America’s Decline

The United States once bristled with power, but the optimistic tone has since become a frightened whimper. We Germans are very familiar with that.

At first glance, everything looks normal. Everything is still far too big: the refrigerators, the T.V. screens, the bags of potato chips. And the glasses still have far too much ice in them. The SUVs have taken on the dimensions of small row houses. To browse the entire salad dressing shelf in a supermarket, I’d need to plan for a whole day’s walk.

And one still hears those wonderful conversations: “And he was like: Hello? And I was like: Oh my God! And he was like: Yeah, right.”

And the television programs, where you’re never sure whether you’re watching the news or just a commercial. Public transportation is still lousy, and the coming lineup of new television programs is, as usual, still terrific.

Naturally, a lot has changed, too: Restaurant lavatories have signs that say employees must wash their hands for at least 20 seconds before returning to work. Some of the plastic tableware is now recycled. Packages of cookies bear calorie content figures.

Still, if I listen closely in this country where I’ve lived since January, I hear a familiar sound with which I grew up in Germany: the gnashing of teeth. The gnashing of teeth in public debate. Self-doubt, fear and a constant obsession with decline. Destruction everywhere.

When I was a student in the United States in 1995, the nation’s power was immeasurable. The Soviet Union had disappeared, inflation was low and there were jobs, jobs, jobs, with the promise of budget surpluses year after year. Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton appeared to have found the economic Holy Grail.

On television, we followed the O.J. Simpson trial while one of my dormitory neighbors explained to me just how a successful military invasion of China might look. This country was so strong it would soon be able to enjoy the luxury of concentrating its entire attention on a blow job in the Oval Office. Back home in Germany, people could only look forward to Helmut Kohl’s “Reform of German Federalism” and the sad state of things in Germany. There were lots of reasons to stay right here in the United States.

Fifteen years, two economic bubbles and two recessions later we arrive at America’s decline. One could easily say, “again.” In the 1960s, they feared the Soviets and their Sputnik; in the 1980s they were spooked by the Japanese and their superior technology.

Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman assured us in a special edition of Foreign Policy magazine: “American decline – this time it’s for real.” In the article, he referred to Aesop’s fable of the little shepherd boy who, out of sheer boredom, began crying “Wolf!” Rachman pointed out that many people forget that the wolf really did eventually show up, and he said our wolf was China — much larger than Japan and much stronger than the Soviet Union.

The Hammer Is No More

Time magazine also did a cover story about America’s decline, albeit with a pro and contra viewpoint. Fareed Zakaria, author of “The Post-American World,” represented the pro. That’s not the only book to address this subject; one could open a whole bookstore selling similar works about America’s decline.

And they all say that this time, it’s different. The Chinese are everywhere, sitting on trillions of U.S. dollars, stockpiling raw materials up to and including the sacred pecan! A recent Wall Street Journal screamed, “The Chinese want our nuts,” and went on to describe the increasing foreign consumption of America’s prototypical nut, the pecan, that had been grown by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. (My first reaction as a German was that this was great for U.S. exports.)

Increasing numbers of Asians sit in Harvard’s lecture halls where their fingers, more nimble than ours, dance quickly across the keyboards of their Apple MacBooks — clack, clack, clack — like march music. (Such mechanical accuracy has always intimidated me ever since I had to take piano lessons, but back then it was the South Koreans, I think.)

The American decline has become a whole academic subject unto itself. A professor lectures on the newly begun “Third Era” since World War II. The first era, he says, ran from Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition until Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Decades of growth were interrupted by minor recessions but were also characterized by the earnest belief that the economy could be controlled. Keynes was in vogue and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about “The Affluent Society.”

Then came the oil crises, stagflation and eventually Ronald Reagan, who finished off the remnants of the New Dealers and upended everything with plain talk. Some historians designate the years between 1974 and 2008 as “the Reagan Era.”

Now we’re at phase three, and it’s still open ended. The professor says that we’re just starting the battles that will rage in the future and reminds the students that they will be the ones making the decisions as to which direction the economy takes. The fight over debt, taxes, healthcare, Social Security has been raging for weeks already and will continue for a long time. One coed says it all sounds like a firestorm and asks where they’re supposed to begin dealing with it.

The professor has no answer for that either. He says only that America will be great once again, but no longer the greatest. The United States will no longer be able to carry a hammer to the negotiating table and use it any time it pleases. He says we need new tools.

