There has been an ongoing discussion, these past few years, among those scholarly opinion-makers in politics, the media and the professoriate that America is in a state of inevitable and irreversible decline. Let’s call them the “declinists.” They readily accept the deterioration of U.S. power after the Second World War was hastened by a period of self-delusion that coincided, precisely, with the “remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s,” to echo the words of the declinist-in-chief, Noam Chomsky. China — they say — will become the world’s largest economy over the next decade, and surging giant India boasts a middle class population that’s larger than the entire United States. Doomsday forecasts and sound-bite metrics fuel an industry that’s reached prophetic intensity. Once a cottage industry, this schtick now heats Thomas Freidman’s palatial 11,400 square-foot home — bought and paid for by best-sellers sub-titled ” How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented .” For these folks, the daydream of American exceptionalism has been revealed as fallacy. Countries such as Russia and China threaten to obstruct our supremacy in matters of foreign affairs. Our leadership on the global stage is no longer wanted. Our flat-lining economy is hectored by a broken political system, itself ground to dust by the interminable gridlock of hyper-partisanship. I know the academic argument backwards and forwards. The end of America’s time in the sun is supposedly presaged by historic failures of each economic behemoth before us. Whether Genoan, Dutch or British, the end of the hegemonic cycle generally coincides with overextension and financial crisis. But I disagree that this is the end of our turn at the top. Take a look around… or just scan the front page of your local paper. Where does one look for leadership? Europe? The continent has scuttled itself. The EU is maimed –perhaps terminally — by a single currency Eurozone that will demand the next decade to repair. Of course, that’s to assume the restoration of solvency is even possible. Scholarly declinists often point to China as the ascendant state, and potential heir to superintendency of the global order. However, China’s growth will prove capricious. This is a fact that even the Chinese accept. Premier Wen Jiabao has admitted that his nation’s development is “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.” But these past few weeks have revealed that something’s rotten in the People’s Republic. Mind you, this “something” lurks below the superficiality of red-hot economic indicators and a thrilling Olympiad. Chen Guancheng’s activism awakened public crisis unheard of since tanks drove down Tiananmen Square. His family suffered 20 months of house arrest at the command of local officials, after he exposed their regional despotism and forced abortions . With a little luck, he’ll soon be studying law in the United States. But while his case has received the most attention, there are other difficulties currently facing China’s Communist regime. Several weeks ago, rumors of a coup troubled the institutionalized transition of the Politburo’s General Secretary. The power squabble between Shanghai’s “Princeling” faction and their rivals in the Communist Youth League simmered over in a rare glimpse of party fracture . Now the wife of disgraced party chief, Bo Xilai, is being held in connection with the murder of a British national. But the ramifications of this case are far deeper than a simple homicide. In fact, they threaten to expose bright-line schisms within the party, first revealed by the leadership dispute. Suffice to say, China’s problems run deep — deep enough to often escape our scrutiny, but also deep enough to threaten the Communist Party’s systemic integrity. As such, I’d say it’s premature to portend their ascendancy at America’s expense. In his excellent column regarding ” 5 Myths of America’s Decline ” for the Washington Post , political risk guru Ian Bremmer suggests that the United States isn’t done yet — for some of the reasons I’ve detailed, and others he explores in greater length. I’ll leave you with his rebuttal to those declinists who assume consensus spells capitulation: We are entering what I call the G-Zero: a period when global leadership goes by the wayside. It’s a less productive, more crisis-prone world, but it’s less painful for the United States than for everybody else. If America can engage the world with a narrower, self-interested focus, it will reap rewards. It will have the luxury of applying cost-benefit analysis before intervening abroad. It’s a downsized role, but don’t mistake this for decline. Sounds like a plan to me.
