TheMarketForIdeas

The United States of America is celebrating 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The moment marks the final break with the British Empire, after an escalation of the economic, fiscal, political and principled conflict between the metropolis and the North American colonies. The anniversary is an important one in American secular religion as a moment of affirmation of national identity. Its importance has gradually grown, as significant waves of migration (especially the most recent) have distanced America from the hard Anglo-Saxon and British core of its founding, and then the European one of its perfection as a global power. The quarter-millennium is important not only symbolically, but also politically, as an opportunity for the Trump Administration, surrounded on several sides and facing a difficult congressional campaign, to march on the rituals of the American republic to encourage national unity at a time of maximum division. Americans have celebrated their other major anniversaries with pomp, but, measuring every 50 years, the US has never faced another anniversary in such a difficult situation, although the uncertainties of the Cold War or the post-Civil War period were probably on Americans’ minds at the time. The relative decline of American power instruments as a whole, relative to the coalition of revisionist countries that oppose it and that are accelerating the transition to a multipolar world, constitutes a challenge not only to their Great Power calculus, but also to America’s self-conception as an exceptional country. The Administration’s bombastic style is in line with what Americans want from the celebration, but Donald Trump’s self-promotional tendency and “imperious and imperial” leadership style risk alienating that part of the opposition that could be mollified. After the confetti has settled and the hot dogs have been digested, Americans will return to a world that has become largely ambivalent about the idea of ​​American leadership. The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 will pit the United States against allies fearful of the current Administration’s unpredictability and caprices, but also of long-term structural changes to the United States and its presence in the world, regardless of the political color of the White House and Congress.

Reflections on US History

While celebrating 250 years of political independence, I believe that a deep understanding of the US and its current internal conflict requires a contextualization of its history. Contrary to the joke about the US as a country without history, in contrast to the “old continent”, the real history of the US dates back at least to the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and its deep history is as a branch of Anglo-Saxon culture. The British Isles had a destiny of their own, divergent from that of the rest of Western Europe, with the Magna Carta of 1215, when the English king was imposed limits on his power. The British heritage in the broad sense of the US is a reality not only as the origin of a plurality of the population, but also through its institutions, through the use of Common Law and through reflexive conceptions of power, the relationship between the state and the individual, and the commercial character of the economic order. The “nation of grocers” of England, mocked by Napoleon, gave rise to a nation of entrepreneurs, and it is no coincidence that the development of the USA coincided almost entirely with the transformative period of the Industrial Revolution and modernity in general. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian republic of independent yeomen quickly disappeared in favour of an industrial power driven by the manifest destiny of conquering a continent. From a minimal state as a union of sovereign republics, the USA underwent a gradual but inexorable process of centralization and development of classical and new state instruments – starting with its naval forces, standing army and central bank and culminating in the industrial research and policy apparatus that delivered the Manhattan Project and the moon landing. With the Civil War, the plural reference to the USA disappeared in American English giving place to the singular (from “These United States are” to “The United States is”), as a symbol of the new political unity of its component states. Gradually, the US transformed itself from a product of modernity into a producer of modernity and the modern man, with its personal autonomy (some would say lonely), its elective and abstract attachments, its large-group patriotism, its pro-social and urban behaviours, its productive materialism (some would say crass), and its tolerance (some would say apathy) for the different and eccentric.

The Steps to Superpower

As the China of its time, the Americans had no regard for intellectual property or fair competition – what they didn’t invent, they got from others and scaled to unimaginable heights. Copying came before innovation and protectionism before free trade. Even the Civil War, explained today as a struggle over the institution of slavery inherited from the British, was actually a struggle between the industrialized, protectionist, liberal regions of the North and the agrarian, conservative, free trade regions of the South.

The revolution that began in Britain was taken over and advanced by the USA with its significant resources and large population. It is no coincidence that the modern assembly line and the standardization of components truly emerged in the USA and reached their maximum scope under the Fordist ideology. Modern management and Druckner's quality control revolution are also an American product, successfully exported to Japan and then to South Korea, Taiwan and China.

Later, even before the collapse of the British Empire as the world's leading power, the US had taken over the role of leader of modernity for better or worse. Focusing on its eccentricities and the differences between the US and Europe in terms of gun culture, libertarianism, radical progressivism or religious conservatism, we often ignore how the US changed the world. During the same period of technological and industrial ferment, in the first half of the 20th century, Americans developed marketing, public relations and many of the organizational elements of modern states, from the income tax to the means of modern state control of the economy. In response to the effects of industrialization, Americans also developed the first national parks and the modern idea of ​​environmental conservation and biodiversity.