“Oh, God! Did I Really Say That?”

Of course, not everyone is that pessimistic. Those stalwart believers in continuous growth and in coolness, those who talk power with their “we’re gonna fix it” slogans. But at times, you’re uncertain whether they’re perhaps just trying to drown out the sound of gnashing teeth. One hears the reservations expressed about Barack Obama here every day. The president just had to show his birth certificate again and one sees bumper stickers reading, “Climate change is a hoax” right next to another sticker that reads, “A village in Kenya is missing its idiot.”

Many Americans think Obama is to blame for the whole disaster. At times, it seems the entire nation just awoke from a sound sleep to make the horrible discovery that it owes $14 trillion.

Yet a part of this dispute seems strangely familiar to me. Health care costs (much too high), pensions (eating us alive), the public sector (overly inflated), taxes (much too high — or much too low — and too many loopholes). Weren’t these the same problems we had when Germany was beyond saving? Didn’t we think the United States should serve as our example, and didn’t 70 percent of the tax literature we read deal exclusively with German tax law?

The argument about the role of government in the United States isn’t new. Actually, it’s as old as the country itself. And that’s why it has become a matter of interpretation as commentators beat us up every day with history lessons as far back as the 1930s. When the financial crisis appeared three years ago, many celebrated the comeback of Keynes. The Republicans surrounding Paul Ryan want to end that comeback immediately. They quote Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Not more government, less government. It has to hurt. They say, “first pain, then gain.”

In a seminar I was attending, I recently said, “I think the USA has to raise taxes. Especially on the rich.” Oh, God, did I really say that?

One weekend, I traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina, to visit my old school friend Josh. On the approach to the airport, I could see the armies of the American dream; the endless housing developments arranged in a grid as though strung together on a necklace in circles and patterns between forests or on lakes with little docks. Each and every one of them is a dream with a 30-year mortgage. From this height, I couldn’t tell which ones were still dreaming.

“The Age of Debt”

Charlotte is home to Bank of America, Wachovia and others whose names once suddenly made us recoil in horror. Charlotte’s skyline is only about 20 years old and the Bank of America building dwarfs the others. “Like a middle finger or an erection,” says Josh. From there we drive out into the suburbs where Josh owns a home among the thousands of other suburban houses that we’ve seen on the evening news ever since 2008. All with double garages, of course.

Josh asks if I own my own home. I tell him I don’t because property in Hamburg is simply too expensive. “You mean you don’t buy a house unless you can afford it?” he asks, adding, “how boring.”

He mentions the “Wal-Mart culture” rampant in the United States; everything too big, too much, too insatiable. “Remember in our first semester how the banks used to tempt us with T-shirts? They offered us a lot of credit cards and suddenly you were $30,000 in debt.”

After a while, he asks, “Germany is pretty strong these days, isn’t it?” I tell him I don’t know for sure but that a lot of people keep saying it is.

That evening, we look through old college annuals where I see a lot of faces I had since forgotten and recall how I once looked forward to the future: Get a job. Buy a house. Make money. It sounded so simple. It sounded so good.

These days I read about debts again and again. At one time, we Germans filled boxcars with our debts; enough debt to reach to the moon. To which star will $14 trillion in debt reach? Maybe a hundred years from now, schoolbooks will call this chapter “the Age of Debt.”

The Horror Exists on Both Sides

I suddenly realize with a shudder that we have our own little debt problem back in Germany. I had almost forgotten. Maybe the Europeans should move to the United States for a few years, and vice versa. Then everyone would forget his own problems and watch the other country decline.

That’s what the “markets” do as well. They tell us to look at America and then to “take a hard look at the European debt crisis.” It sounds as if they think someone could rise up from the battlefields of Verdun and “take a hard look at the First World War.” The truth behind these markets that cast their glances first here and then there is far more banal and frightening: The horror exists on both sides.

No, this great country will never perish. There are still many reasons to simply stay here. There’s a reality soap about a Mormon, his four wives and their 16 kids. There aren’t only exits off the interstate, every few miles they have “food exits.” Whenever you buy two things, you usually get one free. There are big houses, big cars, big television screens and little envy.

And neither will Europe ever perish. But I can still hear the professor telling us that the great battles on both continents are still to come. And we’ll all be right in the middle of them.