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Chen Guancheng and the Myth of American Decline
[Posted by Karl] As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply. Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself. Sockpuppet comments about the Republican primary race are strictly prohibited . If you wish to use sockpuppets for that purpose, confine your comments to this thread . Same goes for any discussion that is not funny where people want to get angry at each other. Offending comments will be summarily deleted and the violators flogged. And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny. — Jodi Kantor, who writes for rome wingnut rag called The New York Times , also wrote a book about The Obamas. NRO’s Jim Geraghty has been excerpting choice bits, including this nugget about the Sun King losing faith in his subjects : Later in the first term, there were points where the American public seemed to be giving up on Barack Obama. But the relationship went both ways, and there were many times the president seemed to be giving up on the public, too, convinced Americans would never understand his point of view… …Being in the White House seemed to intensify one of his best traits, his natural seriousness, along with one of his worst, his conviction that he was more serious than anyone else. There was a gap between the way Obama consumed information — in orderly, high-level briefings — and the way nearly everyone else in the country did, and it could often turn him derisive. Geraghty then shows that at times, Obama has seemed quite incorrect in his assessment of how other Americans consume information, perhaps because Obama seems to consume his from MSNBC. Next up, the president’s trip to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize: But amid the bad news and pressures of late 2009, the trip unexpectedly passed like a brief, happy fantasy for the president, a Nordic alternate reality where citizens were learned and pensive, discussions were thoughtful, and everyone was a fan. “It wasn’t hero worship,” said one adviser who accompanied them. “Okay, it was.” For one day, the Obamas lived in the dream version of his presidency instead of the depressing reality. At meals and receptions, they mingled with the members of the Royal Academy — government officials, academics . . . [In his speech, the president] laid out standards that he privately must have known he would not reach. “The United States of America must remain a standard-bearer in the conduct of war,” he said. “That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions.” He did not acknowledge that the effort to close Guantanamo was failing or ddress the questions of whether his detention policies violated those guidelines . “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals we fight to defend,” he said. It was as if he had pressed some sort of rewind button to 2008. The trip spurred a thought the Obamas and their friends would voice to each other again and again as the president’s popularity continued to decline: the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader. The president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.” [President Obama's old friend] Marty Nesbitt told [another old friend of Obama] Eric Whitaker indignantly. (Emphases added) Again, a mixture of hubris and a failure to spot the gap between that hubris and the reality of his polices. In fact, it’s even worse than the book suggests. According to Gallup , U.S. leadership had a 49% approval rate in Europe in 2009 — a marked improvement over the final Bush years, but 49% was approximately Obama’s low mark for approval in America. Lastly, Obama’s assessment of his political skills : Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” This would go a long way toward explaining the frequent tone-deafness of the Obama administration. A secure leader tries to surround himself or herself with people who are as smart or smarter than they are who will challenge them. Instead, Obama’s post-presidency may feature a staging of “ Barry, Get Your Teleprompter .” –Karl
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Sockpuppet Friday (Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas edition)
Following a brief but glorious revolution (according to popular legend, it began when a 26-year-old woman posted a note on her Facebook page saying, “People, I’m going to Tahrir Square”), Egypt is now stuck with the long and messy business of deciding what comes next. According to a recent report in USA Today , the country’s unemployment has risen by a third over the past year, while its foreign exchange reserves have dropped by more than 50 percent and revenues from tourism are down a staggering 80 percent. Against the harsh reality of an unsettled political condition, continued outbreaks of violence, and a shattered economy, the whoops of joy in Tahrir Square that greeted the collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s government on Feb. 11, 2011, have become a distant memory. As for the brief three-sided honeymoon involving secular liberals, Islamic fundamentalists, and leaders of the army, that too is a shattered dream. I returned recently from a week-long trip to Upper Egypt—making a small contribution to the country’s depleted tourism industry and having a delightful time. My wife and I went by boat from Luxor to Aswan and back, with side trips to see the Valley of Kings, Abu Simbel, and other ancient wonders. Getting up at 4 a.m. one day, we took a dawn balloon ride over the Nile at Luxor—brushing over the top of a sugar cane field, rising, crossing the river, and sailing over the magnificent ruins at Karnac, which we had explored on foot the previous day. Though cocooned in the luxury of a guided tour, there were delays and minor inconveniences that made us almost comically aware of the larger problems confronting Egypt. The group of which we were a part (about 20 people) had to switch boats twice—hurriedly packing and unpacking in the move to new cabins. We were two days late in casting off from Luxor because of shortages of passengers and diesel fuel. Making the best of bad situation, Angelotel (our hosts) waited for the arrival of a new group from Europe and then put us all together on another vessel. And when at last we sailed, headed south, or upriver, we soon ran into another obstacle. Striking workers had shut down the locks at Esna—making it impossible for our boat and dozens of others to proceed. So now Angelotel moved us by bus to another boat on the upstream side of the locks. On the bus we saw long lines of stranded trucks—unable to move because the petrol stations had run out of diesel fuel. We also saw lighted and speeding trains that were empty of any passengers because the railroad workers had gone on strike—leaving displaced passengers with bags in hand to queue up on the road for buses to continue their journeys. Like the lock workers, the railway workers were demanding higher wages from their near-bankrupt government. Throughout these misadventures, Mahmoud, our tour guide—trained in archeology at the University of Cairo—never lost his calm, his charm, or his sense of humor. But he did seem almost ready to despair of the “Revolution”—as he repeatedly and lovingly called it at the outset of the trip. He told us jokingly on parting: “If you would do a favor for me, please put me in your suitcase and take me with you.” Yet as Mahmoud also told us, no other country in the world comes close to Egypt in the extraordinary wealth of her archeological treasures—the product of a long history as a single close-knit cultural entity. In some Moslem countries, it is possible to believe that history begins with the prophet Muhammad around 600 A.D. But the Islamic period comprises less than 20 percent of Egypt’s history—and everywhere there are reminders of how the country has held together and prospered over seven millennia. In the richest of her past, I believe, lies strength for Egypt’s future. What other hope is there?
