Domestic strife and foreign policy adventurism have undoubtedly hurt the United States’ relative power and prestige compared to the height of American influence in the 1990s. For a decade, the American Union—termed a hyperpower instead of a superpower in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union—led the international liberal order and upheld Western political norms. George W. Bush’s administration put the first dent in what seemed like a nearly invulnerable U.S. regime through the disastrous invasion of Iraq and a botched response to the financial crisis of 2008.
Bad policies and poor prioritization continue in foreign policy, but the news might not be as bad as it seems.
“Relative decline results from bad choices,” Mr. Maitra said, “but they are choices which, by definition, can be reversed. It needs political will and an agent to carry through, but it is doable.”
The citizens of the United States need to understand that decline is a choice. Suppose we’re to remain a strong country capable of upholding liberal democracy. In that case, we must realize that this will mean acting forcefully and ensuring that transcendent moral beliefs and commitments support liberal democracy.
In the aftermath of World War II, Louis Rubin Jr., a Jewish Carolinian poet, jested that two types of Americans knew that “history” could happen to them: Jews and Southerners. Rubin’s jest meant that Jews and Southerners understood that they hadn’t escaped history. Macro-historical and epochal events could and still did occur. Human life could still be turned upside down. Progressives nowadays seem blissfully unaware that history can happen to the United States. En masse, sexual revolution and flirtation with Maoist iconoclasm in the form of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other radical movements are indulged without any consideration of the potential consequences of such an earth-shattering overthrow of the social and political orders.
Classical historians understood the profound consequences of stabilizing an empire’s political and social foundations. Subtly, without even noticing, a polity would lose its strength and become a weak, enervated, and emasculated version of what it once had been. Times of relative prosperity and apparent international peace blinded citizens to what happened as their empire slowly was drained of the transcendent values that had once made it strong.
In Tacitus’s “Annals,” he wrote of the Roman Republic’s slide into imperial decadence and social decay:
“At home all was tranquil, and there were magistrates with the same titles; there was a younger generation, sprung up since the victory of Actium, and even many of the older men had been born during the civil wars. How few were left who had seen the republic!”
Tacitus warned his readers that these subtle changes in the Roman regime had profound effects on society. There was no such thing as politics denuded of moral consequence. The Roman state, Tacitus lamented, “had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old morality.”
When Americans overthrew the British Empire in North America and formed their republic, they understood, like Tacitus and Romans before them, that societal success and the endurance of what Thomas Jefferson called the American “empire of liberty” hinged on the maintenance of specific moral and social commitments, most but not all coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition received from Western Europe.
John Adams argued unambiguously that the U.S. Constitution only worked for moral and religious people, and he didn’t believe that the definitions of morality and religion were meant to be value-neutral and redefined ad infinitum by every succeeding generation. This wasn’t the concern only of the 18th-century founders. In the late 20th century, Russell Kirk warned, “In no previous age have family influence, sound early prejudice, and good early habits been so broken in upon by outside force as in our own time.” Morality and virtue “among the rising generation is mocked by the inanity of television, by pornographic films, by the twentieth-century cult of the ‘peer group.’”
In our own time, the rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the BLM movement have sought a wholesale overthrow of the longue durée of Western moral and social commitments by accusing the very foundations of the American regime of being racist, and so on. American commitments to liberalism and tolerance might make us want to indulge our tendency to discuss or debate the merits of this new moral order being foisted upon us, but that would be to admit an ideology that was essentially seditious.
American liberalism and the moral and social commitments that have upheld American power worldwide are too important to negotiate. Americans and the American state need to act forcefully to eradicate ideologies that would undermine the American order that allows us the freedoms we value so highly.
American decline isn’t inevitable, but stopping decline will mean acting to protect the liberal order in ways more forceful than our decadent and slothful age has become accustomed to.