Apocalypse Forever

Convinced America is going into the shitter? Tempted to buy into the recent rise of rise-and-fallism? Make sure you first read this great little World Affairs Journal survey by Georgetown professor Robert Lieber of retrospectively inaccurate and sometimes comical American "declinism." A sample:

It was in the 1970s that declinism began to take on its modern features, following America's buffeting by oil shocks and deep recessions, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, victories by Soviet-backed regimes or insurgent movements in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, and revolution in Iran along with the seizure of the U.S. embassy there. A 1970 book by Andrew Hacker also announced The End of the American Era. At the end of the decade, Jimmy Carter seemed to give a presidential stamp of approval to Hacker's diagnosis when he used concerns about a flagging American economy, inflation, recession, and unemployment as talking points in his famous "malaise" speech calling for diminished national expectations.

By the early 1980s, declinism had become a form of historical chic. In 1987, David Calleo's Beyond American Hegemony summoned the U.S. to come to terms with a more pluralistic world. In the same year, Paul Kennedy published what at the time was greeted as the summa theologica of the declinist movement-The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which the author implied that the cycle of rise and decline experienced in the past by the empires of Spain and Great Britain could now be discerned in the "imperial overstretch" of the United States. But Kennedy had bought in at the top: within two years of his pessimistic prediction, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union in collapse, the Japanese economic miracle entering a trough of its own, and U.S. competitiveness and job creation far outpacing its European and Asian competitors.

Link via Opinion L.A.