America as Tragedy

Thoughts on Independence Day

An overused image in articles about American decline, but I couldn’t think of anything else, so…

As many of my friends know, I have deeply mixed feelings about America, which quite naturally come to the surface every 4th of July. America may have been founded (in large part) on very noble ideals that are worth celebrating — and I do celebrate them, happily, this day. First of all, there is an aspiration to self-governance, responsibility, and ownership of one’s own destiny, that has is somehow ingrained in American culture and it is truly praiseworthy. Concretely, this was embodied in something like Jeffersonian agrarianism, but historically has also been enhanced by the Hamiltonian industrial progressivism that was also there from the very beginning. The American dream is the dream of self-ownership and mastery, largely embodied in the dream of property ownership. Nothing wrong with that!

But there was also an admixture of worldliness that I think doomed the realization of these ideals from the very beginning — and make July 4 as much a day of mourning as a day of celebration. America today is no beacon of liberty nor a facilitator of genuine self-mastery, but the perpetuator of a new system of oppressive social relations (“capitalism”, though I use that term with some reservation after the year 1971). Likewise, at the global scale, America is no longer the bringer of freedom to the world, but a veritable military and economic bully to the lesser nations of the world. Nor is it a haven of religious liberty, but a force of secularization across the West, notably in Europe. If there is anything that Catholics and conservatives may learn from Marxism, it is that pretty much all of these phenomena maybe attributed to the USA’s ruthless capitalism.

First, I almost need not mention America’s failure to deliver the dream of responsible liberty to its citizens. Instead of truly responsible liberty, marked by responsible property ownership and a sense of duty to the common good, the “libertarian” (for lack of a better word) flavor of American ideology has acted as a cover and justification for new types of exploitation and servitude. In our history, the slave-owning class of the old confederate South is the most obvious and iconic example of this: a Jeffersonian ideology wielded for quite inhuman purposes. Thankfully that specific abuse has been expelled, but I think something much like it survives as long as capitalism survives — one doesn’t need to be a Marxist to see this. The dependence of so many Americans upon wage labor as their sole means of subsistence has prevented them from realizing the dream of responsible property ownership — a Jeffersonian ideal but also a “distributist” ideal that comports very well with Catholic social teaching. But this is a topic that has been beaten to death, so my mentioning it here doesn’t add much to why I think of America’s “birthday” as also a day of mourning.

There are other related reasons. On the global scale, America is the undisputed home of global capital. If there is a class war in the old Marxist sense, it is not only between the American lower classes and the American elite — which, by the way, is a struggle that was strategically harnessed by Donald Trump, making him almost more of a Marxist than his opponents on the Left! — but also between the lesser nations of the world and America itself, where America is the primary exploiter and consumer of the world’s labor (especially in the era of globalization). The offshoring of industrial manufacturing continued to enrich American capitalists at low cost, while contributing to the proletarianization of other countries, foremost among them China. But as China has bided its time and used its own proletarianization to become an industrial superpower in its own right — thus becoming a threat to America in exactly the way Marx saw that the proletariat would become a threat to the bourgeoisie — the U.S. has responded with the use of systemic and deliberate destruction, by means of economic deindustrialization and direct warfare in areas such as the Middle East, the third world, and most recently in Ukraine. Deindustrialization in the third world is mainly accomplished by means of America’s international and usurious financial institutions, keeping poor nations in a condition of irremediable debt slavery, compared to which China’s notorious international debt regime is positively benign (of course, nobody tells you this story). America’s role in this struggle is further backed by a vast military apparatus and an international military alliance that effectively governs through a reign of terror.

The recent and continuing rise of the BRICS bloc, led by Russia and China, has been predicated on the growing recognition of the U.S.’ tyranny. Outside the Western world, the U.S.’s “approval ratings” among third world and developing countries is shockingly poor compared to those of China and Russia. Even some countries of Eastern Europe are cautiously beginning to share this perspective. What are the reasons for this? Though the U.S. likes to brag of its international aid and lending program, by far the greatest portion of global poverty reduction since 1981 (over 45%) was not contributed by the U.S. but by China. In contrast, how many nations have had their local economics decimated either by U.S. and NATO military intervention or by unpayable and usurious debts from U.S. dominated institutions like the IMF or World Bank? The U.S. behaves towards the rest of the world as a colonial empire, enriching itself either by the classical capitalistic exploitation of industrial proletarian labor or by means of the anti-industrial practices of usurious lending. Outside of Europe (and perhaps Japan), the world no longer sees America in a favorable light. They see it as a bully. Some Christian countries even see America as the anti-Christ (I’m not that extreme).

Not only this, but an American-centric capitalism has been a decisive force of secularization across the Western world. As I have written elsewhere (in an article I recommend that all my readers read), this was recognized as early as 1945 by an atheist Marxist, the inimitable Alexandre Kojève — who, despite being an atheist, thought it was a good idea to reduce Europe’s dependence on the U.S. and to create a Catholic empire (basically Catholic integralism), in order to conserve Europe’s rich cultural heritage. He recognized that, by contrast, Europe’s economic vassalage to America would only destroy that heritage, raising a basically Protestant work-ethic to the position of reigning ideology (in contrast to the contemplative ethic of Catholicism, which he cherished). He was dead-on right about that. It happened; and it was a cultural bloodbath.

Needless to say, all of this is difficult for me to celebrate on the Fourth of July. These phenomena are not just momentary blips in America’s history: they are the patterns in which it has become irreversibly entrenched. However, recognizing these darker elements of America’s legacy does not require one to give up being a patriot. It merely requires one to reassess what patriotism means. Certainly, whatever it means, it does not require one to turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of the homeland, even if those shortcomings are tragic in nature. And I mean tragic in the classical sense: they will spell the inevitable fall of this one-great nation and its empire. We can love and honor our nation’s past greatness, even recognize how it might have set the stage for the next great phase of humanity’s history, while also recognizing with mourning that its time has come. Civilizations die. They always have — often as the end result of their own corruption. Thankfully, they may still leave shreds of greatness behind them for future generations.