James Burnham saw in the USA the first modern managerial state and a prototype of the managerial revolution of the reorganization of bourgeois society through mass organizations led by class-conscious managerial elites and redefining the sphere of religion, trade, education, government, etc. through the same set of managerial skills that transcend regional differences and particular loyalties. The subsequent trajectory of the USA and the system of modern international relations, with its emphasis on free trade, regulated interaction between states, the mobility of ideas, goods, people and capital, produced the phenomenon of globalization and the transnationalization of companies.

Including the convulsions that the world is going through in the modern period, from religious revival to new conceptions of radical autonomy of the individual (trangenderism and the fluidity of sexual and gender identity), from neotraditionalism in architecture to transhumanism in relation to technology, all have their origin or perfection in the USA. And the soft power of the US, through Hollywood, CNN, YouTube, the role of search engines as an Internet portal, has never been stronger. Even criticism of the US and its rejection (such as the fight against political correctness or wokeness) is discussed in terms, discourse and ideas pioneered by Americans and on platforms largely produced by them, if not controlled by them.

The Burden of Exceptionalism

The original conception of American exceptionalism was to be the first state not to paralyze or self-destruct through democracy. Americans had in mind not only the example of ancient Athens but also the contemporary example of the Netherlands, and the republican system they forged was intended to prevent both the tyranny of the majority and democratic paralysis. In those years, American exceptionalism became much broader and took on quasi-messianic connotations, offering something for every interest group in America – a security leader for some, a promoter of individual and peoples’ freedom for others, a cornucopia, a land of freedom, the place of the American dream in the materialist conception, as well as a thread of thought from Thomas Aquinas to the Puritan John Winthrop and reaching Ronald Reagan of the need to have a model society in the world, America being that society for the latter two. Along the way, the idea of ​​the project of the US conforming to the independent ideal of a liberal or modern or Christian society at different stages of its history and for different groups, became the idea of ​​the US as the originator and explorer of ideas related to the good and the model society. The export of the American model began as a defensive reaction to the export of the communist revolution by the USSR and became a vocation for later generations, especially in the unipolar post-Cold War period. We could characterize the current conflict within the US as a struggle between those who believe in the proselytism of the American model and in the export of the American revolution and those who, exhausted by over a hundred years of superpower status, want a “normal” country, but even the normalization of the US has different schools of thought, from cautious non-interventionism to selfish isolationism, and from conservatism with a small c to crass transactionalism.

In parallel, several trends have manifested themselves. Without a common racial, ethnic, and religious identity and with a self-conception strongly based on liberal ideologies and values ​​in the classical sense, the USA was and is the experimental ground of the modern post-national state. Native and imported racial, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts are gaining major importance, like an infection that cannot be treated because the reflex mechanism of solidarity through similarity of pre-modern society is missing. Ideological and economic conflicts risk spiralling, and the irresistible temptation of American politicians to use ever finer gradations of differentiation by slicing the American electorate “like Sibiu salami” and encouraging increasingly niche identities prevents the aggregation of a sufficient mass of people to address important collective problems. Globalization and automation have produced the economic decline of vast regions and important communities of people, who have suffered not only economic losses, but also the erosion of the virtues necessary to function within the American system. A new regional conflict has emerged, not between North and South but between coastal and inland areas. The irony is that the MAGA revolution, imperfect as it is and at risk of derailment, represents a last American political force favourable to the ideal of the American civic nation, in which “Americanism” and loyalty to values, symbols, and ideas are more important than skin colour or other forms of identity as a form of political organization.

The digital revolution has amplified the disaggregation of American community, accelerating the American trend of a hyper-mobile society, with weak family ties beyond the first degree of kinship, and with superficial interpersonal relationships, which is actually conducive to a mercantile society based on strong and impersonal institutions. Beyond a certain point, the benefits (at least compared to pre-modern societies) were accompanied by disadvantages such as a crisis of loneliness and the increase in the frequency of mental illness, but also other signs of a profound social crisis, including the appetite for radical ideologies and violence as a source of identity.

Conclusion

250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States stands at a crossroads, in a period of transition to new economic models, new social models, new self-concepts, and new structures of great power relations. The unipolar moment is over, and America can no longer count on a new American century, but on the challenge of conserving as much power as it can during the Asian century. Behind the feverish emotionalism of the nationwide national day celebrations are major anxieties about America’s future and destiny. For many, the key lies in accelerating technological transformation and mobilizing American capital, entrepreneurship, and talent. But these will exacerbate the social and moral crisis of American society, which is grappling with the results of changes that are too rapid for the comfort of the average person and the uncertain effects of frontier social models unprecedented in human history. We don't know what the outcome will be, but we have learned over the last hundred years not to bet against the Americans.

Photo source: PxHere.com.