As Good a Take as Any. The Roots of America's Malaise.

His book is, "Tailspin - The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall - and Those Fighting to Reverse It." He is Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer magazine and, gulp, Court TV.

In a remarkable essay, Brill outlines the culture that put America into a nose dive, how the country went from meritocracy to aristocracy, and some recent efforts being made to pull America back before it ends as most tailspins end.

Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government? 

...About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.

...Income inequality has soared: inflation-adjusted middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, while earnings of the top 1% have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008 – which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings and jobs – was reserved almost exclusively for the wealthiest. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99% saw an uptick of less than half of 1%. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.

...Although the U.S. remains the world’s richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), behind only Turkey and Israel. Nearly 1 in 5 American children lives in a household that the government classifies as “food insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for active, healthy living.” 

Beyond that, too few basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air-traffic control system is more than 25 years behind its original schedule. The power grid, roads and rails are crumbling, pushing the U.S. far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than most other developed countries, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse globally. Among the 35 OECD countries, American children rank 30th in math proficiency and 19th in science.

...there is a theme that threads through and ties together all the strands: many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy. 

By continuing to get better at what they do, by knocking away the guardrails limiting their winnings, aggressively engineering changes in the political landscape, and by dint of the often unanticipated consequences of their innovations, they created a nation of moats that protected them from accountability and from the damage their triumphs caused in the larger community. Most of the time, our elected and appointed representatives were no match for these overachievers. As a result of their savvy, their drive and their resources (and a certain degree of privilege, as these strivers may have come from humble circumstances but are mostly white men), America all but abandoned its most ambitious and proudest ideal: the never perfect, always debated and perpetually sought after balance between the energizing inequality of achievement in a competitive economy and the community-binding equality promised by democracy. In a battle that began a half-century ago, the achievers won.

It's a fine essay if not too much of a giveaway. Read it and you might decide you don't need the book.

When the "Indispensible Nation" Becomes Expendable.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Max Boot argues that "Trump's 'America First' Is the Twilight of American Exceptionalism."

Boot's essay begins with an extensive catalogue of the similarities between Obama's policies and what Trump will likely deliver. He finds Obama a latter day Jefferson and sees in Trump a 21st century Jacksonian. For those not familiar with Jackson's populism, that may not be a very good thing for America:

One of their big divisions is over international institutions. Obama negotiated an international accord to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases; Trump has said global warming is a Chinese hoax and called for pulling out of the Paris agreement. Obama negotiated a nuclear accord with Iran; Trump promises to renegotiate it, calling it a “disgraceful deal” and an “embarrassment to our country.” Obama is a free-trader who negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); Trump is a protectionist who vows to withdraw from the TPP, rip up NAFTA, and impose tariffs. Obama has been supportive of NATO, working to expand the forces that the alliance deploys in Eastern Europe and the Baltics to guard against Russian aggression; Trump has called NATO “obsolete” and questioned the need to station U.S. troops to defend countries that don’t pay enough for the privilege.

...Obama is a believer in international organizations and international law; Trump is not. It is hard to imagine Trump saying, as Obama did: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” In turn, it is hard to imagine Obama ever threatening to bomb the “shit” out of another country, to steal its oil, or to torture detainees — all of which would constitute war crimes.
In the terms coined by Walter Russell Mead, Obama is a Jeffersonian, while Trump is a Jacksonian: The former believes that the United States should perfect its own democracy and go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” whereas the latter believes that “the United States should not seek out foreign quarrels” but that it should clobber anyone who messes with it. What unites Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, in spite of their substantial differences, is that both support quasi-isolationism — or, if you prefer, non interventionism — unless severely provoked.

Obama has been intent on pulling the United States back from the Middle East. The result of his withdrawal of troops from Iraq and his failure to get more actively involved in ending the Syrian civil war has been to create a vacuum of power that has been filled by the likes of the Islamic State and Hezbollah. Undaunted, Trump has said he wants not only to continue the pullback from the Middle East (he wants to subcontract American policy in Syria to Putin) but also to retreat from Europe and East Asia. He has suggested that he may lift sanctions on Russia and pull U.S. troops out of countries (from Germany to Japan) if he feels they are not paying enough for American protection. It is quite possible, then, that Trump’s foreign policy would represent an intensification rather than a repudiation of Obama’s “lead from behind” approach.

American power survived eight years of an Obama presidency, albeit in diminished form. If the president-elect governs the way he campaigned (which, admittedly, is not necessarily a safe assumption), there is good cause to wonder whether U.S. ascendancy will survive four to eight years of Trumpism. The post-American age may be arriving sooner than imagined, ushered in by a president with an “America First” foreign policy.

American power, and the advantages that flow from it, is something of a con game, a confidence game. American dominance depends on the confidence that other nations, ally and adversary alike, place in it. It's the glue that holds Europe, Asia and the Middle East in America's camp.

