Posted on 02/23/2010 1:09:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Patrick Allitt says that the infuriating but reassuring can-do spirit that once defined the United States is finally dying out. But what will we all do when it’s gone?
The first time I went to America, in 1977, I couldn’t believe how cheerful, peppy and purposeful everyone was. The late seventies were bad years by American standards, the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation and malaise, but to someone coming out of Jim Callaghan’s Britain the place seemed almost insanely upbeat. Strangers would greet you enthusiastically, with a ‘How ya doin?’ in New York and a ‘Have you taken Jesus as your personal saviour?’ in small Oklahoma towns, but always with a radiant goodwill. How to Win Friends and Influence People was still a bestseller and everywhere people worked hard, believed in the future, and talked incessantly about progress.
I felt as though I’d had a transfusion of red blood cells supercharged with espresso, and was fully awake for the first time. The sheer lack of fatalism was exhilarating. In Britain, when something broke in those days of strikes, paralysis and decline, everyone gathered round to take a look and said, ‘It’s broken. What a pity.’ In America everyone gathered around and said, ‘It’s broken, but we can soon fix that,’ and they did.
Where has that America gone? The United States are a little sadder and feel somehow deflated today. The burst of utopianism that greeted Obama in 2008 has disappeared with the return of everyday politics and the slow grind of two unwinnable wars. Now everyone talks about decline, recession and ageing. Admittedly I was a 21-year-old in 1977, eager to look on the bright side, whereas now I’m a 53-year-old who’s also declining, receding and ageing, but I think there’s more to it than that. The supreme confidence in the future that marked America throughout its first two centuries has begun to disappear.
America was optimistic almost as a matter of official doctrine right from the outset. Anyone setting up a republic in the 1770s had to be aware that nearly every republic in the history of the world had failed, usually under the iron heel of a tyrant or conqueror. No sooner had the American experiment got started than Napoleon repeated the pattern by snuffing out Europe’s frail republics. Yet this one, safeguarded by an ocean, prospered. British visitors in the 19th century, like Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, found the Americans’ self-confidence, national pride and boastfulness almost insufferable, but they had to admit that the Americans got things done. Enterprising chaps like Andrew Carnegie emigrated from gaunt British poverty to amass Wagnerian fortunes on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the 20th century, too, a succession of visitors as different as Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, P.G. Wodehouse and Alistair Cooke loved recharging their spiritual batteries with long trips to America. Cooke even made a career out of extolling America’s can-do attitude, albeit with an undercurrent of irony at its excesses. What would he make of its current moods and attitudes?
Today, recession-related jitters are widespread. Nearly everyone knows someone who has just lost their job and can’t help speculating whether they’re going to be next. Entire counties in the Sunbelt are stricken with failed mortgages, evictions and houses worth far less than they cost. Economic news stories increasingly compare America to China, very much to China’s advantage, and predict its increasing dominance. But the decline of American confidence isn’t just a temporary blip on the screen brought on by the recession — you could already feel it during the boom days of the mid-zeroes.
American gloom comes in highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow forms. It has become characteristic of the wealthiest and most highly educated Americans to be pessimistic about their country. They fear the erosion of civil liberties at the hands of a metastasising security state, a loss of competitiveness and an inability to produce new generations of elite scientists. One of their favourite authors is the UCLA professor Jared Diamond, who became famous in 1997 with Guns, Germs and Steel, a lively book about how civilisations get started. But his sequel, Collapse (2005) marks the changing mood. It describes civilisations that went down blind alleys and foundered, ending with the clear implication that America might well be next. His subtitle, ‘How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’, sticks to the traditional American promise of free will, but also implies that those who get to make a choice often choose wrong.
Middlebrow gloom shows up in Hollywood, where recent films tell a similar story. The success of Avatar, for example, is really rather odd. In its lumbering allegorical style it depicts an American way of life that consists in equal parts of cynicism, destruction and a brutal, galaxy-encompassing greed. You might think citizens would object to such demonisation, but they don’t. Instead, millions have flocked to it, apparently willing to make an emotional commitment to the crippled marine who symbolically rejects America to become, instead, the local blue people’s messiah.
