America’s decline could save it from destruction
Bearing less responsibility will have benefits for the country, even if that means wielding less power
There are two key questions. The first: Do Americans want a future that is different from the present or the past? To put it another way, is it possible for Americans to maintain a self-respectful notion of national identity within a new, disillusioned history of themselves?
The second key question: Can Americans remember differently — and therefore advance differently, without the nationalist and exceptionalist identity that carried them to 2001?
We have little to go by in terms of an existing record in American history, and what we have is not encouraging. The Bush years amounted to a simple denial of historical facts, a life-wasting, resource-wasting lunge for American power, even though it had already slipped away.
The Obama presidency, for all its initial promise of change, has been an even bigger disappointment in some respects, given the electorate’s initial hopes. It has offered very little in the way of forward movement.
Barack Obama has clung to the same prerogative rights to conduct military action wherever he sees fit. His administration is guilty of many of the same abuses of law that characterized the Bush years.
Apply a blind and one cannot tell the difference between the security-related legislation Obama has passed and what Bush enacted from the Patriot Act onward.
Does this reflect a cynical liberal effort to mollify conservative adversaries on all questions related to defense in order to preserve power? Or does it signify some frightening, invisible hold the defense and intelligence establishments have over our political life?
THE UNKNOWABLE SURVEILLANCE MACHINERY
One suspects that Obama’s heart has not been in much of what he has done overseas, but one cannot tell. The Cold War and the military and surveillance machinery that arose from it made the American government unknowable in such respects. Fighting global terrorism has only rejuvenated and strengthened that deeply engrained tradition.
It took George W. Bush only two years after September 11 to turn the world’s near universal sympathy into a degree of resentment or contempt unknown in American history. Obama has improved matters, but to nothing like the extent he could have.