reform-minded changes throughout Afghan society and tried to turn the country into a more internationally integrated place. This goal lay beyond the GIROA’s ability, it required support from the international community. The transformation of Afghanistan was always going to be a multi-generational project. The combat arm of the ANDSF had become moderately effective but their combat enablers were still dependent on Resolute Support staff, who, through modest but critical assistance enabled ANDSF operations.
This takes me back to my original conclusion. The USA walked away from a situation that was sustainable for it and the GIROA. Afghanistan was reforming at a glacial pace but significant reforms had occurred (e.g. the Inherent Law, etc…). The USA abandoned its commitments there because some felt it was not worth the cost. Why is Taiwan or Ukraine worth the death of American soldiers but not Afghanistan?
My thesis is that the ‘Afghanistan was a lost cause’ narrative is much more a rhetorical attempt to mitigate the fallout from a strategic blunder than it is the result of a nuanced reflection on that war.
Yes the US got into the middle of a long series of civil wars in Afghanistan. Why? We did not enter the war desiring to establish democratic state in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden died more than a decade ago. The Taliban have learned that harboring terrorists who target the US means you get invaded and bombed.
I think the DOHA accords were dumb too.
The thing is that Americans didn't feel that they had agreed to get into a multi-generational project to transform Afghanistan that would involve an indefinite American military presence fighting a war. Certainly, they failed to see the benefit to the US that was worth the cost.
As for Ukraine, no American soldiers have died or are in danger of dying there currently. The US has *explicitly* ruled out any direct military action against Russia to defend Ukraine. On Taiwan, the US has never made a promise to send troops to defend them.
My thesis is that 'leaving Afghanistan was a strategic blunder' is a rhetorical attempt to convince people that years of directionless and failed Afghanistan policy was really going according to plan, and that the main problem with the war in Afghanistan is that we ended our involvement too early.
I do find it incredibly bizarre to criticize the (assumed) Dobbs opinion as "undemocratic". It is literally taking away a judicial restraint on democratically making laws. There are so many ways to criticize this opinion, that this is the one getting harped on is pretty revealing of how "democracy is falling apart" is seemingly the reaction to every perceived bad thing that happens. (And no, not the first time the court has backtracked on a right: remember "liberty of contract"?)
Putting the 'states rights' argument aside, a lot of systems, not just democracy, are compatible with a judicial system. The notion of rights above legislation is inherently anti-democratic.
However, there is a general feeling like most people have 0 buy-in to the process of collective self-determination. I think because americans conflate democracy with freedom, we have these sorts of takes.
Great, level-headed post
By and large, I agree with your post and the warning to go easy on the doom and gloom. But I have to respectfully disagree with how you’re framing the threat to American democracy. At this point, the gravest threat to American democracy is not coming from the prospect of a second Trump term. It’s coming from the fact that Trumpism has made right-wing authoritarianism cool here, and state government all over the country have gladly picked things up where Trump left off, which is hugely consequential given how much power states wield in our system. We’re seeing this in state legislatures’ systematic efforts to strip power away from local governments and even limit private businesses’ ability to run themselves as they see fit (e.g., by banning mask mandates); in renewed efforts to ban content or censor teachers’ speech in public schools (an effort which is sure to spread to private schools and higher education in 2023 legislative sessions); and in renewed efforts at gerrymandering, voter suppression, and politicization of vote-counting, which will also directly impact what the federal government looks like in coming years. And DeSantis has taken the state-level authoritarianism to a new level with his political retaliation at Disney for speaking their mind on the Don’t Say Gay law, which represents not just socially conservative policy (which is compatible with democracy), but a direct assault on rule of law. What’s worse, states are learning from each others’ illiberal experimentation. Just as states (and cities) are laboratories for democracy, apparently they can also be laboratories for democratic backsliding. While states aren’t necessarily dismantling separation of powers or checks and balances, they are systematically allowing an extreme, minority faction to seize all the levers of power and then use those levers of power to go after their enemies. If the Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin governorships flip in November, you can bet that those states will replicate what’s been happening this year in Texas, Florida and elsewhere. This isn’t a distant 2024 threat; it’s a real-time, bottom-up assault on democracy in the states.
Appreciate the post. Keep them coming.
Good post. Statistics may be boring, but they are always better evidence of trends than anecdotes. I'll disagree with you about Afghanistan, but to me it was a failure of judgment, not a symptom of weakness or will.
