The end of America as the world as we know it

Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas:

The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three territories, bringing its international tally to $606.8 million. Another movie from the Mainland, “Crazy Alien,” earned $28 million for an overseas total of $318 million, while fellow local title “Pegasus” brought in $25.7 million, taking its bounty to $238 million.

Fox’s “Alita: Battle Angel” led films on the Hollywood front, generated $56 million when it launched in 86 overseas markets this weekend. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, the sci-fi adventure has now grossed $94 million internationally. The movie saw the best opening in Russia, where it earned $6.5 million. “Alita” also had sizable debuts in Mexico ($4.2 million), Australia ($2.9 million), and Thailand ($2.5 million).

The Wandering Earth is based on a story by Liu Cixin. It is kind of a big deal, the second highest grossing mainland Chinese film ever.

The graph at the top of this post is based on data taken from Angus Maddison’s magisterial Contours of the World Economy. No matter how you calculate it, it does look like the United States of America became the world’s largest economy at some point in the last quarter of the 19th century. The USA has maintained that position for more than one hundred years. This has undergirded the power of the United States of America in the second half of the 20th century in all dimensions. Cultural, geopolitical, and yes, moral.

Of course, the size of the economy is not the only thing that matters in relation to influence and power. The Chinese economy was very large in the 19th century, but it was not mobilized and deployed in a manner which allowed China to maintain military parity with Western nations, and later Japan. In the years between 1900 and World War I, the powers of Europe remained culturally and geopolitically at the center of the world, despite the fact that the United States of America had surpassed any specific European power economically. That is, there was a certain “cultural overhang” which was a lagging indicator in relation to economics.

The United States during this period was a debtor nation which maintained very small armed forces as it was rising to economic prominence. Culturally it looked to Europe, with homegrown American movements such as Transcendentalism of national, but not international, interest. The British retained their self-conception as the world’s hegemon after 1900 due to their colonial Empire, despite the factual reality that the USA and Germany had matched or surpassed them economically.

After World War II, the USSR achieved some level of military parity (at least roughly) through mobilization of a disproportionate fraction of its economic resources toward the armed forces. But the USSR never matched the USA in terms of overall economic output or cultural influence. The dissolution of the Communist Bloc after 1990 resulted in the unipolar moment, when the United States of America was unchallenged militarily, geopolitically, and culturally. With the recession of the Japanese economy, the Asian flu of 1998, and American vigor in the second half of the 1990s, the USA was also economically a model for the world again.

As someone who grew into manhood in the 1990s, it was an interesting and charmed time. The future was American. Liberal democratic. Market-oriented. The popular culture of the future would be the American popular culture. The specter of Chinese economic might was still something a generation down the road. Fodder for think pieces. But mostly blue-sky. Abstract.

Twenty years on from 1999 we are now facing the world we had dim glimmers of then. There is a mix of the expected and unexpected. The expected is the demographic-economic juggernaut of China is now within spitting distance of the United States in terms of nominal GDP. Parts of China are already basically a developed economy. Barring a major catastrophe, which some have predicted every few years since the 1990s, China will become the world’s largest economy by 2030, as it was in 1880. One hundred and thirty years of the USA being the largest economy in the world will end.

The period after 2030 is murky. China faces serious demographic headwinds due to the one-child policy. Much of its population will be poor, while coastal areas will be tightly integrated with the rest of the world. The USA will likely remain the wealthiest large nation on a per capita basis for the foreseeable future. China’s preeminence as the largest nation economically will be in the context of much greater parity between it and other big economies, as well as structural factors pointing to its eventual decline. We are not looking to another unipolar, even bipolar (e.g., USA vs. Chinese), world, in the second quarter of the 21st century. Probably the best analogy is the period around 1900 when a mix of cultural, economic, and military proto-superpowers jostled for their time in the sun. The first modern age of globalization of trade and travel.

As the United States proceeds into the 2020s there are two primary issues that I think will be interesting to follow. First, the debasement toward the lowest common denominator of our “soft power” in the form of media. Hollywood is a major American export, but due in part to globalization, the major studios are now pumping out formulaic adventure stories scaffolded by comic-book storylines. To not put too fine a point on it, America’s preeminent cinematic cultural exports are now explosion festivals which exhibit a level of narrative complexity and depth that can hold the attention of teenage boys. Captain America may notionally represent American values, but the major exports of Hollywood today that “travel” and “translate” are not different than ancient mythic adventure stories wrapped up in a quest, destiny, and an evil antagonist. American industry is a vessel for the reduced universal, not particular Americanisms which will conquer the world.

The second issue is that in some ways the American elites are not as secure, and confident, in their own self-understanding and ideology. The American elites have always been defined by wealth, but there also remained an element of patriotism and pride in the nation-state. The idea that we are a light unto the nations with our example of robust democratic republicanism. The rise of global capital means that many of the economic oligarchs have weak attachments to specific nations. They are citizens of an archipelago of super-cities inhabited by the financial elite. They involve themselves with the politics of multiple nations but fundamentally are not of any nation in anything more than a bureaucratic sense. Rupert Murdoch is a case in point.

