No Longer Shatterproof

Pat Buchanan, in one of his refreshing Arctic blasts of wisdom that cuts through the tropical fever delerium of the usual political discourse, has gone all the way and declared the current financial crisis the end of the American empire. And sure enough, when you think about Rome, they still had troops stationed all over the known world when the barbarians were storming the gates. The only thing that forced the troops back home was when the supply ships stopped coming. And so it will be with us. Our hapless foreign policy and adventurism will be the last thing to go -- not the first, as it ought to be. We'll still be promising to defend some place called Buttholistan against the Russians when everyone back home is standing in breadlines. That's just the way things work these days. Look at the German army vs. the German people, i.e. the home front, in the waning days of World War II. You had a blue-steel armed force supported by a nation in rags. Japan was a landscape of burned-out cities, but by gosh, their troops were fighting to the last man on the Pacific islands. (The Italians had a bit more sense. When things turned sour, they said "basta", hanged Mussolini, and got back to being Italians.)

But to get back to Pat for a moment -- he says that America as "the Omnipower" is already history. He also points out that the current woes are not a "failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism", but a symptom of greed and short-sightedness (and, I would add, also a failure of big government socialism or what Nixon called -- and he was all in favor -- a "mixed economy"). All too true -- and as I have pointed out, virtually everyone is to blame, from the most corrupt CEO down to the middle-class drudge who thought he was "entitled" to home ownership and that retirement pad on the golf course. It's the shattering of illusions, more than anything else, that has people upset. Who knew how overextended we were as a society? And who knew what it would take to make things right -- i.e., in conformance with the laws of economics and the principles of sustainability? We're finding out -- and it's going to take a lot of humility to avoid some form of societal post-traumatic stress disorder.