The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
By Publius
I wrote this piece in July of 2022. Sharing it now because I think it’s still relevant now.
By the time that I was born, it was already over. The game had been played, the score had been counted, the players had all gone home to lick their wounds. Some of them, the undefeated, wanted to start training again for next year. But there wouldn’t be a next year – the game was over, the chips were down, and we had lost. We had lost our way, and there was no turning back. And that all happened long before I was born.
As a historian, I suppose it is my duty to pick a date, to mark the time of death. There is no precise way to do this, but, since it is my duty, I shall declare that the American Empire officially entered cardiac arrest on September 13, 1971: the final day of the Attica Prison Massacre.
If this is to be my eulogy, I only hope that I may honor her legacy truthfully and faithfully. For she was, in her time, a beautiful nation, the immaculately conceived country born out of the very best that Europe had to offer.
My mother was born on July 4th, 1776, in a humid room on the sweltering streets of Philadelphia. Her birth had been anticipated by centuries of prophecy, prophecy which told of a nation unlike any other nation that had existed before it, a nation of freedom.
A free nation, a nation where one did not fear that their thoughts could endanger their body. A nation where one’s station at birth did not dictate their station for life. A nation where one could stand on one’s own feet and not need to fear for the opinions of others.
The prophets of the old world had foreseen the coming of this new nation. In 1641, the lesser prophet James Harrington predicted a nation whose leaders were chosen by its people. Just 10 years later, Thomas Hobbes anticipated the birth of a nation without a monarch, a nation whose sovereignty rightly rested with its citizens. He died just 90 years before the election of that commoner king. In 1689, John Locke anticipated that mankind’s inherent drive towards freedom would push him to revolution.
These wise men all foresaw the birth of a great nation. A nation of freedom, a nation of liberty, whatever those words may mean. They brought their intellectual gifts, modernity’s gold, frankincense, and myrrh, to the holy parents of the new nation, who anointed the blesséd child on July 4, 1776, beginning the new millenium.
The immaculate conception of the United States was a greater achievement for European intellectualism than any of its prophets could have imagined. A nation without privilege by birth, perhaps they could have imagined. A nation without state-appointed religious thought-police, may have been possible. Even a nation governed solely by elected officials, they could fathom. But a nation with all of these things? Simply impossible. Freedom like the kind the United States provided would have been the messianic musings of only the most delusional.
And yet, on July 4th, 1776, in a sweltering room in the Philadelphia summer, that nation was born.
Hundreds of years have passed since that day. So much time has passed that it has become nearly impossible to imagine a world before America. But there was a world like that, and it was a grim world indeed.
It brings me great sadness to think about that world of the past today, for it seems now closer to the present than it ever was before. A world where the privileged few, born to big estates, can live lives of luxury while the rest toil and sweat all the days of their lives. A world where one’s livelihood can be stripped from them for committing thoughtcrime. A world of silence and shadows, secrets and seclusion, sadness and sedition.
There was a dream that was America, but this is not it.
It will not be long now before there is a de facto nobility in the United States. The annual interest on the vast sums of the very few is far greater than the annual income of anyone else could ever be. The wealthy of our nation do not need titles to secure their social position for eternity; they need only decent interest.
And with that interest, and with that wealth, they will not oblige us as did the nobility of old. In Europe, at least, there was an expectation of “Noblesse Oblige,” that the wealthy would spend their wealth to benefit the poor in their communities. As their egos grew, so too did the public works of their community.
But not in America. Our ‘nobility’ sees no connection between themselves and their community. They ‘earned’ their wealth as free people, and, therefore, they can spend it as freely as they wish. They are obliged to no one. And that is why they take their wealth to private islands and build themselves private castles and engage in private parties only the other privately wealthy are invited to.
This is the great irony of the American nobility. They used American freedom to earn their wealth, and then they used their wealth to limit American freedom.
Of course, it is not in our generation that this culture of greed was born. No, for, as in all beautifully imperfect things, the birth of this nation was blemished, blemished by the very freedom which made it beautiful.
The freedom which Europe yearned for was freedom from the yoke of wrongful inequality. Serfdom had been abolished in most of Europe, but the vast majority of Europeans were still slaves to class. Nearly no one could escape from the position into which they were born, and this was the greatest burden of all.
