
America the Shrunken - mark_l_watson
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opinion/sunday/bruni-america-the-shrunken.html
======
mark_l_watson
I submitted the his article because it reflects the change in psychological
outlook that I see: an undercurrent of pessimism with a layer of denial.
Strange combination.

For the last decade or two, I have felt optimistic about my own future while
really concerned about that of the USA in general.

~~~
gammagoblin
Personally I hope the USA quiets down and accepts that one nation cannot lead
the entire world without a fully globalised society (and even then I doubt the
idea is very good, but that's another discussion entirely). The problem I, as
a European, have with the USA is that the government sees itself to have the
moral authority to intervene in other countries' internal affairs to change
our politics to their interests or pull us with them into their own wars. I've
not spoken to a single person here in Europe who supports military
intervention in the middle east, and to be honest I think the intervention of
both the previous Soviet government and the current U.S. government is what
breeds terrorism and threats from extremists.

The USA has - as a result of the cold war's and the current interventions in
other countries - expanded the role of the NSA, set up extensive airport
security programs such as the TSA, and through Homeland Security they
scrutinise every tourist's history to the greatest of detail before actually
letting them in. The ESTA application is only the surface of such. I consider
the US government to be a very dangerous institution to safety and security
for all human beings around the world.

I sincerely hope that the American public puts the US back on the right track.
The current foreign policy is economically and socially unsustainable, the
welfare state in the USA is crumbling and the middle class is shrinking at an
alarming rate. The government seriously needs a big change. I am not
encouraging revolutionary action, as I believe any government that needs
violence to be instated is inherently flawed, but there needs to be a change.
There's a lot of focus on the wrong issues in the USA, especially amongst the
youth, while the entire nation is heading towards economical and social
regression.

~~~
waps
As a fellow European, I find this attitude baffling.

Your complaints about the US:

airport security

interference, of the soft political kind, in other countries

military intervention in the middle east (and Russia/Eastern Europe, which you
left out, yet it was far more important than the middle east will ever be. And
hell, if Putin doesn't back off, it may happen yet again)

Okay ...

Now let's open the history books, go back to before American hegemony, the
1918-1945 period. Britain and France in charge, with some lesser powers having
a bit of clout in a few remote places. Do I really need to remind you what
happened ? I don't just mean WWII, rather all the events leading up to it more
than the actual event. The economic crises, not getting a few people fired,
but throwing large populations into famine. Do you think, had you lived in
that period, your complaints would have been about travelling security,
political power of foreign countries ? Go ahead, ask your grandfather how
society worked, what they were afraid of ... and the things that happened to
them. Ask a Jew, and I'm not just talking about WWII. Go ahead, enquire about
the period preceding the war.

Then go back a bit further. How was life, in Europe, during the revolutionary
era, culminating in the creation of Soviet Russia ? Do you really want that,
because that's what the society of Europe created ? It was one period of
history where there is no denying : the people were in charge (or at least,
they were the driving force behind the big changes). Robespierre. Napoleon.
Constant wars, for moronic reasons. The eternal holy war of the muslims
against Europe was still going, even if no longer at full blast, it may be
downplayed now, but was a VERY real thing influencing the lives of a great
many people very, very badly.

I mean, I'm not saying America really is the "shining city on the hill", BUT
let's call a spade a spade here : American hegemony has been pretty fucking
great for America, for Europe, for the whole world. Denying that makes you a
moron, nothing more.

Let me state the blatantly obvious here : without American power being
unassailable, maybe not globally, but at least on every ocean, our world will
get a whole lot worse, very fast. Very fast. Once it happens it will take half
a millennium to get liveable again. Can you at least consider for 5 seconds
that knowing nothing about history and just having lived the last 30 years
might not provide an entirely realistic view of how the world works ?

And if by globalized society you mean the UN, I suggest you check out the UN's
successes. Oh wait. I'm looking over the list here. First there was the
"League of nations", the UN. List of successes ... it's getting blamed for
WWII, that's certainly a big thing I hear. But no worries ... the UN is so
much better. They started out with the Katanga mission ... no sane person can
call that a success. But surely things improved after that ? So then we have
their attempts at negotiating truces between Russia and Eastern Europe. Great
success for Russia, those ... Then the creation and various division(s) of
Israel, and the UN's constant assurances of peace and peace treaties ...
followed by massive attacks. That went so very nicely. Other highlights :
Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Western Sahara, ...