Americans, like their president-elect, have largely lost sight of how much depends on this confidence game. America went from being the world's largest creditor nation at Ronald Reagan's first inauguration to the world's largest debtor nation, eight years later when Reagan's work was done. 

America has remained the world's largest economy over the intervening years but it's never been enough. For decades the US has sustained balance of trade and balance of payment deficits, its debts bought by foreign creditors on the strength of their abiding confidence in America as leader of the free world. This confidence has also allowed America the benefits of having the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. That leaves its creditors subject to American monetary policy and parlour tricks such as 'qualitative easing' that essentially discount American debt held by its foreign creditors.

America's allies are already worried about a world led by Donald Trump. He's already fallen in with a bad lot from Putin to Erdogan, Farage, Orban and lePen. Trump may give America's creditors the impetus they never found under Obama to switch the reserve currency to a basket of leading currencies - European, Chinese, Japanese and American. That could leave America forced to borrow in other nations' currencies without the benefit of its own monetary policy manipulations and at potentially higher rates. That's a truly iffy way to "Make America Great Again." As Boot suspects, Trump may indeed usher in the post-American age. And that is a contingency for which our government needs to prepare but who am I kidding?

America's Dangerous Hyper-Nationalism

We're Number One, We're Number One!

No you're bloody well not, no you're bloody well not!

The United States is many things but it's not the greatest country in the world.  It has a chequered past and a chequered present.   Yet from mainstreet Hicksville, Arkansas to Capital Hill, Washington, you'll find Americans ordinary and powerful chanting the mantra of their nation as the greatest country in the world, the natural leader of all lesser states.   They don't just say it, they believe it, and that shapes their view, not only of themselves but also of you.

Writing in The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald gives a cautionary warning of the perils of 21st century American exceptionalism.  He was particularly taken with a couple of tweets by National Reviews's Charles Cooke reacting to North Korea's recent nuclear weapon test:

"I never understand the moral equivalence on this.   We can have nuclear weapons because we're right.   They can't because they're wrong."

"Why should we condemn North Korea's test?  Because they're a totalitarian nightmare state and this is the greatest country in world history."

Greenwald responded:

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point, greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism, its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable, to lavish it with that title.

This is more than just an intellectual exercise. This belief in America's unparalleled greatness has immense impact. It is not hyperbole to say that the sentiment expressed by Cooke is the overarching belief system of the US political and media class, the primary premise shaping political discourse. Politicians of all types routinely recite the same claim, and Cooke's tweet was quickly re-tweeted by a variety of commentators and self-proclaimed foreign policy experts from across the spectrum.

Greenwald then drew upon this passage from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism:

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Preserving this warped morality, this nationalistic prerogative, is, far and away, the primary objective of America's foreign policy community, composed of its political offices, media outlets, and (especially) think tanks. What Cooke expressed here - that the US, due to its objective superiority, is not bound by the same rules as others - is the most cherished and aggressively guarded principle in that circle. Conversely, the notion that the US should be bound by the same rules as everyone else is the most scorned and marginalized.

...US foreign policy analysts are permitted to question the tactics of the US government and military (will bombing these places succeed in the goals?). They are permitted to argue that certain policies will not advance American interests (drones may be ineffective in stopping Terrorism). But what they are absolutely barred from doing - upon pain of being expelled from the circles of Seriousness - is to argue that there are any legal or moral rules that restrict US aggression, and especially to argue that the US is bound by the same set of rules which it seeks to impose on others.

...think tank "scholars" don't get invited to important meetings by "national security professionals" in DC if they point out that the US is committing war crimes and that the US president is a war criminal. They don't get invited to those meetings if they argue that the US should be bound by the same rules and laws it imposes on others when it comes to the use of force. They don't get invited if they ask US political officials to imagine how they would react if some other country were routinely bombing US soil with drones and cruise missiles and assassinating whatever Americans they wanted to in secret and without trial.   

One gets invited to those meetings only if one blindly affirms the right of the US to do whatever it wants, and then devotes oneself to the pragmatic question of how that unfettered license can best be exploited to promote national interests.

But why should this matter to us?   One reason is the Lockheed F-35 and what it means for Canadian foreign policy, Canadian defence policy and even our independence.   You may think of it merely as a ridiculously expensive airplane, possibly because that's all your hear from the Opposition parties, but it's far more than that and we stand to pay dearly if we don't see this clearly and in time.

This light attack bomber begs the question of who we're planning to attack, what we intend to bomb?  Better yet, given that we can barely afford to buy a paltry 65 of them, who are we going to bomb with a handful of these warplanes and what do we have in mind if the people we bomb decide to repay us in kind? Hmmm.

But, you see, it's not who we intend to bomb that matters.   It's who some other country wants to bomb that matters.  No, if Canada's light attack bombers are sent into combat it will be as part of a "coalition" which means under the command of someone who almost certainly believes he represents the greatest country in the history of the world.   See where this is going?