In America, they found freedom from this. They found the freedom to do whatever they wished to do and to rise as highly as their aspirations would take them. But there is no freedom from human nature. As they rose, greed began to set in. And with greed came arrogance. And with arrogance came hypocrisy. And there is nothing so heinous to humanity than its own hypocrisy.
In his prophetic work, Thomas Hobbes said, “man does not want for himself an equal, he wants a servant.” Oh how right he was.
For while all of Europe yearned collectively for freedom, they yearned independently for the power they had so long been denied: the power to oppress. A nasty little thing about humanity, we are deeply arrogant, and once we taste the fruit for ourselves, we are not so generous as to want to give it to others.
And that’s the rub.
Our nation, immaculately conceived by men who yearned for their own freedom, was born blemished by the greatest human hypocrisy of all: slavery.
The birth of the world’s first free nation as a nation of slavery is perhaps the greatest political irony in the history of the world. It can only be explained by one thing: human nature.
For, if it were in man’s nature to love his brother’s freedom, he would. Yet there is not one single case of this in the history of nations. If it were in man’s nature to be good, if it were in man’s nature to be charitable, if it were in man’s nature to respect his fellow man, we would not need to constantly preach these things. Religions command us to do these things because the sages knew that they were not within our nature, that goodness was not native to our souls and so it had to be ingrained into us, every day, multiple times a day, so that we could overcome our nature and try against all odds to be good.
It is not our nature to be good; it is our nature to be greedy.
When the male midwives of our great nation gathered together to declare that all men of the world were created equal, that they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that those rights could not be infringed upon, they knew that they were lying. They knew that they were lying because they themselves did not believe in those “self-evident truths.” If one truly believed that something was self-evident, there would be no reason to declare it as such.
Each of the men in that room was equally guilty of greed, equally guilty of hypocrisy, equally guilty of humanity. They wanted freedom for themselves, the same freedom that their European forebears had been dreaming of for centuries. But when they got that freedom, they were not magnanimous with it.
When the founders got their own freedom, they used it to subjugate others. They used their newfound freedom of speech, the one they had so long yearned for, to declare that black people were exempt from the grace of humanity and that somehow they lacked the personhood required to be free. In their hypocrisy, they even went so far as to claim that it was the rightful way of the world for black souls to serve white ones, that it was somehow both a scientific and moral truth.
For whatever goodness there was in the founding of this nation, and there was goodness there, there was an equal portion of greed. Greed has an unfortunate persistence to it; goodness does not. Greed chips away at the mind at every moment of every day. The covetousness of our soul never sleeps. Goodness, the drive towards human happiness, is a learned art, one that requires constant vigilance.
But goodness is indestructible. The yearning of the human soul for emancipation is perennial. And goodness, the mysterious and strange desire for human freedom, cannot be destroyed by greed, only diminished.
And that is why this great nation could not abide its own original sin. For in becoming free we unlocked a great truth from the tree of knowledge. By tasting the fruit of true freedom, we gave ourselves the ability to choose how we would live our national life.
But that freedom allowed us to choose greed. That freedom allowed us to speak freely, to say anything, to justify anything. That freedom allowed us to massacre whole villages in the name of progress. That freedom allowed us to enslave whole cultures. That freedom allowed us to turn a blind eye to our own hypocrisy.
But that freedom also allowed us to challenge our greed. To look squarely in the face of our beloved nation and say, “whatever goodness there was in our emancipation, we have desecrated with our greed. Whatever virtue we place in being free we have no right to, so long as we weaponize our freedom to enslave others.”
A great war was fought between the forces of goodness and greed. A great war that never ended. For although the proponents of slavery were beaten in battle, they were not beaten in spirit. Their greed, run amok with their ill-gotten gains, had grown rapacious and persistent.
When the Civil War ended, and the forces of goodness had triumphed, the wealth of many of the greedy was simply eliminated. Mississippi, which had been one of the wealthiest states before the Civil War, became, and has remained, one of the poorest.
All of their capital was invested in people, and when it was ruled once and for all that people could not be property, their investments vanished. The emancipation of the American slave population was one of the greatest events of wealth destruction in human history.
But the destruction of wealth became an investment in human potential. This nation, the new Jerusalem, was founded for the freeing of humanity. This nation was born to break the fetters of the old world and usher in a new one. This nation was built as a house of hope.