Lowbrow gloom, sometimes veering over into self-contempt, is easy to find just by turning on the TV. Millions watch The Biggest Loser, a show in which hideously overweight citizens cast off their last vestige of dignity as they compete to shed rolls of fat. In Das Kapital Karl Marx made what was probably meant to be a bitingly ironic aside, that the bourgeoisie was becoming so bloated that it would soon be paying to lose weight. The joke’s on him; as it turns out, it’s the pro-bourgeois American proletariat that is paying millions to slim down, and taking a voyeuristic interest in others on the same quest.
Two further signs that America has lost its old confidence are vitriolic anti-immigrant campaigns and changes in the evangelical idiom. An America that once opened its arms to immigrants from all over the world, confident of its ability to transform them into harmonious, egalitarian, democracy-loving citizens, has hunkered down behind the floodlit, gun-swept, fortified wall that now marks the Mexican border. Many evangelical Christian leaders, meanwhile, who once described America as ‘God’s country’, now see it as a land occupied by the Devil and his minions, against whom the dwindling band of true Christians must fight their own Armageddon. These folks don’t read Collapse but their version of the same story is Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind books, in which Jesus has already whisked the really good people up to Heaven, while the second best have been left behind to fight Satan as best they can, until the apocalypse.
Where will it all end? You can still find vestiges of the old buoyancy, and I dare say the return of good times will give it a bit more lift. Habits as deep as American optimism don’t die out easily. On the other hand, America has experienced a prolonged dose of unpleasant reality since 2001; its influential and ageing baby boomers feel morose, not having lived up to their own promise, and much of the rest of the world has caught up with America, robbing it of the complacent sense of superiority that it could hardly help feeling 30 or 40 years ago. Ironically, some of America’s cheeriest people these days, me very much included, are immigrants who are acutely aware of what a good thing they encountered on crossing the Atlantic.
******
Patrick Allitt is Goodrich C. White Professor of History at Emory University, Atlanta.
I have noticed a lot of that. As of late it’s like people are pretty much trying to be as miserable as possible and making others miserable with them. It’s like people are giving up and not bothering anymore.
I think the one good thing about the ‘Cold War’ era was that it gave our nation a purpose. With the end of the Cold War, we are struggling to find what our role should be. We no longer stand for that ‘shining city on the hill’ that Reagan talked about.
I’m in Texas so I don’t really see the attitude decline he’s talking about.
Democrats in power, spending sprees by both parties, limiting or blocking our ability to produce anything from power to manufacturing with regulations, free handouts for every sob story and illegal alien, and above all a lack of faith in God. These are the things killing the Country.
He talks about societies ending after invasion at the top of his article, then further down suggests that Americans have become paranoids of some type for wanting to control the Mexican border.
This writer is the presenter on my “Rise and Fall of the British Empire” lectures. He’s very interesting and has a cute accent.
I feel better now. [/sarc]
There is some truth to this. The Bangladeshis in my neighborhood, my Brazilian GF, and shopkeepers/businessowners are various stripes ARE optimistic about America as the source of future prosperity. Then again, there is still a (declining) number of us native-born who also push forward in the face of adversity, and haven't embraced European-style pessimism. We're "not quite dead" despite the declinists amongst us (who were very much in evidence in the 1970s and 1980s, btw).
I think the author is being a bit dishonest. America in the 70s was economically horrible, there were constant analysis showing that Japan was overtaking us and we had seen our better days. The difference now is the pace of collapse in the markets compounded by electing an immature ideologue as president. Lets wait until after November to take the country’s temperature. Methinks exchanging the pelosi/reid congress for one that loves their country and wishes it well will make a world of difference. Bammy will become an eyesore lawn ornament (note saying jockey) until he is replaced in 2012.
America is still the envy of the World from the outside looking in.
The best solution?
Bring back the military draft. Up until 1973, there was no more pro-American youth than those who returned from 1-2 years overseas, serving the Nation in military uniform, who gratefully & eagerly assimiliated back into civilian life with a renewed sense of *Home Sweet Home*.
Thankfully, the all volunteer military never needed that lesson; for which we are eternally grateful.
