Golden Age Lost

Today's revolution is not like any other.

“In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.” So Edward Gibbon began his history of the decline and fall of that empire, dedicating three introductory chapters to how –

The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. . . .

A future Gibbon might say much the same about the republic of America at the beginning of the second millennium of the Christian Era. That country’s hegemony was more extensive, but also gentler, than Rome’s, and it seemed to rest on a firmer foundation: a widespread agreement on the merits of constitutional democracy, economic freedom, international commerce and irenic acceptance of cultural and religious differences. America’s military power was to all appearances an unchallengeable guarantor of peace, its economic engine a source of accelerating prosperity throughout the world, its literature and art (taking those terms broadly) universally admired and imitated, its political system supple in its ability to adapt to changing conditions without losing its fundamental virtues. The polity had, it is true, weathered a stormy period in the seventh and eighth decades of the preceding century, but the ninth and the tenth had brought the restoration of civic concord, recovery from economic malaise and military decay, unprecedented technological progress and renewed confidence in the “shining city on a hill”.

On January 1, 2001, Americans had every reason to look forward to a veritable Golden Age. The concluding words of Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (1998) expressed that optimism with particular eloquence:

There have indeed been many setbacks in 400 years of American history. As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, after all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. They will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills in their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed. So the ship of state sails on, and mankind still continues to watch its progress, with wonder and amazement and sometimes apprehension, as it moves into the unknown waters of the 21st century and the third millennium. The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world’s eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity.

A mere quarter century ago that prophecy was uncontroversial except among intransigent naysayers. Today, one can hardly read it without sardonic laughter. “Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency and their democratic skills”: Does that describe the American people in 2023?

One can comprehend the demand for Year Zero that animated the French and Russian and Red Chinese revolutions. Each of those upheavals came in the aftermath of an “age of iron and rust” (to borrow a label applied to the Roman Empire’s period of turmoil in the mid-Third Century).The French monarchy was perennially unable to pay its bills. The Russian Empire had suffered massive military defeats. The Chinese Republic was racked by corruption, inflation and widespread anarchy. Desperate men believed that the ills they suffered could be cured by overthrowing the incumbent regime. Only after the revolution did they encounter the terrors of the Devil they had unknowingly embraced.

A future Gibbon will be able to point to no similar precursors to today’s revolutionary ferment. His most plausible hypothesis may be that tens of millions of 21st Century Americans reacted to peace and prosperity with fear and trembling. They concluded that a nation that could foster such conditions must be fundamentally rotten and that whoever could not smell the rot was an enemy. America must be not merely reformed but torn down and replaced by a polity founded on entirely different principles.

Some very strange psychology is at work here. Could it be that a Time of Troubles is, for some portion of mankind, more attractive than an Age of Gold? Be that as it may, the bright promise of January 1, 2001, is dim and tarnished today. Why and how that happened is the great question of our time.