No offence but the "globalized society" is not just a disaster, many people
would have been better off living under a dictator ordering a genocide against
them than with the result of having the "globalized society" that is the UN
interfere with their affairs.

~~~
gammagoblin
I don't know which part of my post said that I completely agreed with and
thought everything that happened in the world preceding the American global
control was good. You are criticising a non-existant point in my post.

I am criticising all interventionism, not just American interventionism. I
sort of made this obvious when I criticised Soviet interventionism.

>I mean, I'm not saying America really is the "shining city on the hill", BUT
let's call a spade a spade here : American hegemony has been pretty fucking
great for America, for Europe, for the whole world. Denying that makes you a
moron, nothing more.

For the whole world? Really? What parts of the world, exactly?

As far as I can see, about half the world's population is in the absolute
shitter and still very unstable, not made better by the military
interventionism of the USA in the middle east for example. The progressive
attitude we have here in Europe and that they have in America is not
consistent throughout the world. In fact, the socio-economic situation of a
lot of the world is very, very bad.

American "hegemony" as you call it has only been good to the US' closest
allies and trade partners. China, Russia and India to name three big ones have
had to develop by themselves independent of American support. In Europe, I
think the leading cause for no repeated big wars is European cooperation and
the lack of other political systems than the democratic one. While the
American support is relevant, Europe at the time committed to preventing
future wars, and to be honest no doomsday prophecies like the Versailles
Treaty was made this time.

>Let me state the blatantly obvious here : without American power being
unassailable, maybe not globally, but at least on every ocean, our world will
get a whole lot worse, very fast. Very fast. Once it happens it will take half
a millennium to get liveable again. Can you at least consider for 5 seconds
that knowing nothing about history and just having lived the last 30 years
might not provide an entirely realistic view of how the world works?

What makes you able to say for certain what the world would look like if this
and that didn't happen?

>And if by globalized society you mean the UN, I suggest you check out the
UN's successes.

Globalisation is a process mostly independent from the UN. Come on.

>No offence but the "globalized society" is not just a disaster, many people
would have been better off living under a dictator ordering a genocide against
them than with the result of having the "globalized society" that is the UN
interfere with their affairs.

Globalisation, unless EVERY single nation on Earth adopts isolationism both
economically and socially, is unavoidable.

~~~
BugBrother
>>American "hegemony" as you call it has only been good to the US' closest
allies and trade partners. China, Russia and India to name three big ones have
had to develop by themselves independent of American support

Are you aware of the democratic peace theory? Check wikipedia. In short,
[stable] democracies don't have wars. Not even USA starts wars with (or
intervene in) stable democracies.

Most of the cases "suffering" from USA are ~ evil juntas.

India is an exception, they have voluntarily turned to Russia for e.g. buying
weapons -- I don't know if the country "had" to do anything, re USA (they do
benefit from the global market). But Russia's junta _prefers_ to cooperate
with non-democracies -- and actively demonizes the world's working
democracies. China is doing even worse jingoism than Russia.

In short -- don't mix up packs of thieves stealing countries with the
countries themselves. Or with democratic governments.

>> Globalisation, unless EVERY single nation on Earth adopts isolationism both
economically and socially, is unavoidable.

Why would globalization necessarily be handled in a good way? We could get the
military empire building back; Russia and China have started.

~~~
gammagoblin
>Are you aware of the democratic peace theory? Check wikipedia. In short,
[stable] democracies don't have wars.

Yeah. I actually mentioned it in passing.

"In Europe, I think the leading cause for no repeated big wars is European
cooperation and the lack of other political systems than the democratic one."

Other than that I don't think democratic peace theory really holds water when
the involved nations are not committed to peace (like Europe is). Russia, a
democratic nation (though exactly how non-corrupt it is can be discussed), is
currently intervening in Ukraine and so is the USA.

>Not even USA starts wars with (or intervene in) stable democracies.

I'm not sure I really follow. They seem to have a great time intervening in
non-NATO countries.

>In short -- don't mix up packs of thieves stealing countries with the
countries themselves. Or with democratic governments

I've not said that either of these nations have a clean plate, nor have I said
that they're a good influence. I've argued that I dislike all interventionism,
and since the article /was/ about the USA, I criticised them.

India and China sure as hell have a cleaner plate than USA though.

>Why would globalization necessarily be handled in a good way? We could get
the military empire building back; Russia and China have started.

I don't think it is being handled in a good way. That's the god damned point.
No nation should have global military police forces.