I don’t think that’s exactly his point. I think he’s observing that once, the United States assimilated immigrants. Now that our government and “elites” have declared that it’s “racist” to want immigrants to become American, obey the law, and affirm (more or less) our culture, there’s a growing sense of concern about immigrants.
I think it’s a reasonable concern, but the author seems to be simply noticing the genuine change in attitude - especially in his time frame, since the 70s - rather than analyzing it.
Yes, the irony escapes him, though he was critical of the movie Avatar for showing Americans in a bad light, so he’s not a knee-jerk moonbat.
IF is is dying out, then it was killed by an islamo-marxist kenyan, one Baraq Hussein mohammed 0bama.
Anyone who’s ever visited a third-world hellhole (much less lived in one for several years) will know just exactly why they are so happy to be here.
Never underestimate the ability of the downtrodden to lie flatter.
HELL NO! Military conscription was a European import/pox that was inflicted on the nation by Lincoln. There is a word for forcing somebody by force of law to perform work they do not freely choose...
I think he’s wrong. The TEA party movement is proof that we have the will to fix things. Our elites have totally screwed things up & have just about bankrupted the country. It’s going to take a long time to sort things out, but the next election cycle will start things on the right path.
And I will never understand the dismissal of those who are against illegal immigration. I’d be fine with a liberal immigration policy if we didn’t have welfare. As long as people come to work & take care of their own family, fine. If they come to saddle me with their grandparents & children, no thanks!
I see that this is a work of fiction.
It's the liberal leftist defeatist attitudes that have permiated our colleges, schools, MSM, and government. Most of the news you hear from around the world is negative. And, people are bombarded with TV Questions. Do you have insurance if your are hurt and must miss work, Are you being audited - the IRS will take everything away, Have you taken ________ medicine and experienced deafness, blurred vision, Do you have erectile dysfunction? By the time I finish watching my favorite programs I feel I must get a physical exam and call and attorney.
The author is making more of a statement about himself than America.
I have faith in the American people because again and again, they have shown that they are not as blind and stupid as the Leftist Intelligentsia would hope.
When Reagan was elected in 1980, nobody was more surprised than me. The media drumbeat against him was so fierce and hysterical, I thought he didn’t have a chance. His election proved to me that the American people don’t swallow whole what they’re being told, even when saturated with nothing else but Leftist orthodoxy.
The Silent Majority has roared again over this past year and likely has saved this country from the brink. Even with the Democrats having the Presidency and strong majorities in both houses of Congress, the hard Left blinked when faced with popular wrath at the prospect of transforming this country into a European Welfare State.
They have blamed Fox News, Republican-inspired gridlock, but it was the American people themselves who have held the line in protecting our freedom.
I am therefore confident that we will pull out of this crisis intact, but not without more struggle and suffering.
I find his characterization of New Yorkers in the 70’s at odds with my own memories of that era...the city was a cesspool of crime...the Bronx was burning down...people were not upbeat here in NYC...the ones high on drugs, perhaps, but not the populace at large...believe it or not, the city is in much better shape today.
Since the English are tea drinkers, Professor Allitt should attend a "tea party." He might come away with a different point of view.
Patrick Allitt is Goodrich C. White Professor of History at Emory University, Atlanta.
the View from Inside the Ivory Tower. That’s about all you need to know right there.
I attended the Young Americans for Freedom's national convention in midtown Manhattan in 1977 and was shocked at how the city had changed since my previous visit in 1966. The subway cars were all covered with gang graffiti and 42nd Street was lined with pornography shops where it intersected with Broadway--one of the most famous intersections in the world.
It’s the same misery that existed during Jimmy Carter’s term, expunged by Ronnie’s optimism. It’s no accident that Allitt’s initial contrast is relative to the leftist Callaghan’s term in the UK. Labour Party terms in England, from Attlee on, were all miserable times. It took Conservative’s McMillan to lift England’s post-war blues due to Attlee and Stafford Cripps.
Tell me who you are and I'll tell you why we don't have to bother with what you think either.
Allitt's book, The Conservatives is definitely worth a look, and I wouldn't entirely dismiss what he says here either.
