Why Decline Is Never Inevitable

When we talk about decline, we need to ask—relative to what? American intellectuals overestimated the Soviet Union. Now it's China.

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Because the United States is apparently in decline, I’ve been thinking more about the idea of decline and how quickly perceptions of decline versus triumph can shift. There are biases and psychological mechanisms at work. If one looks for evidence of decline, it is easily found. If one looks for evidence that the United States has no plausible challengers, not even China, then there is considerable evidence for that too. But even with the latter option, decline may still be real but it will be a decline relative to what we once were or what we wish we could be.

Americans are in love with their own exceptionalism, whether it’s that we are unusually destructive abroad (an argument implausible on its face, since the two most recent empires were the Soviet Union and the British Empire) or that we’re exceptionally good (but good relative to what, the British Empire? Then sure.)

These are the two sides of exceptionalism: we are never enough, even for ourselves.

Self-flagellation is a national pastime. Any country preoccupied with its own greatness, real or imagined, will also be preoccupied with its own fall from that greatness. In this sense, declinism, as a particular genre, is unfalsifiable, because it could always happen even if it doesn’t happen as quickly as we feared (or hoped). Our own individual assessments of decline are also idiosyncratic, a function of what we value, and what we value is a function of our starting assumptions about human nature and flourishing.

For example, are we talking about spiritual decline or material decline, or are we making a more simple, straightforward point that China will overtake the United States in overall GDP at some unspecified point in the future? But even this latter, more narrow claim is speculative. It used to be conventional wisdom that China would eclipse America in the 2020s. Most forecasting firms have had to scramble to revise those projections. At least one major research firm is now projecting that it will never happen, while several others see China peaking in the 2030 followed by a slow, interminable sputtering for the rest of the century (source: The Economist).

It’s never made entirely clear why GDP is the primary (or only) metric that matters. Another way of looking at long-term decline is through fertility rates, which have profound societal effects in addition to undermining GDP growth. For a state as authoritarian, closed, and xenophobic as China, the effects of declining fertility rates are even more perilous, because the only other way to maintain population levels is through mass immigration. Short of China becoming something other than what it currently, that isn’t really a solution, which likely means that there is no solution.

All of this makes it somewhat remarkable that Jed Esty, a professor of English, could base an entire book, The Future of Decline, on a fanciful premise. In the introduction, he writes that America will become “any day now a second-place nation.” Basically the book is an exploration into how the United States can—with good nature and cheerful resignation—do the work of learning to live as a second-rate country in anticipation of the inevitable. But why should the United States learn to live with something that may or may not happen?

The uses and misuses of gross national and domestic product are not new. During the Cold War, leading intellectuals ignored the USSR’s subpar GNP figures to argue that the Soviet Union was more “powerful” ideologically, politically, and even economically than the United States. It just depended on what metrics you were looking at. As the Democrat-turned-neoconservative Elliot Abrams remarks:

The sense that Soviet power was rising and American power diminishing peaked in the dismal year of 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Marxist Sandinista movement took power in Nicaragua and the Marxist FMLN group appeared on its way to power in El Salvador (both with Cuban help), the New Jewel movement seized power in Grenada and immediately established close relations with Cuba, and the shah of Iran, an important American ally, fell.

In isolation, at least in 1979, Soviet power—particularly in its hard and sharp variations—may have seemed like the future. Well into the 1980s, the myopia persisted, seemingly impervious to reason. Moral and political equivalence was common, even among the most mainstream, respected thinkers of the time. The eminent historian and Kennedy confidante Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. visited Moscow in 1982 and returned with a series of observations and insights about Soviet staying power. “Each superpower has economic troubles,” he noted. In other words, no one was perfect. But it was more than that.

I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street—more of almost everything except, for some reason, caviar . . . Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.

In 1984, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith offered up a variation on the Kremlin line. “Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower,” he said. “The Soviet economy has made great national progress in recent years.”

However factually accurate, a snapshot in time—isolated from any broader context—can deceive rather than inform even the most careful observer. But there’s also that word—progress. Progress is a difficult thing to measure, because the constitutive elements of progress cannot always be seen, perceived, or even measured.

There is no such thing as the mere fact of power divorced from its sources and context. There is power and there is what is underneath power.

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