First came their better, cheaper cars. Initially dismissed as “rice rockets,” their superiority to American-made cars eventually could not be denied; they were cheaper, more durable, and got better mileage. That proved a real blow to an American psyche that had been trained to see Detroit’s Big Three automakers as the bedrock of U.S. industrial might, and the cars they produced as the sexy, muscular symbols of Americans’ independence and dreams of the open road.
Then came all the cool, futuristic Japanese gadgets that everyone wanted: the walkman, compact discs, the VHS, home video game consoles, and even the first laptop computer. Americans began to worry that the Japanese were more disciplined and dedicated to world economic and technological domination, and that Americans themselves had become layabout fat cats who could no longer compete with zaibatsu corporate ninjas. American cultural expressions of these fears were plentiful. One of the most forthright was the 1989 Michael Douglas film Black Rain.
It’s all rather laughable now. Most older Americans have to jog their memories to recall this panic about Japanese dominance. Most of the under-40 crowd don’t even know it was a thing. The year after Black Rain played in American theaters, the Japanese economy began deflating and still hasn’t rebounded. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. economy was remade by its own tech revolution, increased energy production, and various free trade agreements.
Now they say China is going to overtake the United States. Only this time they might be right. Today’s Chinese economy is much bigger than Japan’s ever was. And while Japan continues to slog through the viscous remnants of a long ago burst bubble, China is much better prepared to weather periodic downturns as it plays the long game.
Back when, lazy, racist explanations of Japan’s economic ascension centered around stereotypes about Japan’s corporate samurai culture This was contrasted against clichés about Americans becoming spoiled and indolent. Japanese students lapping American students in math testing scores was symbolic of this. Did Japanese students generally work harder at and achieve higher math test scores than Americans? Yes. Are that and similar cultural differences what substantially explained Japan’s economic rise and U.S. economic volatilities during the 1970s–80? Of course not.
Today, lazy explanations of China’s rise and challenge to U.S. supremacy center around China’s supposedly hyper efficient totalitarian government, which is contrasted to a moribund U.S. democracy. The Chinese government makes decisions and the Chinese people jump into action, we’re told, while American politicians can’t agree on anything.
And of course there’s some truth to general observations about how the Chinese government manages its populace and how the United States government of late has been mired in, to say the least, dysfunction. However, the current larger economic trends can’t be explained simply by claiming China has an efficient totalitarian government and the United States has an inefficient democracy. For starters, democracies can get a lot done in a short amount of time. And you know, Mussolini didn’t actually make the trains run on time.
U.S. democracy is not inherently inefficient, much less a drag on the U.S. national economy. Indeed, U.S. democracy has been the main driver of American economic innovation and success during the past 250 years. It has funded the development and/or implementation of major, essential transportation (canals, railroads, roads) and communications (telegraphs, telephones, the internet) infrastructures that have played vital roles in the United States’ unparalleled economic success.
More recently, however, U.S. voters, specifically those who vote Republican, have been undermining and degrading the very democracy they participate in by electing hyper partisan politicians who advocate a win-at-all costs approach and who treat the opposing party as enemies within who need to be discredited and vanquished instead of as fellow citizens and politicians whose differing philosophies should be broached with respect and a willingness to negotiate. To point this out is not to let the Democratic Party off the hook for all of its shortcomings and even passive complicities. But we must acknowledge, as future historians likely will, that the GOP and its various media arms have been the main force eroding U.S. democracy since the 1990s.
This ongoing erosion of U.S. democracy began as a slow march with the anti-Clinton movement led by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA). It sped up in the early 21st century with the racist anti-Obama (eg. Birtherism) and sexist anti-HR Clinton movements. It has since gone into overdrive with Trumpism, which thus far encompasses the two Trump presidencies that bookend additional GOP-driven erosion during the Biden interregnum.
There are many elements to Trumpism’s erosion of U.S. democracy, too many to cover here. But it is thus far impossible to examine Trumpism and not begin with its namesake. He is very likely the stupidest and most unstable man to ever inhabit the White House, and concordantly one of, if not the, most reckless. Beyond Donald Trump himself, Trumpism has also unleashed a wave of Trumpist GOP politicians, some of whom are true believers in Trumpist authoritarianism and some of whom are going along with it simply to remain in power. In other words, those who genuinely want Trump to become a dictator, and those who will tolerate it for the sake of their own careers and their party’s ability to hold offices. The two sides of this coin are perhaps best represented at the moment by the militaristic twins of Trump’s cabinet: the clownish, immature, stupifyingly stupid Trump lap dog/war monkey, Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth, and the increasingly dark and brooding Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was an early target of Trump’s publicly humiliating insults, has since been brought to heel, and now appears to be oozing a thick emulsification of self-loathing from his very pores.