An America that once opened its arms to immigrants from all over the world, confident of its ability to transform them into harmonious, egalitarian, democracy-loving citizens, has hunkered down behind the floodlit, gun-swept, fortified wall that now marks the Mexican border.
Back in the beginning of the 20th Century, we needed immigrant labor to accommodate America's industrial growth.
But in today's "Global Economy", America's wealth creating industrial sector is being downsized and outsourced to China, and unskilled immigrant labor only serves to further erode American Middle Class wages and benefits.
American citizens are well justified in their anger at the political globalization idiots who are deliberately undermining domestic employment opportunities.
True, but he says as much:
The late seventies were bad years by American standards, the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation and malaise, but to someone coming out of Jim Callaghan’s Britain the place seemed almost insanely upbeat.
Nothing to argue with there. On the whole the 70s were a lousy time, but things were worse in Britain then. Sure, Carter was a mess, but in comparison to Britain the US was pretty upbeat in 1977. It was a little rise on the roller coaster between the rough patches a little before and after.
Professor; I really do not think one would gain much from taking World History from you.
Do you know that Alaric was a legitimately sanctioned Roman General, but was a Goth, because the Romans forfeited their own standup military commitment to their own society; but instead abandoning it to mercenary Goths (who indeed were good soldiers, just not Romans)? Kind of like Americans abandoning their own work ethic to a crowd of illegal invaders?
Professor, do you know that the US federal government takes taxpayers money, quite literally at gunpoint, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, and hands it over freely to a few connected viciously greedy international Usurers, like Goldman Sachs and AIG, all in the name of necessary management?
Professor, do you know that Thomas Jefferson, during a time of great national expansion, and great vision, had a Bible by his bed which he read every night, and was by God a Protestant?
Professor, do you know that the United States under its own resources with virtually no help from western Europe, put men on the Moon, which has not been accomplished by any society whatsoever since; but now gives up on any further exploration ?
Professor, do you know that the United States fought a global war on two fronts, one of which was basically singlehanded, and won, with a national population of about one hundred ninety million people; when today's population of three hundred million, can't even produce a literate public high school product?
Professor, do you know that the Left, let's say Communist Soviet Union, produced virtually NO product worth marketing to the rest of the world, and of which there is absolutely no evidence of such around today; whereby reflecting the slide of the United States from individual responsibility and creativity to government dependence and its abyss of obsequiousness?
Professor Allitt do you really teach World History, and not see any lessons whatsoever? We who are apparently more insightful do see associations and relationships in history, and do indeed fear for the tragic descent from individual integrity to communal sloth.
But if you instead essayed about the current Tea Party's clear association with that original "party" of courageous men who threw off the shackles of oppressive government taxation and servitude, perpetrated by that British asshole George III, then perhaps you could contribute to the renewed independence and confidence of Americans, and to some degree show that you are capable of learning something from history.
Johnny Suntrade
And Davis. Who instituted a draft more than a year earlier.
Hear, hear!
Actually, TJ was not a Christian, much less a Protestant. He was a Deist, and did not believe in a personal God, much less that Christ was that God.
He may have read the Bible, but it may have been the Bible he personally edited to remove the sections he disapproved of.
He may have prayed, but not to the God of the Bible.
How could I forget? Of course, the southrons will tell you that all of their ancestors “rushed to volunteer to fight.”
What we need is an strong optimistice leader. When America has hit the abyss, God has sent us the right leaders. Cases in point: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, even FDR and Nixon came along at the right time to lift the spirits of America. Have we fallen from grace where God has turned his back on us? Pray that he has not and sends us the right President to renew our nation.
A couple years into the war most of those who were interested in volunteering had already done so.
I’m presently rereading Foote’s three-volume history of the war.
Atlas is shrugging and that may not be a bad thing. It is bad for the successful companies that need parts for their equipment and get disconnected phone numbers instead of their suppliers.
It’s good because the old company presidents and managment are retiring and closing the companies behind them. Good for them for taking a stand against governmental interferance. Bad for the last employees.
I hope our next president has the good sense of leaving businesses alone.
We have a glimmer of hope if we win in 2010. If we knock out obama, the country has a chance in 2012.
