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Notes -
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that article but it reminds me of the idea that the issue with historians is that they only look backward. They see the future inevitably being just a different iteration of the past.
I’m also skeptical of narratives of decline. I think it reveals a nation that’s a little unconfident right now. A nation that, in living memory, has been immune to the ups and downs that characterize the evolution of the state. But we have had times of domestic tumult before. Just go back to the 60s. People who lived through that would surely be forgiven for making the assumption that what lies in front of us is necessarily part of a longer term trend. I imagine that times of change are, more often than not, accompanied by feelings of existential dread.
Comparisons of the US to empires have never really made much sense to me either. Empires do fail because they are held together by force, so anything that threatens the power base necessary to exert that force is necessarily an existential threat. But that doesn’t describe our country. People speak of neo-imperialism as if having influential companies and culture is the same thing as having vassals, but it simply is not true.
I think the biggest issue we have today is that we are facing uncertainty, we are facing change, and we don’t know what to make of it so everyone sort makes that same mistake of assuming that what lies in front of us is necessarily a trend. But sometimes you’re just trying to judge the outcome of a race as it’s being run.
I don’t think democracy means that a weakening power base isn’t a problem. I think it’s a problem for any civilization, there’s just a lot of propaganda that tries to take democratic systems out of the logic of civilizations of the past. I don’t think that’s true because part of the logic of democracy is that it’s better to negotiate than to simply flip the table and take over the system. If the system gets weak enough that it’s better to defect and try to take over yourself, then that’s what a rational actor would do, even if it means that he destroys democracy.
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