> Do you think a “failing empire” or Rome 2.0 or whatever your favorite historical analogy is
> could have executed such a quick and skillful strategy to parry, weaken, and ultimately
> defeat one of its biggest rivals?
Rome did exactly this at the same time the Republic was falling apart. The Mithridatic Wars from 89 to 63 BC defeated a skilled and effective antagonist in Mithridates, but Rome was in pretty bad shape at the time. There had been a literal civil war just the year before, the political system was polarized to the point of dysfunction, and the preexisting long slide into autocracy didn't stop.
I think the smart Roman analogy for modern America is not the late empire but the late republic -- sharply polarized, huge class divisions, saddled with a completely broken political system, but with great underlying strength.
For an individual perspective, it is more useful to look a real median HH income than looking at overall GDP. HH income has been pretty much flat since at the mid 80s. It's gone up 3% since 1989.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mYUr
GDP overall is good for looking at the strength of the economy (and the nation!) but median income is better for looking at the quality of life of the citizens. A stagnant quality of life is going to cause general pessimism, especially when combined with increasing inequality. It's not surprising that individual Americans are negative.
I am really puzzled by the "Wage Growth Tracker" graph as it indicates that the 4th quintile has had higher income growth than the 1st quintile since 1998 and that doesn't seem right to me.
America is not "collapsing" I agree. But we are in relative decline and American hegemony is in decline. The recent Ukrainian events notwithstanding, we are in a gradual, probably inevitable situation where our economy will be a smaller percentage of total global GDP. And that's a good thing! Global poverty has been going down. China is still on track to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy in the next decade or so and India is growing fast.
We are transitioning to an economy that requires less fossil fuels but not very quickly and that puts us in competition with other economies that increasingly can afford to pay for oil. China will soon overtake the United States as the world's largest consumer of oil. These are long term secular trends that won't go away anytime soon.
People are particularly gloomy right now, especially as most Americans are seeing their actual standards of living go down right now due to high inflation and moderate wage growth. The top 70% of wage earners at least. And all the other factors Noah mentioned.
I am a glass if half full kind of guy and I appreciate the optimism, but it has to be tempered with some clear eyed consideration of where we are now and where global trends will take us.
I don’t find as much hope as some here. With the pretty much even split in every issue, and both sides saying they wouldn’t mind the other seceding those isn’t much Union in our Union these days. And both sides of the duopoly are still working for their rich contributors instead of their voters.
thank you. gold star to the only commenter acknowledging that our political so-called democratic "choice" is in fact none as long as the system is dominated by a two-headed, plutocratic beast.
I’d just add that excessive doomerism also carelessly legitimizes bad narratives.
For every leftist who buys “Rome 2.0”, there’s at least one lunkhead Roganite out there who’s making that same old dumb connection between Obergefell and Gibbon’s claim about homosexuality killing Rome, all because Joe Rogan Does His Own Research.
The problem is that we, as in most Americans, think dichotomously. Future history can only be Rome 2.0, or its opposite, the optimistic scenario that America will muddle on through somehow.
We should ponder how many other decline and collapse scenarios that are occurring right now and see that optimism has to compete with them and its odds are long.
Consider:
* Islam being remade in the image of Algazel. We probably know that Islam in its golden age was at the forefront of science, philosophy and thought endeavors. Then came "The Revival of Religious Sciences" and "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" which pivoted Islam away from secular inquiry and toward piety. It took centuries but this has been the path Islam has been on for much of its history.
In the U.S.? Notice how Trumpism is a galaxy of premodern anti-rational ideology, with the brightest constellation the Qanon religion. Looking past that, you have Christian fundamentalism, a rising Catholic radical traditionalism/integrism (like Christian fundamentalism, but with the restoration of the papacy to pre-Reformation majesty), unreconstructed fascism (i.e. nationalism), alt-right (the same characteristics as fascism but in a racial or masculine sense of nationhood), and lapsed libertarians crossing the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge over to neoreaction.
*The consequence of collapse of modern nation-states, notably Yugoslavia after Tito's death, the Rwandan civil war crescendoing into the 1994 genocide, and Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.
These are all recent historic events that much of the world has the lived memory of. What happened in each of these instances? When the nation-state collapses, and taking the government power and economy with it, societies will reorient around the next highest level of social organization. In Yugoslavia, it was ethnic and religious. In Rwanda, it was tribal. In Iraq, it was sectarian and tribal. With no government in the way, these social organizations will compete violently and use war as a means of settling historic scores.