When the slaves were freed, millions of souls could finally taste of the goodness that America had promised. But it was not to last. Jim Crow and the politics of racial terror kept black Americans out of the garden of freedom. White Americans, once again seduced by the prospect of profits, capitulated to southern pressure.
Black freedom was less important than white wealth, and once again greed triumphed over goodness.
So what happened on September 13, 1971? Quite simply, our beloved mother exhaled her last beautiful breath, and died.
For on that day in 1971, after one of the most humane and peaceful protests in prison history, the forces of greed opened fire on the forces of goodness at Attica Prison and killed 33 people.
What were the prisoners demanding? Humanity.
What did they receive? Gunshots.
They may tell you it was a riot, they may tell you it was a scary time, they may tell you many things. But they cannot tell you that Attica was the first time, nor can they tell you that it was the last.
Attica represents a moment in American History where the hypocrisy of the nation founded for freedom could plainly be seen. There have been a million moments just like it, but it is the one I have chosen as the Time of Death.
Because it has been 50 years, and, since then, there hasn’t been even a word from the forces of goodness. Perhaps they have been simply overwhelmed.
Somewhere along the line, the forces of greed stole our American Dream. For the dream of America was never the promise of riches or the luxuries of wealth, the dream of America was to live up to the sacred words our founders wrote. For even though they were fallible men, their words were written with immortal truth. All men are created equal. There is no way around this simple truth, this yearning dream of humanity. We feel its call everyday. Somewhere inside the heart of every true American is a yearning to live in a world that is as great as our founders said it could be. A yearning to live in a world where everyone is judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, or the contents of their coin purse. For this is the true American dream. Anyone whose vision of this nation includes the subjugation of any man, woman, or child, for any reason, is not a true citizen of this nation. They have been infected by the sour monster of greed, the ugly side of freedom, by the virus that preys on our arrogance and covetousness. And they have forgotten what this nation was meant to be.
Look to the world around you. You will not see a single man of good standing. Our community has broken. Our fellow-feeling has died. Our once collective dream has been obliterated by our individual greed. There is no one left who stands on the ground of virtue. There are no founders among us, no citizens seeking freedom. We have all retreated to our respective homes, to stockpile as much of the American wealth as we can before the last light of hope gives out.
The task we had was simple: create a world in which all men were created equal. All we had to do was live and treat our fellows as we would want ourselves to be treated. To use our power to make laws to make just laws, good laws, laws for the sake of the people. But we were driven astray by our interminable greed. We continue to let racism pillage our minds to justify the ill-gotten gains of our ancestors.
Since the inception of our nation, our task has been the complete liberation of the community our greed enslaved. It has been so plainly obvious since the beginning that it almost seems inappropriate to put in writing. But it is the simple truth. It has always been the simple truth. But everytime we came close to a reckoning, greed came back, and forced us off course.
And ever since 1971, it seems we have not been able to come back. Greed has taken over every element of society. Grifters proliferate in the shadows of social media. Parasites have infected our politicians, and now they do not even pretend to lead. Tycoons amass unfathomable sums of wealth while most people will never be able to own their own homes. Greed has won the day.
There is nowhere left to turn. There are no more leaders and preachers of freedom among us. Everyone is out for themselves. It is plain for all to see.
When they write the history books, hundreds of years from now, they will say that we let our greed swallow our goodness. They will say that this once great nation, whose original sin was so plainly obvious, lost its way because we went blind.
But we didn’t go blind. It just became too difficult to enjoy the gifts of our greed while looking at wreckage we wrought, so we carved our eyes out instead.
The greatest shame of this nation is that our task was so obvious. In the quest for our own freedom, we needed to reckon with the subjugation we imposed on others. But that, we would not do. We wanted all of the rights, without any of the responsibility. And rather than face our hypocrisy, we chose self-mutilation.
Of course, as I write this, I am abundantly aware that all of the people who need to read it have lost their vision. And that is why this is an eulogy, not a call to action. Whatever hope there was for this great nation, and I was once a hopeful patriot, died long before I was born. Soon I shall join my forebears in prophetic exile, waiting for the next messiah, praying that that nation will not hide from its hypocrisy as we do.
I am sure that they will say, many years from now, that the Americans, like the ancient Israelites, lost their empire because they lost sight of their G-d, their virtues, their unwavering commitment to their truth. But that’s not quite true. We never lost sight of our truth. We never lost sight of freedom; we just tried to turn it for a profit.
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