The ongoing, unconstitutional war with Iran is one of the more visible illustrations of this conjoining of two declines, U.S. dominance and U.S democracy, and how they feed each other. Iran has been a “problem” for the United States since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Yet since then, none of the eight U.S. presidents before Trump II were stupid enough to launch a war against Iran. Well, one of them was presumably stupid enough, but during Trump I, Donald Trump apparently had enough “adults” around him to reign in some of his stupidest inclinations, such as getting Americans to inject bleach to combat Covid-19 or starting a war with Iran.
But it was clear from the get-go that Trump II would be very different in one important way: the guardrails, in the form of serious advisors, would largely be absent, with most of the “adults” replaced by sycophantic simpletons whom he fires and hires on whims (eg. Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi). Presidential stupidity, fed by pettiness, monumental selfishness, temper tantrums, a lust for revenge, chronic impulse control problems, and the fragility of a nearly non-existent ego in constant need of external praise, now runs amok. In Trump II, the Mad King faces fewer checks; he freely compares himself to Jesus Christ; his authoritarian ambitions find increased fruition; and the erosion of U.S. democracy has sped up significantly from the pace it witnessed during the previous three decades. And all that, it now seems, is contributing strongly to the long term decline of U.S. hegemony or dominance or unrivaled superpower status or whatever you prefer to call it. And China may very well be poised to fill much of the looming void.
This should come as absolutely no surprise. After all, we are talking about the man who, during his first presidential campaign in 2016, suggested, in all seriousness, that the United States should deal with the non-problem of its national debt by declaring bankruptcy. As if the United States were one of his many failed businesses, not the wealthiest and most powerful empire in world history that bases much of its economic dominance on the US Dollar being the world’s reserve currency, which in turn is made possible in large part by the rock hard fact that the United States has never, ever once declared bankruptcy and that holding U.S. debts has long been considered the world’s very safest economic investment.
But fuck that, let’s just pull the classic petulant rich kid move by walking away from the nation’s financial obligations and telling the rest of the world Tough Shit.
It’s one thing to have a mentally handicapped manchild as the nation’s chief executive. It’s quite another to have one of the two major parties and its media arms openly support his effort to trample democratic norms and institutions in a bid to become an authoritarian strong man. Trump’s illegal and impulsive demolition of the East Wing of the White House, his subsequent solicitation of donation-bribes (about $350 million and counting) to replace it with a gaudy ballroom, and the ongoing eyesore of the missing wing, may have no effect on the nation’s economy or international relations. However, they are the perfect metaphor for what Trump is doing to the United States at large, and specifically to its economy, its government, its international alliances, and its image abroad, all of which combine with its unparalleled military might to maintain American global dominance. Only the last bit seems safe for now, even amid the wake up call of the failed war on Iran.
Indeed, the United States might ultimately end up little more than a giant arms warehouse and mercenary dealership.
If you oppose U.S. global dominance and want it to end, this is what you’ve been waiting for. The decline is real. It will take time, to be sure. A ship this big takes a while to slow down. But the engine room is in disarray, as an incompetent lunatic barks orders, and his opportunistic, boot licking underlings readily throw fuel overboard and bang on the machinery with monkey wrenches at his command.
I for one have very mixed feelings about U.S. hegemony. It’s hard to be an American historian and not. Over the last two and a half centuries, the United States has been the best of the best, the worst of the worst, and much of the in-between. But whether you see the United States as a force for good or ill or some impossible combination thereof, there is no denying that its phenomenal rise since the Revolution was accompanied by an expansion of democracy, both through the franchise and in improvements to the republic’s democratic institutions. And it is starting to look like its decline will coincide with the decline of the same. Whether that is coincidental or causal, I can’t say. That will be for future historians to decide. But I cannot ignore the correlation. And I cannot help but feel that whatever the United States might have been, it is, for the first time in its history, in a fundamental way with long term implications, becoming worse.
This essay first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.