~~~
BugBrother
First... my original point isn't really discussed:

Don't mix up criminal juntas -- which must have external enemies -- with the
countries they steal. I don't really care about "rights" for the juntas.

>> Russia, a democratic nation (though exactly how non-corrupt it is can be
discussed),

Well, you are unusual.

Few outside Putin's controlled media would describe Putin's Russia as a stable
democracy. Most people would probably argue that Russia has never been close
to democratic. :-(

>> I'm not sure I really follow. They seem to have a great time intervening in
non-NATO countries.

That was a comment on when I wrote: " _Not even USA starts wars with (or
intervene in) stable democracies._ "

I wrote " _stable democracies_ "... That is not the same as "non-NATO
country".

Was it an honest mistake?

>> No nation should have global military police forces.

I agree with you in principle. But it is really naive.

Our moral comes from living in a country with a working police force (state
violence monopoly, rule of law, etc). Before that, there were only clan
societies. Then your only security was that clan members would revenge you.
And they only did that, if you were willing to revenge them. Our present
morals just didn't work.

The world's states today are like clans without a state police. There will in
any given area be a bigger and meaner clan doing raiding.

Now, there will be peaceful clans which don't start stuff with other peaceful
clans (democracies), but consider China and Russia -- they are bigger than
their neighbours and behave like vikings.

You'd certainly see much more problems for the Philippines, India, ex-Soviet
etc without USA and NATO...

Point is, we have been better off with USA. No, it isn't perfect.

Would a _real_ world police even be desirable? What would happen if they did a
coup? Who could fight against them? Think 1984, history as a foot that
tramples a face. (The same as in the old communist states. Which was Orwell's
point, of course)

------
dctoedt
All motion is relative: It's been said that what we're seeing is not so much
the decline of the West, as it is the rise of the rest.

That might make some of us feel bad here in the U.S. --- we're no longer the
undisputed top dogs in the world, as we were post-WWII --- but (to put it
mildly) it's not entirely a bad thing for our fellow human beings in non-U.S.
countries to be enjoying a higher standard of living than they had before.

The essence of "Americanism," it seems to me, is a desire to do better, for
ourselves and our posterity (to paraphrase the preamble of the U.S.
Constitution). That's not a quality unique to the U.S., of course, but we put
a lot of emphasis on it. The mere existence of the linked article, and those
like it, suggests we haven't entirely lost that quality; we shouldn't begrudge
it when other countries and cultures "win" as well.

EDIT, responding to @waps: This issue is orthogonal to the question of how
order can be maintained while still preserving peace, prosperity, _and_
liberty. If there's an alternative to a light-touch military dominance by the
U.S. and its allies, I'm not aware of it.

~~~
waps
There is just the tiny problem of what the military world order China will
support (although I'm thankful it's not the middle east). This seems to me a
pretty serious problem, and frankly the reason they will not stay the biggest
for long. But it's going to hurt everyone, just like it did before.

People forget what history looked like before the "pax Americana", because
it's lasted more than a generation now. Even before that there was the
colonial "peace" (compared to what came before it, it certainly was peaceful,
compared to after, maybe not so peaceful), so even the pre-baby-boomer
generation does not really remember what was the norm of history before WWI.

Let's just hope it'll all be different this time. That China will not do what
it did in the early medieval times. That either the middle east will not
reunite, or that it somehow will act differently this time. That the Russian
situation does not resume the cold war (which wasn't all that cold in Eastern
Europe as plenty of Americans know first-hand).

There is the strategic theory that there has been peace because of the
superpowers. Let's just hope that that is very wrong, and that it can survive
3 or 4 superpowers.

~~~
hga
Look up the volume of world trade before WWI, and just how long it took to get
back up to that level. Much, _much_ later than you'd think.

