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COMMENTARY
October 19, 2011
Managing decline
It is with some hesitation that I supply gentle readers with a method to make a right-wing pundit blow a gasket. It is a very simple method, like "waving the red flag at the bull" - as we said until recently, when the iconoclasts and political correctors banned bullfighting in Catalonia. It does not even require audio-visual aids. You just utter the phrase, "the management of decline," in a tone that is instructively smug and superior. A British accent helps.This is how Gideon Rachman got his otherwise much-ignored Financial Times column linked on the Drudge Report, this week. (Drudge is "the bull" in this scenario.) In his smuggest, most superior, British tone, he lectured the Americans on "the management of decline." He claims, at the start, to have met, recently, the (unnamed) retired British diplomat who claims to have launched this phrase. In my understanding, it was indeed a product of Whitehall, in the days of Clement Attlee's Labour government, just after the last world war; which would make that diplomat an advanced centenarian. All such considerations aside, the phrase was meant to be droll: to ridicule the mindset of people who were destroying the British economy through nationalizations, while walking away from her responsibilities "east of Suez"; who portrayed Britain's decline as inevitable, and themselves as the ingenious lords of this great recessional dance. Poor Rachman must himself have been bull-waved, for in the course of his pompous disquisition, he flags Charles Krauthammer, the widely-read American conservative columnist who alluded to our phrase with its original insinuations. He portrayed the Obama administration as if it were Attlee's, opining, "Decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice." To which Rachman, and all other pundits of that ilk, have one rejoinder. It is to characterize their opponents as "rabid right." Very well. I have bitten him. We "running dogs of American imperialism" (as the Maoists used to call us) regret the decline of American power, not necessarily from adoration of everything American, but because the alternative to American power in the world is Chinese power, and the rise to consequence of an array of regional powers perhaps nastier. For as America goes down, these unspeakable powers go up, relatively, and get their opportunity to throw their weight around. In a similar way, in a previous generation, many not British themselves, cheered on the works of "British imperialism." For imperialism is always with us, and the British form was rather more benign than, say, the German form. That is a point characteristically lost upon "progressive" minds, with their underlying, usually unexamined, utopian premises. This has been on exhibit throughout the Arab Spring, where it is assumed that the overthrow of Arab dictators must naturally lead to roses. It is behind every revolutionary impulse; and to the fore in such batty campaigns as Occupy Wall Street, turning upon such absurd syllogisms as: bankers are greedy, therefore greed will end when we destroy the bankers. (It is sad that elementary logic continues to be taught only in a few isolated Catholic private schools.) Decline is of two kinds, relative and absolute. The relative decline of the U.S. was inevitable, as other countries which had destroyed themselves through war and totalitarianism gradually recovered, and wealth with its accompanying powers was disseminated through the world. The misfortune here is that America's allies in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere, declined their share of military expenditure. All were content to let the U.S. carry the weight of NATO, while they embarked on nanny-statist ventures more advanced than the American. These in turn contributed to absolute decline: and to the effective bankruptcy of states across the European Union, as well as America and Japan. Behind the budgetary catastrophes are the demographic realities of aging societies, which can never catch up. They simply don't have enough working young to pay all the "entitlements." Relative decline was unavoidable; but absolute decline was a choice. This latter cannot be reversed without reversing the policies that caused it, which ultimately include the purposeful destruction of those religious values that made children welcome and abortion unthinkable; and the tax systems that replaced the "safety net" of the family with cradle-to-grave bureaucracy. "Managing decline" now means making the best of the fallout; of choosing what we can still afford and what we can no longer. The British "managed their decline," and now sneer at Americans whose turn it is to manage theirs. There was in Britain a Churchillian force that did not accept decline. It "won the war" on its last sprint, then snuffed out just after. There is likewise in the United States today a force - call it Tea Party - that does not accept inevitable decline. It is allied with every other faltering life force in American society. And, as an exponent of this "rabid right" myself, I will not only cheer them on, but continue biting their detractors. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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