The F-35 is Canada's admission ticket to the Aerial Foreign Legion of a master country that not only preaches exceptionalism but practices it at the end of a barrel.  It's a nation that believes itself so exceptional as to stand above its own constitution.   It is a nation that believes it has the right to torture, to imprison its own citizens indefinitely without trial, to kill its own citizens without charge or trial, to invade foreign countries and lay waste their populations on connivance and the flimsiest of pretences.

What they're thinking and believing matters and it could matter a great deal if we allow our foreign policy and our defence policy to be hijacked by American exceptionalism.   The Liberals and New Democrats should be standing up for Canada on this.   They aren't.  Why not?
 

The Toxic Delusion of Exceptionalism

A great many Americans believe in Creationism but, of all the fanciful myths our southern cousins embrace, none rivals the notion of American exceptionalism. Ronald Reagan parlayed American exceptionalism from myth to outright delusion because of the horde of believers.

The notion of American exceptionalism is grounded in the genuinely exceptional (for their time) concepts that forged the creation of the United States of America. It's why American courts constantly struggle to read into their country's constitution the intentions of the "founding fathers." The idea is that strict adherence to the beliefs of a gaggle of highly privileged, 18th Century white guys somehow assures the security, sanctity and vigor of the state even into the 21st Century.

Ronald Reagan duped his people with the cheap parlour trick of restored exceptionalism. The Reagan vision they so eagerly embraced carried with it an enormous price tag that garnered scant attention. Ronald Reagan came into office when America was the world's largest creditor nation. He left America, eight years later, as the world's largest debtor nation.

In the post WWII era, successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, had steadily whittled away at their nation's debt as a percentage of GDP. Under Reagan's stewardship that unglamorous effort by his predecessors was utterly trashed as the debt to GDP ratio soared madly.

The graph above depicts the betrayal of America as shown in the red lines of Bush/GHW Bush and, later, GW Bush. That's the malignancy that has brought the United States to its knees. Reagan and Bush Sr. and Jr. have savaged their own country and its promise.

The mortal sin of the American people must be their gullibility. I recall many years ago Pierre Berton opining that the greatest difference between Canadians and Americans was that Americans were guided by a powerful "need to believe." This craving has left them easy meat for hucksters like Reagan and the Bush dynasty. It has led them to a childish indifference to debt and a retarded, self-destructive antagonism to taxation.

Harper, his buddy Tom Flanagan and the University of Calgary cabal, still cling to the Reagan vision albeit with a lower tolerance for public debt. They embrace the Norquist ideology of shrinking government (through privatization where possible) until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Yet the world we'll see by 2015 will put the lie to their ideologies as those nations with strong central governments ascend to dominance. America's greatest fear is of the day its foreign lenders no longer fear an abrupt American economic decline and, instead, come to accept it as an unfortunate inevitability offset by commensurate prospects for their advancement.

George w. Bush spoke of America's "addiction to oil" but never touched on the greatest affliction, America's addiction to borrowing and debt. No matter how dark the scenario confronting president-elect Obama, try to imagine what he and his countrymen would have to face if the foreign lending tap was turned off. Imagine what America would look like if it was forced to live on its own GDP. That's so frightening as to be almost inconceivable.

And yet there is a creditors' psychology that comes into play whenever they're confronted with a particularly troublesome debtor. There's a tendency to let bad debts ride - for a while, sometimes a long while - hoping against hope that a miracle turnaround might appear. But eventually there comes a stage of painful resignation where a creditor knows it has to cut its losses, it has to take a big hit now instead of an even bigger hit later. There's a whole basket of emotions that comes into play - self-ridicule at not having acted sooner, anger at the debtor's betrayal, even a thirst to punish the debtor in non-pecuniary ways. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've seen this process played out at levels great and small.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the lesser players were true believers in American exceptionalism. They freely drank of the cup of hemlock served up by lunatic outfits such as the Project for the New American Century which proclaimed that the 21st Century belonged to the United States provided it was prepared to be both ruthless and mass murderous in its pursuit of global domination.

What they never understood is that the PNAC vision, as restated in the puerile Bush Doctrine, couldn't begin to work in any nation that couldn't live for a year on its own takings. It couldn't possibly work for a country permanently dependent on foreign lenders. Someone had to pay for those enormous military expenditures.

Can Obama rescue America? I can't see how. He can probably, at best, stablize its decline, make it bearable and spare his people complete chaos. What he cannot do is restore the United States to anything resembling pre-Reagan America. Too much damage has already been inflicted, too many rivals are on their way up. The Reagan legacy has done its work.

The day will come, probably within the next decade, when Americans are shaken out of their stupor and finally confront the reality of their notional exceptionalism and those who used it to con them. I wonder what they'll think of Reagan and his disciples then?