One characteristic of the current crisis has been a marked lack of U.S. leadership. The United States has not rallied the world in a collective effort to confront either the virus or its economic effects. Nor has the United States rallied the world to follow its lead in addressing the problem at home. Other countries are looking after themselves as best they can or turning to those past the peak of infection, such as China, for assistance.
But if the world that follows this crisis will be one in which the United States dominates less and less—it is almost impossible to imagine anyone today writing about a “unipolar moment”—this trend is hardly new. It has been apparent for at least a decade. . . .
Just as consequential as U.S. policy choices is the power of America’s example. Long before COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock, gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow, incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its way.
I think years from now McConnell more than Trump will get the blame for America's decline toward becoming just another, run-of-the-mill banana republic.
Trump is just a huckster, a modern-day P.T. Barnum, who believes a sucker is born every moment, and all he has to do is keep the show relatively amusing. If there is anything truly sad about his having been elected, it's that before it I would not have believed that so many Americans would have fallen for his con, and persist in being fooled by it. Trump, when all is said and done, is just a silly, ignorant man, an entertainer who is easily manipulable by anyone who learns how to stroke his performer's ego. But McConnell is something else entirely, something far more sinister than Trump. His goal is to remake America in his own soulless, mean-spirited, myopic image.
Maybe it's just as well. The problem all along with American democracy has been that too few great leaders rise to the top. There has always been something crudely, soul-flattening about the American ethos. De Toqueville saw it. Gordon Wood talks about it in the Radicalism of the American Revolution. What's best in the American character always seems to get crowded out by what's worst. For every Lincoln or FDR or MLK, there are twenty Andrew Jacksons, James Polks, Fr. Coughlins, Joe McCarthys, Gingriches, Brian Kemps, Rush Limbaughs, Ted Cruzes, and Sean Hannitys who play outsized roles in shaping American identity. And they all in their different ways represent this soul-dead, myopic, ideologically blinkered meanness that characterizes the dark, primitive side of the American character.
The U.S. is big and unruly, and so it will never be completely irrelevant on the world stage, but unless something really surprising happens, it will not any time soon offer real leadership to a world sorely in need of it. Certainly a guy like Biden will not offer it. How can the world trust a country led by the likes of Trump and McConnell. Even if Biden wins, that would be at best a short pause in our national decline into greater degrees of myopia and meanness. I have no idea about what the world will look like with China as the new global hegemon, but China at its best could never be what America might have been at its best.
Too bad. So many unrealized potentialities. So it goes.
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