*Geopolitical realignments. The U.S. has discredited itself on the world stage, Russia wants to be a great power again, China wants to be in the driver's seat of history. So does similarly sized and economically ambitious India. Mohammed bin Salman and Erdogan are aspiring to be modern caliphs who can reinvigorate Islam. Africa and Latin America, with their fortunes improving as a continent, may produce a charismatic leader who can unite a continent against greater powers on the world stage.
American exceptionalism owed to being impassable on two sides of water, keeping peace with its neighbors, and by and large feasting on the carcasses of European powers after wars small (all pre-WWI) and great (WWI and II). America is following a similar trajectory as post-imperial UK -- their prosperity owed to geopolitical dominance, but overrated when it comes to economic competition. Notice, in both the UK and the US, when an industrial competitor emerges, both nations have to rely on fewer and fewer regions to remain economically productive (i.e., the coasts and the Gulf of Mexico that ebbs and flows with the price of oil).
Now they've seen it can be done. Next time they'll be more prepared, and the next Trump won't be such a moron. Hard to feel super confident in the face of that. Although if they can sit on the Senate / SCOTUS / electoral college, an insurrection may not be necessary. I don't know if that's doomerism, but I am alarmed. I'm also concerned for the people of the nation more than the nation itself.
It just doesn't *feel* like the Democrats are up to the defense of democracy.
Good read, Noah. Society has been morbidly obsessed with the Apocalypse, in one form or another, my entire life. When we are not reaching for a WWII analogy, then we are on our soap boxes prophesizing the end of the world. People need to chill out and enjoy what will be recognized as the calm before the coming storm, assuming that Republicans sweep to power in 2024. Change will follow hard on its heels. That the country won't collapse is about all I'm willing to predict. Well, that and years of strong emotions and raw nerves.
It's always good to read some sanity between the endless doom posted by extremists on both sides. America has been through worse and come out fine.
True, but the map is not the territory.
Which Americans will be able to say they can come out of the other end of history and say they are fine?
"But now we have Twitter, so this rhetoric gets blasted out to millions of eyeballs and every journalist and politician in the land, while being amplified by every 13-year-old troll and foreign info-op account."
Serious people don't use Twitter. Personally, I only see it in columns where someone has inserted the Tweet. It has no bearing at all on what I think about issues. If everyone would take a month's vacation from Twitter. To paraphrase the great Jackie DeShannon song,
"Think of your fellow man
Twitter's not a helping hand
Put a little love in your heart
You see it's getting late"
Not true. Twitter is full of serious people and by far the most intellectual network there is. The negatives are big enough to make me quit it, but not having it definitely sucks in a way not having Instagram or Facebook or Youtube doesnt.
Which is ironic since it started out as based on cell phone text messages with a limit of 140 characters. :/
How does this even get published? One of the stupidest essays ever written. "Yes, violent crime is up or inflation is up or American power is down, but it's not as bad as the all-time worst. America is not collapsing." What the left counts as genius couldn't build a lawn-mower.
Probably, since this is his substack, by clicking the 'Post' button
Did the 70s mark the end of American global hegemony?
From the article:
"From the end of the Civil War through the mid-1930s, SCOTUS upheld segregation and enforced laissez-faire economic doctrine. We will get through this era just fine."
That's a period of 70 years. Hurray! Maybe when I'm dead and buried, my great-grandchildren might be able to see an unfucked Supreme Court.
Oksbad, where do you plan on raising your expatriate family? :)
Noah,
Thank you for the engaging read. I think much of the doom-mongering stems from a person’s sense of perspective. In each of the cases cited, perspective greatly affects a person’s interpretation of events.
If you are a major supporter of the Roe v. Wade decision then the forthcoming Dobbs decision appears to be a crisis. However, if you have opposed Roe then the pending changes are a triumph. I personally oppose abortion on moral grounds and am pleased that the matter is transitioning from a judicial concern to a political one. The Dobbs decision does not undermine democracy but rather pushes the question of abortion to the States to be resolved as a political issue. The courts cannot mediate conflicting moral frameworks—that is a political task.
Regarding Afghanistan, I think you have under-emphasized a few things. After 2015 it was not really a military occupation by the USA and allies. A single aircraft carrier strike group has more military personnel than the US had in Afghanistan in the post-ISAF period. For all the flaws of the GIROA, it was still the democratically elected government of that country and it was adamant that the Resolute Support mission continue. By the time of the Doha Accords the Afghan conflict would best be characterized as a civil war with the US supporting the elected government against the rebels (Taliban, ISIS-K, etc…). The ANDSF conducted most of the fighting with Allied nations providing military enablers, training and advice. What shocked the world in 2021 was that the US essentially walked away from a sustainable situation (for America) that had broad international support. Now that the GIROA has collapsed and Afghanistan faces a severe famine, much of America has responded with a collective “meh”—as though its ally of 20 years means nothing to it.
