The 75 Year Ride Is Over

Ironically, given the low state of American right now, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the United States' ascendance to the status of the world's most powerful nation. Even during the Cold War battle with the Soviet Union, this was the case. On this diamond anniversary in 2020, we are marking the end of that status.

The United States has become a laughing stock to the world with its Covid response. The election of Donald Trump was already a sign that this country was no longer fit for world leadership, now we are only seeing greater confirmation of that fact. The Dubya years had already killed this nation's credibility, which Obama managed to resurrect. Now that the world has been twice bitten, there's no way to fix the damage.

One of the great paradoxes of my life is that the United States in the past thirty years has gone from the uncontested victor of the Cold War to this lowly state. The only real explanation is that the Cold War win was more about surviving a war of attrition than a vindication of the American system. The Cold War also managed to paper over some political differences that now threaten to disintegrate the nation.

The 9/11 attacks could have been another such point of unity, but by 2001 conservatives had given up on consensus. Instead, the attacks were used as the pretext to launch a Foreverwar, one we are still waging all these years later. The conservative imperitive to hold onto power by any means necessary has necessitated the abrogation of democracy. Bush and Trump, the presidents who have done so much damage to the nation's international standing, both came into power with a minority of the votes due to the electoral college. Conservatives have used the Senate and the courts to stop reform, and gerrymandering and voter suppression to keep their opponents from winning elections.

Gerrymandering, judicial veto, the undemocratic Senate, and the electoral college are all baked into our Constitutional system. One of this country's most important but quietest failures until now has been its inability to update its political frame of government. No newly independent nation today could have something like the Senate filibuster -much less the Senate- as part of its system and be considered remotely democratic. Our Constitution, even with the amendments added in, is still Democracy 1.0. It is an operating system behind the times, prone to failures, and causing constant crashes.

The high standing of American power in the world after 1945 has a lot to do with the failure to make a truly democratic system. Generations of Americans since have thought of themselves as members of the world's most important nation, if not necessarily the best. That belief in American exceptionalism has made it difficult to change the fundamentals of our system, or even to get people to understand just how bad they have it compared to other countries in the world.

The Cold War and beyond trumpeting of "American freedom" meant totally ignoring reality. In the United States of 1945 a huge portion of the population wasn't even allowed to vote on account of race. The civil rights movement finally changed that in 1965, but the Shelby decision in 2013 effectively undermined it.

Ironically, the nations fostered by the United States would end up being better examples of democracy. When the Federal Republic of Germany was created in the late 1940s, it had the opportunity to build a democracy from scratch. Its system guarantees not only rights to free speech, but also to health care, housing, and education. Other democracies started expanding the rights of their people in this way after 1945, but the United States refused. Now we face a pandemic where the government is forcing people to work because it does not have a safety net in place to keep people at home without starving.

So what now? Even if Biden wins the election, the fundamentals are broken and won't be changed. The only possibilities for change can happen when Americans reject the self-image of the nation forged in 1945. The days of the "American Century" are over now and aren't coming back. I deeply hope for what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom." My prediction is a sclerotic, dying empire that much like the UK or Russia will be seen as a dysfunctional nation incapable of forgetting past glories that can never be relived.