Looking the results of the of the infinitely more brutal Pax Romana should
give anyone pause at the prospect of the end of the Pax Americana.

------
carsongross
This is the liberal view.

Take a few moments, if you can, and put yourselves in the mind of a
conservative american. Consider what things look like to a conservative
christian in favor of small government, living in a town whose industrial base
has been nuked and who is now living through a construction bust, with no
obvious "next thing" in sight, except perhaps uprooting their families to the
Dakotas for oil jobs.

If we don't make room for them, there will, eventually, be war.

~~~
hga
I have to run soon, so ask for details and I'll reply in a few hours, but from
our viewpoint it's much worse, we're already on the currently losing side of
an active cold civil war, legal (e.g. gun control, except we're current
massively winning there), cultural, social and economic at minimum, and are
very concerned it will get hot in the foreseeable future. That's very possibly
another reason for
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694454)

~~~
waps
This is the great problem of liberals in the US. World-wide of course it's a
far greater problem. Liberals espouse democracy, but the majority of the US
wants religion, conservativeness and the like.

World-wide the situation is far, far worse. In case you haven't yet noticed,
most of the world still isn't Christian, and every other faith wants some
variation of killing gays ... some faiths want them killed on sight even. The
number of people wanting that is not really known, but reasonably, it's
somewhere between 4 and 5 billion.

Liberalism is self-interest of middle class and upper-middle class people. But
as you say, those social classes are disappearing, and not just because they
don't seem to be having any kids.

The sad truth is, unless something fundamentally changes, the end of
liberalism won't need to wait until the next generation, because those classes
are being eliminated. You could say that it's economic policy, but that's not
really true. I'd say technology and improved large-scale efficiency is mostly
responsible. And that's inside America and Europe, in the rest of the world
nothing remotely resembling liberalism stands a snowball's chance in hell of
getting 10% of the votes.

~~~
hga
By economic I mean things like the _absolute_ prioritization of so called
endangered species (weasel words because they often turn out not to be) over
human jobs and when you come down to it lives. The spotted owl being used to
shut down the Pacific Northwest lumber industry, a bait fish being used to
shut down a lot of California farming, etc.

Then there's general "environmentalism" and NIMBY/BANANAism that broken the
compact between the city and countryside in California in the '70s, canceling
the water projects necessary to keep up with the population growth of the
former. Per farmer and intellectual Victor Davis Hanson, this year that's
going to kill _half a trillion dollars_ worth of agriculture, as an inevitable
string of droughts require sending all the water to the cities.

Or the _precipitous_ shutdown of the US coal industry; yeah, the stuff is
extremely nasty and pretty much anything but bogus renewables (that can't
scale, nor meet any demand cycle without even more expensive storage) would be
better, but the speed and way this is being done is evil. And
disproportionately hits fly-over country.

Or look at the XL pipeline, or unrestricted illegal, and way too great legal
immigration. Etc. etc. etc.

All these are destroying working class jobs and lives, and the middle class
ones that are based on them.

------
tptacek
I flagged this article because I can't imagine a civil, productive, germane
thread that could emanate from it. Flag it with me, or prove me wrong, I
guess.

~~~
itbeho
I think the content of the article is insightful and aligns with what I and
some friends were recently discussing. There seems to be a growing sense of
pessimism (outside the tech scene anyway) in middle class America. I don't
really know the cause but I think it's worth discussing further.

------
BugBrother
Isn't there too much theorizing and teeth gnashing?

With Asia's fast rise and outsourcing, the increase in global work force has
been much faster than the increase in capital investments.

It seems natural that while that happens, the average salaries will go down
[or at a minimum stagnate] for the middle class in the old rich countries
(supply/demand), since there are lots of well educated people coming from a
poor environment.

USA already had larger GINI coefficients than the rest of the western world,
which is natural with the size (more heterogenous). So the median values etc
for living standards will reflect that.

------
lhgaghl
I'm having trouble reading this article. It seems to make a giant bar that
takes up a large percentage of my screen as I scroll through it:

[http://image.bayimg.com/6f1dce58aa37b2825e74cec05895180a1473...](http://image.bayimg.com/6f1dce58aa37b2825e74cec05895180a147350db.jpg)

Anyone know how to turn it off?