If America were so willing to abandon a 20-year military partnership with the GIROA, would it do the same with Taiwan or Ukraine? An interesting question is whether Biden’s actions in Afghanistan factored into Putin’s calculus for invading Ukraine. How far will America go to press its interests? that question appears unresolved.
Luke,
I by-and-large agree with the portions of your considerations you have fleshed out here. I find Noah to be wrong, in my opinion, about many things, but his delivery is honest and convicted. And he is brave to allow discourse contrary to his thoughts, feelings and beliefs. I have been called a troll on this forum by other posters, simply for strenuously (A Few Good Men) pushing back on "narratives." But I'm not a troll. I have no time for such tomfoolery. I also don't have time for mincing words and being politically correct.
"perspective greatly affects a person’s interpretation of events."
Yes, and this is what I was searching for as I scrolled through the comments. Perspective is worldview, Gestalt, and it largely defines us as individuals. In MY worldview, EVERYTHING is collapsing. Globally. Yes, the US losing its hegemonic advantage is troubling for me (I realize many US citizens actually cheer this on) but nationalism isn't an illegitimate fascist cult; it is core to the survival of a people, a country, a culture. And its dissolution paves the way for, yes, a "Great Reset" as the WEF boldly proclaims.
This dissolution of nationalism, then, is MY idea of "collapse." Full disclosure, I am a Christian. And, I'd like to think I am an intellectually honest and thoughtful one, besides.
When I see dissolution of nationalism and organizations as powerful and influential as the World Economic Forum and The World Health Organization boldly proclaiming their intent to place the entire planet under the power and control of a very small number of elites, in the interest of "Equity," (read "Marxism,") then I see "Collapse..." with a capital "C".
The United States, despite the post modern-account of its origins, WAS founded on Biblical Judeo-Christian principals. Even if the founding fathers weren't Christians themselves, they believed in the core principals of the history, traditions, tenants and culture of the faith. If you would be so kind as to accept that as a premise, and not wrestle in the mud with me about this point, then it becomes obvious (to me, and others whose perspectives are similar to mine) that to abandon the guideposts and guardrails provided by this ideology and worldview WILL send us to unparalleled reckless abandon. I.e., Collapse.
I see deliberate means to these ends;
Our pullout from Afghanistan was the best example of deliberate self-destruction I have ever witnessed in my 55 years of living. Whether we should have left the country is peripheral. The WAY we did it was criminal and deliberate. I say "deliberate" because NO ON is so stupid as to have "accidentally" monumentally effed something up in such a grand fashion.
Distributing six Trillion dollars out of the open doors of helicopters on the American populace was criminal. Not stupid, criminal. It destroyed the value of our currency, lost the confidence of other sovereign nations in our (then reserve) currency, discouraged people from working (read: the great resignation) stopped production of goods and services while at the same time increasing the demand for said goods and services... ECON101 tells you what happens next.
Not stupid, criminal.
Encouraging the riots (yes, ENCOURAGING) during the "Summer of Love" while censoring, incarcerating and convicting those who (idiotically) showed up at the capitol of January 6th is such a wild double standard I can't wrap my head around it; the "democracy" was never in peril! The confirmation vote occurred, nonetheless, mere hours later! This narrative that the "democracy" was in peril is puerile and pathetic on its face. What an idiotic and simplistic read! Citizens who buy this narrative should be ashamed for their lack of investigative intellectualism. Meanwhile, the future vice president of the United States of America was, quite literally, bailing out those who tried to burn cities to the ground in 2020. Albeit ("peacefully.")
These are NOT minor differences between us as a people; The abortion civil war is further dividing us. We The People are disintegrating in real time, right before our very eyes.
In my view, this is collapse.
I think the complete and nearly-instant collapse of the Afghan state works against your argument. If the only thing keeping the Taliban from casually walking into Kabul is the presence of American soldiers then you don't have an independent state with its own sources of legitimacy, you have a client that cannot survive even with massive injections of money and material from its great power benefactor.
As we see in Ukraine, people are willing to fight, even if no one else will, when they believe in the cause of their country and government. I dare say that the Taiwanese would behave similarly if the PRC invaded.
