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I remember after the Roe ruling many people were saying things like ‘fuck America’ and some were burning American flags. And I also remember speaking to someone who was maybe 23 (before the roe ruling) and she said something to the effect of ‘I know in my generation (gen z) it’s not really socially acceptable to say you like the US’ (and for context she was an American). And this jives with my observation that the impact of identity politics has been people focusing more on what makes us different than what makes us similar. But something that has kind of thrown me off is if you meet someone from a developing country where terrible shit is happening they will say ‘fuck the government’ but they still love their country and will say so. But in the US, the connection of those on the far left to their country is so tenuous that if a single policy is passed that they do not like, they completely disavow the US in a way that I’ve only seen Iranians do. And what makes it even crazier is that progressives tend to come from wealthier families, so, unlike those I mentioned in developing countries, they have actually had a pretty privileged life that has presumably treated them pretty well - but the second some law is passed that they don’t like they will disavow it. It strikes me as a unique form of privilege that is so great and imbedded in the person that they fail to actually assess the nature of their own privilege; they are so oblivious that they would oppose with every fiber of their being the very system that has given them so many advantages.
See also this article about "oikophobia", or the fear or hatred of one's own country.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191011093517/https://quillette.com/2019/10/07/oikophobia-our-western-self-hatred/
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that article but it reminds me of the idea that the issue with historians is that they only look backward. They see the future inevitably being just a different iteration of the past.
I’m also skeptical of narratives of decline. I think it reveals a nation that’s a little unconfident right now. A nation that, in living memory, has been immune to the ups and downs that characterize the evolution of the state. But we have had times of domestic tumult before. Just go back to the 60s. People who lived through that would surely be forgiven for making the assumption that what lies in front of us is necessarily part of a longer term trend. I imagine that times of change are, more often than not, accompanied by feelings of existential dread.
Comparisons of the US to empires have never really made much sense to me either. Empires do fail because they are held together by force, so anything that threatens the power base necessary to exert that force is necessarily an existential threat. But that doesn’t describe our country. People speak of neo-imperialism as if having influential companies and culture is the same thing as having vassals, but it simply is not true.
I think the biggest issue we have today is that we are facing uncertainty, we are facing change, and we don’t know what to make of it so everyone sort makes that same mistake of assuming that what lies in front of us is necessarily a trend. But sometimes you’re just trying to judge the outcome of a race as it’s being run.
I don’t think democracy means that a weakening power base isn’t a problem. I think it’s a problem for any civilization, there’s just a lot of propaganda that tries to take democratic systems out of the logic of civilizations of the past. I don’t think that’s true because part of the logic of democracy is that it’s better to negotiate than to simply flip the table and take over the system. If the system gets weak enough that it’s better to defect and try to take over yourself, then that’s what a rational actor would do, even if it means that he destroys democracy.
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