While the economic elites of the West have absolved themselves of the need for deep national patriotism (though they may still be active in various ideological causes which know no national boundaries), the cultural elites have become open to a deep skepticism of the foundational roots of the civilization of which they are members. To be reductive, “Western civilization is fundamentally a white supremacist patriarchal project.” Though even this expression of critique is a product of Western civilization in a historically contingent sense, it points to a lack of confidence in the premises on which we make the argument for the export and universalism of democratic market liberalism. This confidence was still present in the year 2000, even in the face of critique. But today the landscape has shifted so that critics have the rhetorical high ground in much of the bastions of the intelligentsia.

To use Peter Turchin’s framework, the West is a society with declining social cohesion and riven by elite faction due to overproduction in the administrative classes. The “post-World War II consensus” was boring, but it also presented a vision of emulation. A robust middle-class was supported by an economy which was productive and had a use for semi-skilled labor. We are entering a period where old certitudes are fading away. Economic and cultural.

But they are not being replaced by a new system or a new ideology in the West. The neoliberal framework is better than its rivals, but its cold and rational operations are always going to result in only a cult following. The resurgence of classical socialism among young Westerners and the appeal of political Islam elsewhere indicate a genuine lack of new ideas. While “Communist” China turns back toward its own traditions, in India Rightist movements are creating a new understanding of their society that rejects the Nehruvian project that descends from British Fabian socialism.

As the 2020s unfold in the United States, there will be a raft of “think pieces” about what the rise of China as the preeminent power means for us, and the world in general. Because we humans anchor to numbers, and crisp clean differences, the rank order will be a way to introduce the topic, but the reality is that parity will matter much more than who is number one. On a per capita basis, the United States will still have the most affluent citizenry, while the institutional and historical legacy of our geopolitical commitments will mean that our imperial reach will be second to none. But, the same thing that occurred with Edwardian England will happen to the United States of America: our sense of ourselves will be greater than what cold hard metrics tell us.

The end of the unipolar age will affect the ideological tribes differently. The cosmopolitan and broadly liberal upper middle and upper classes will welcome a post-national and global age, but some elements will not acclimate itself well to the reality that this age is not dominated by particular and contingent Anglo-liberal values. That is because of this class’ adherence to a form of economic determinism, where modern technological productive societies go hand and hand with liberalism. History ends, and it ends in their way. Despite the fact that organized “liberal” parties are generally a “Third Force” to the parties of the Left and the Right where they have any power at all (arguably in the United States this “liberalism” was the ascendent ideology in both the Republican and Democratic parties for the 20th century).

We are aware of how the populist Right will react. The call will go out to roll back the clock to the decades after World War II when white Christian America was self-confident and a superpower unparalleled. To a time when the USA could dictate terms and shape the course of the world through its own singular fiat. Its very will. The problem with this vision is American power was always conditioned on exogenous circumstances. The rise of Communism and state and regulatory socialism crippled the long-term trajectory of many nations. World War II reduced the European nation-states and Japan to client states. None of these contingent events can be replicated.

Parts of the cultural Left aim to create a more egalitarian world by deconstructing and tearing down the edifice of the hierarchical Western order that arose over the past few centuries. But this is like organisms adapted toward a niche that no longer exists. The world of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, no longer exists. Inverting the moral message of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-supremacy will continue in the 2020s, but substantively it is a message grounded in the realities of the 1920s. Like the Indian elites’ anger and resentment toward British imperialism, the intersectional critical race theory that is common in the United States is a reflex and toolkit designed for a fundamentally different world. Why continue to muster the armies of the West after the death of Sauron? For glory and position within the administrative state, and the few sinecures available to culture producers.

Finally, the banner of the old Red Flag is now rising once again, like a phoenix from the ashes. Instead of a redistributive economy in a market context, some of these radicals want to reconceptualize economic relations in a Marxist sense. Sieze the means of production. They will tell us that “this time it will be different.” I am skeptical that most people will buy into this message. Like the attempt to mobilized racial and sexual minorities against white males, a classical Left economic policy was always optimized for the industrial economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A message it is, but for a time long gone.

I come bringing news of the death of our old gods. Not news of the birth of the new.

The youngest of the Baby Boomers will be in their mid-60s by 2030. The oldest of them will be dying and long retired. Though the ideas, and the world, of the Baby Boomer will haunt us, they will not live in the new world for long. They will see its birth, but be gone before it matures and ripens.

Those of us who are of “Generation X” and the older Millennials, the children of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, will remember the America that was. Confident in its powers, in the fullness of its unparalleled glory. The world in which we matured was that world, and that will leave its stamp upon our being. Even fallen nobility retain a certain pride, a conceit, and we will retain that. American exceptionalism and supremacy are what we were raised with, and the passing of the age will catch us flat-footed on many occasions. The world revolved around us, all roads led to the USA.

An analogy to Rome and its decline is too easy and too lazy. But perhaps one might think of the United States in the new era as Byzantium in the 10th century. A powerful regional power, continuing the legacy of the past, but accruing to itself airs of glory and grandeur that do not match the age of parity, with the post-Roman kingdoms to the west, Rus rising to the north, and the various Islamic state to the south.

The generations of Americans who matured in the late 20th and early 21st centuries will need to learn that going into the future it’s not always going to be about us….