Will Assholes Ruin the Republic?
That is, is American in decline? And if so, is asshole proliferation the cause? The answer, I take it, is “probably so,” though how likely and how bad the trend is much depends on what you mean by “decline.”
America is certainly in relative decline, that is to say, in a less powerful or influential geo-political position than in previous eras. If nothing else, that’s due simply to the rise of developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil, whose increasing economic prowess and political influence means that the US is less influential than it was before.
Is that a good thing? Absolutely! At least as long as you favor poverty relief on a scale (especially in China) that is unprecedented in human history. For those who think capitalism’s main source of legitimacy is its amazing power to eventually eliminate want, this development means everything. And, anyway, hundreds of millions of people leaving absolute poverty is good by pretty much any moral standard I can think of.
What is more, all this is partly (albeit only partly) to America’s credit. One cause of the developing world’s rise is the post-war global economy, which America had a big hand in constructing. In that case, American decline in relative position is partly due to to America’s success. The US will remain a dominant player in the world for the foreseeable future, so there’s no major cause for existential despair in America having a weaker *relative* position. (If you feel existential despair over its failure to lead on, say, multilateral responses to climate change, notice that this reflects its *continued pre-eminent influence* rather than its decline relative to other countries. It could lead but won’t.)
Here’s a quite different question: Is America in self-induced decline? I elaborate how that *could* happen in “Asshole Capitalism,” ch. 6 of Assholes. That chapter present a “model” of one possible inherently unstable style of capitalism. It is a further question which countries, if any, qualify. As I say there, I do tend to think the US has probably crossed some kind of line into possibly irreversible decline, because cooperative people are increasingly unwilling to uphold crucial American institutions, in part because a culture of assholery has exploded, and because our main asshole-dampening systems aren’t any longer able to keep the asshole population under control.
Thankfully, I of course don’t really *know* that the US is in a self-imposed, asshole-induced downward spiral. I certainly don’t have a solid argument that it is (I don’t pretend otherwise in the book). To me, it just seems, for any number of reasons, that elites have settled into an “ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you” mentality. And it just isn’t clear to me what would bring us back to the kind of cooperation among elites that marked an earlier and plainly bygone era. For what it is worth, I think a lot of Americans, across the political spectrum, feel this way.
If that is our plight, it may be lamentable for different reasons. For one, America is, in important respects, becoming a less just society. It may also explain why America is unable or rather unwilling to lead internationally on big issues such as climate change. That could be grounds for despair, both because a great country is internally not what is was or could have been, and because, partly as a result of its internal failings, we may be passing up our last chance to dramatically reduce profound risks of global ecological catastrophe. Maybe that even erases a lot of the good America has otherwise done in some kind of grand reckoning. (I think all the foot dragging is grounds for despair even if we get very lucky and some technological fix is discovered, or the atmosphere somehow naturally adapts. Compare putting a loaded gun to your head–one bullet, six chambers–pulling the trigger, and luckily getting the empty click.)
Not that I’ve written off the US; I’ve got my own list of hopeful trends. But they are, I must admit, pretty uncertain, even by the low standards of futurology. Like so many Americans, I am therefore holding my breath in hope, against hope, that all this alarmism is just a passing trend.