In Afghanistan, rather, the moment Americans withdrew soldiers, the army melted away in days. That indicates to me that GIROA had no real popular base of support but rather rested primarily on the promise of the direct application of American military power. When that was no longer available, GIROA found that no one was willing to fight for it. And a state that no one will fight for is not a real state.
I believe the Taliban represent in general bad things for Afghanistan. But you cannot say that they do not have people willing to fight for them. So, in the absence of a large and overriding American interest, I see no reason why Americans should spend blood and treasure and reputation to fight for a govt that the Afghani themselves will not. If the Taliban are to fall, it should and will be the people of Afghanistan who make it so.
Daniel,
How many people have to die fighting for a cause to conclude that there was widespread support? This is a Biden Administration talking point from circa August 2021. There is a general estimate that 60,000 ANDSF personnel died in the war. This is a factor of 30 times more deaths than the US suffered. There were factions in Afghanistan heavily invested in the GIROA and there were factions set against it—hence my description of the Afghan War as a kind of civil war.
Afghanistan is probably one of the worst places in the world to attempt to govern. It simply would have been impossible for the GIROA to establish effective governance in the country until a critical mass of the nation bought into its legitimacy. My argument is that this was occurring in the period 2015 – 2018 (before the Doha Accords). After 2015, the ANDSF never lost a major provincial or district center. All the strategically important parts of the country were in GIROA control. The Taliban were left to contest the countryside, small villages and/or conducting targeted assassinations.
The nature of Afghanistan is such that insurgents have significant advantages and even the best-trained, equipped and experienced armies struggle there (unless they are willing to commit mass atrocities as the Mongols did). The reason is very simple; the insurgent tries to topple the government whereas the government must stamp out the insurgent while simultaneously trying to govern the country and advance the welfare of the people. The difference in difficulty between those two tasks is immense as the Taliban are presently discovering.
The GIROA governed while also working to advance reform-minded changes throughout Afghan society and tried to turn the country into a more internationally integrated place. This goal lay beyond the GIROA’s ability, it required support from the international community. The transformation of Afghanistan was always going to be a multi-generational project. The combat arm of the ANDSF had become moderately effective but their combat enablers were still dependent on Resolute Support staff, who, through modest but critical assistance enabled ANDSF operations.
This takes me back to my original conclusion. The USA walked away from a situation that was sustainable for it and the GIROA. Afghanistan was reforming at a glacial pace but significant reforms had occurred (e.g. the Inherent Law, etc…). The USA abandoned its commitments there because some felt it was not worth the cost. Why is Taiwan or Ukraine worth the death of American soldiers but not Afghanistan?
My thesis is that the ‘Afghanistan was a lost cause’ narrative is much more a rhetorical attempt to mitigate the fallout from a strategic blunder than it is the result of a nuanced reflection on that war.
Yes the US got into the middle of a long series of civil wars in Afghanistan. Why? We did not enter the war desiring to establish democratic state in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden died more than a decade ago. The Taliban have learned that harboring terrorists who target the US means you get invaded and bombed.
I think the DOHA accords were dumb too.
The thing is that Americans didn't feel that they had agreed to get into a multi-generational project to transform Afghanistan that would involve an indefinite American military presence fighting a war. Certainly, they failed to see the benefit to the US that was worth the cost.
As for Ukraine, no American soldiers have died or are in danger of dying there currently. The US has *explicitly* ruled out any direct military action against Russia to defend Ukraine. On Taiwan, the US has never made a promise to send troops to defend them.
My thesis is that 'leaving Afghanistan was a strategic blunder' is a rhetorical attempt to convince people that years of directionless and failed Afghanistan policy was really going according to plan, and that the main problem with the war in Afghanistan is that we ended our involvement too early.
I do find it incredibly bizarre to criticize the (assumed) Dobbs opinion as "undemocratic". It is literally taking away a judicial restraint on democratically making laws. There are so many ways to criticize this opinion, that this is the one getting harped on is pretty revealing of how "democracy is falling apart" is seemingly the reaction to every perceived bad thing that happens. (And no, not the first time the court has backtracked on a right: remember "liberty of contract"?)
Putting the 'states rights' argument aside, a lot of systems, not just democracy, are compatible with a judicial system. The notion of rights above legislation is inherently anti-democratic.
However, there is a general feeling like most people have 0 buy-in to the process of collective self-determination. I think because americans conflate democracy with freedom, we have these sorts of takes.