I think the good Professor needs to get out a bit more. I don't recall conservative politics being this energized for a very, very long time. We needed an 0bama and his insufferable elitist staff to smirk and tell us all we're inferior and then demand what we're going to do about it. Does anyone here doubt that they're going to get an answer?
The phrase two "unwinnable" wars tells me that the author has had his worldview framed by people for whom there are no winnable ones (at least not for the capitalist West) and that Iraq remains a festering disaster instead of the quiet triumph it actually is. Academia and the media are pressing their collective palms to their ears and shutting their eyes against the realization that they were wrong about Iraq, and pretending otherwise isn't making it otherwise. When we have the likes of Joe Biden and 0bama attempting to claim credit for something they opposed with all their might and over which they dragged their predecessors' names through the mud at every opportunity, there's a disconnect there that simply cannot be denied.
We've survived a LOT worse than this. That might be considerably more apparent should someone in the media find a way to apportion the credit in more politically correct directions, but that's turning out to be a bit more difficult than one might suppose. The real problem is that the ineluctable direction of history isn't going the way the progressives insist that it has to, and they're in a collective state of denial. That's awfully tough if you happen to be working in a sea of them.
I find it disconcerting that if you are peppy, optimistic, high spirited, they think you’re dumb as a box of rocks. I’m tired of it really. They quit and then down others who don’t. It’s like you have to be some aggressive bitter cynic in order to be considered intelligent.
Yes!
I want to know where he was visiting in the late 70s and early 80s? I grew up in the Rust Belt and spent my childhood with the constant belief that the mills were going to close and everyone was going to have to move away.
And today? The mills have closed and everyone has moved away.
Anyway, this idea that the US has always been a rah-rah/ can do place is just as wrongheaded as the belief that we no longer are. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
“Up until 1973, there was no more pro-American youth than those who returned from 1-2 years overseas, serving the Nation in military uniform, who gratefully & eagerly assimiliated back into civilian life with a renewed sense of *Home Sweet Home*.”
Again, I don’t want to dash your memories. But it seemed like half my friends had dads who had served in Vietnam and most of them seemed pretty angry all the time. (My dad somehow ended up in Germany - which still made him angry but did not give him nightmares). Granted, it was Pittsburgh in the early 80s so everyone seemed pretty angry all the time...but still.
And today, you can go to the world’s largest Olive Garden in that same spot. There was an interesting story in the NY Times a few years ago - prior to 9/11, I believe - which described the change in New Yorkers who seemed to no longer carry the belief that being killed in a random act of violence was a distinct possibility.
The most cheerful person I know is a doctor I work with who is a Filipino immigrant.
Yeah. Hey this is America. We go through ups and downs as the decades come and go. For every miserable-ass unhappy bastard out there who thinks we’’ve all become soooooo mean and nasty theres two Americans who still think this is the greatest of places and the people in too. Old Abe was right about people being as happy as they make their mind up to be. Personally I think a good number of Americans are a lot of self-centered, self-pitying clods who might do some volunteer work at a Deborah Hospital or a VA hospital and get a big dose of gratitude. If anyone really thinks life here has become so intolerable, well, vote with your feet and pick a better country.
He may have prayed, but not to the God of the Bible.
Huh?
We had to back off. Too many people complained of the glare.
My father always said there is nothing this country can not do once it makes up its mind to do so. Since the late 1960's people have been led to believe the nation has limits and its influence should be curtailed.
I remember JFK making the pronouncement the America would make the commitment to land on the moon within ten years. Sure enough we made it happen. Suppose our president announced the nation would be energy independent in ten years. The next day the media and academia would be roundly criticized, or ridiculed if that president were a Republican.
If the nation had the attitude of "limits" after December 7 1941, there would be very, very few free people living on the earth today.
Well, you know how it is with Brits and Tea Parties, they didn't like the first one we pulled, either!
If you ask me, the problem is people have been told they’re entitled to a utopia and reality is now coming along to show them the truth, which is crushing them.
It’s like a child being promised a pony for Christmas and then not getting one. They think they’re entitled to it, so they think something is wrong when they don’t get it.
Me, I understand I’m not entitled to anything I haven’t created or earned, so it doesn’t kill my morale when life doesn’t go the way I’d hoped.
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