The US was not set up to become a hegemon, nor did it ever express or display any official desire to become a hegemon in the sense of controlling others. Serious Hegemaniacs require a great deal of government control over citizens’ daily lives along with, especially, an overbearing influence on foreign nations.
Our founders fought for guarantees that the US would not become a hegemon. The span of control of the federal government was carefully circumscribed by a fine Constitution. These principles were gradually eroded away by the cuts (but not in spending) of a thousand Congressional knives over the past two centuries, but especially since the Great Depression of the thirties. ….and even more especially since the start of the present century.
Meanwhile Russia has sought to become a hegemon since the 14th century when the Mongols, weary of slaughtering and plundering, and lacking a long range plan, assimilated with, and largely subordinated themselves to, those they had conquered. Russia under the Tsars was every bit as aggressive territorially as the Soviets were during the twentieth century …. until August, 1991, when the world’s only true hegemon at the time came apart at the seams, yielding up 14 new independent states as well as freeing up some dozen countries in Eastern Europe.
Despite the dire predictions of many, the US, led by President George H. W. Bush, had no desire to gloat or take military or diplomatic advantage of the broken giant. The Cold War that had dominated world affairs for half a century just went away, exposing a whole different world that had been neglected, a world of famine, civil wars, atrocities, disease, and abject poverty.
What was left of the Russian hegemon at the end was a disciplined, well-paid, military-industrial complex. When the source of sustenance to this huge complex collapsed, and Moscow no longer sent money out to pay the military-industrial complex, the husk of a country that was left was that of basic consumer needs, and those that controlled them (largely women) began to prosper … food supplies, candy, bottled water, private transportation, and agriculture … all sectors of the economy whose vitality had been sapped by the Soviet system that put as much as 40 % of its GDP into defense spending. The Soviet military and its research laboratories and manufacturing facilities were alive and well, even prospering, right up until president Boris Yeltsin climbed atop one of his military tanks and declared the hegemon at an end.
The economic and social shock to the system was palpable … men who no longer had status, or who continued to preside over shells of companies that began to pay their workers in groats, vodka and very cheap wine, drank themselves into oblivion by lunchtime; many simply died early, reducing the average lifespan of Russians from 63 to 58 years in only five years, 1989 - 1994.
Now we have the decline of the American hegemon. Interestingly, the only major sector of the economy which is operating effectively today is also the US military … and to a decreasing extent the industrial complex that supplies it. Eisenhower warned us.
The consumer sector is on life support. Politicians decided we should no longer include food or gasoline when calculating inflation, as if these were no longer important factors to American families, and thus hiding and disguising warning signs of doom. The commanding heights of America’s economy … finance, housing, health, and energy …. have all been neutered by the intervention of big government. And so much for self regulation, especially of the financial industry where “True Grit” was replaced by “True Greed”.
Careers in public service are amply rewarded by early retirements and life-long health care and pensions thereafter, paid for by a declining segment of the population who continue to apply what remains of venture capital to fewer and fewer good ideas. 40 million people are on food stamps. The poverty line in the US is drawn at 20 to 50 times the average income of most of the people in the rest of the world. 50 million wage earners pay no taxes.
We are not sustainable.
We brought it on ourselves. The ideals of Horatio Alger are long gone from memory. Keynes’s “animal spirits” of investor optimism are about to sink beneath the surface for the third and final time. Adam Smith's "unseen hand" has been lopped off. The prescience of Alexis de Toqueville comes to haunt: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.
The hubris of today's presidents and their cabinets. all too eager to write their own legacies while still in office, has replaced the humility, brilliance, patriotism, critical thinking and patriotism of a Harry Truman.
So what will be the result? A long-term decline of the US private sector, perhaps haltingly at first with an occasional victory by a pseudo conservative presidential candidate, an occasional up-tick in the financial markets supported mainly by memories of a glorious past, but with a steadily downward trend nonetheless until bloated government, obsolete entitlements, and a currency of declining value and importance, brings us to the same place as the Soviet Union in 1991.
The final sector to expire before the rise of an agrarian subsistence economy will be the world’s finest-ever military force, and then even our military, with signs of decline beginning to show even today, will be eclipsed. China, the world’s next hegemon, will miss us … as supplicant borrowers and as customers.
Many who survive will continue to give thanks on the last Thursday of each November.