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After the Revolution, Then What?
The Obama administration has proclaimed its interest in a pivot to the Pacific, but Europe grows more interesting all the time.
America is in danger “of becoming something of a legal backwater,” a justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, is quoted as telling the New York Times . His comment is in a scoop that ran under the headline “?’We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.” The story follows up on an interview Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave to Al-Hayat TV in Egypt. In the interview she said that were she drafting a constitution in the year 2012, “I would not look to the United States Constitution.” Instead she commended to her viewers the constitution of South Africa, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada. Justice Ginsburg’s remarks went viral on the web among those who thought they were inappropriate for a justice bound by oath—as every American official must be*—to support the Constitution. The New York Sun commented on them in an editorial, “Lost in Egypt,” suggesting she had missed an opportunity to take the discussion of law-giving all the way back to Sinai. But the New York Times’ dispatch opens up the question of how popular an example our Constitution is these days. The Times reporter, Adam Liptak, gained an advance look at a new study on precisely that topic. He quotes its authors, two law professors, as reporting that our Constitution “appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.” Mr. Liptak, in my view, is onto an important story here. One of the key features of these newfangled constitutions with which everyone is so smitten is that they are much longer than America’s parchment. In Canada’s constitution, which our friendly neighbor got around to writing only in 1982, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, at more than 1,000 words, twice as long as our Bill of Rights, which has 482 words. The curious thing is that with all that verbiage, the Canadians failed to find space to provide for the right that one of our greatest constitutional commentators, St. George Tucker, called the “true palladium** of our liberty”—namely, the right to keep and bear arms. “Why, that’s impossible!” you might exclaim. “No constitution writer could forget such a right.” But feature this. The South African bill of rights is more than ten times the length of ours. And in that vast verbiage there’s not one syllable protecting the right to keep and bear arms. The document covers equality, dignity, life, security of person, slavery, privacy, religion, expression, picketing, association, politics, citizenship, movement, occupation, labor relations, the environment, property, housing, health care, education, language, culture, and arrest, among other rights. But not so much as a peep about the palladium of our liberty. Oh, and South Africa’s constitution states that the whole list of rights can be thrown into a cocked hat if there’s a state of emergency. But never mind, the European Convention on Human Rights appears to be even longer than South Africa’s—running to more than 5,000 words. Yet the Europeans couldn’t find room for the palladium of liberty, either. Mr. Liptak of the Times reports that only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions feature this one of the most basic rights. I cite this right only as an example of the problem with these hyper-long and detailed constitutions. When something is left out of a long list of rights, it tends to look less like an accident—given that they thought to list so much else. If the American constitution is a rich painting done in simple, elegant strokes, the new constitutions à la mode are something out of Breugel, crowded with so many little, crabbed figures one has to hunt for any particular one of them. Finding a right becomes a constitutional version of “Where’s Waldo?” Yet the great attraction to the left in these long constitutions is that they are built less around one of our Founders’ most famous modi operandi , the idea of negative rights or restrictions on the government. These new constitutions are riddled with positive rights, meaning things the government must provide. Our negative rights are worded like this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” etc., etc. Positive rights are worded like this from the South African Constitution: “Everyone has the right to have access to a) health care services, including reproductive health care; b) sufficient food and water; and c) social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.” No wonder a member of President Obama’s brain trust, Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, has called South Africa’s foundational law “the most admirable constitution in the world.” It’s just what the left is looking for these days, a system under which the government is not only permitted to do what the left wants but, at least in principle, required to do it. This is a feature of the so-called communitarian movement, in which the community outranks the individual. It is just breathtaking to see a paean to it coming from a justice of our own Supreme Court on the airwaves of another country. THIS IS NOT TO SUGGEST that Justice Ginsburg lacks for patriotism. I would not want to do that, even for a nanosecond. Some of the clips of her remarks that are rocketing around the web exclude a number of profound observations by her that are contained in the full interview. One is an essential point about constitutions generally, which is that, as she put it, “a constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom. If the people don’t care, then the best constitution in the world won’t make any difference.” She also spoke about the Constitution’s preamble and the intention to form “a more perfect union.” She stressed the enduring nature of that quest. No one suggests that America’s Constitution could not be improved. The Bill of Rights, after all, was itself a series of amendments. All the more admirable our Constitution has become. Editorializing on Justice Ginsburg’s interview, the Sun said it has nothing against South Africa, Canada, Europe, and Australia. America may turn out to be a legal backwater, the Sun said in respect of Justice Kirby of Australia, “but if you want to take away our Constitution, you’ll have to pry it out of our cold, dead hands.”
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‘A Legal Backwater’
