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Ashes of American Flags
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Ashes of American Flags
America250 feels primed to flop.
Does it feel like a jubilee year to you? The United States will hit its quarter-millennium in July, and the powers that be are trying to make “America250” something people can get excited about. The U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission’s website touts such stimulations as a national volunteer program and last June’s somewhat overhyped military parade. There was a tacky light show on the sides of the Washington Monument. The White House YouTube has AI-generated videos recounting episodes in the War of Independence from the “first person” and a significantly less nauseous series of lectures produced in partnership with Hillsdale College.
Two hundred fifty years is a pretty long time, and, in certain fundamental respects, the future seems bright. America continues to be a singular engine of material dynamism. The generation of wealth and new technologies is foremost an American phenomenon, as it has been for a century, give or take. The U.S. has a geographic situation that is the envy of the world: a continent-spanning territory, the largest population in the hemisphere, a still relatively homogenous culture (despite some pretty impressive efforts!), small, pliant neighbors, an embarrassment of natural resources. China, Russia, India—none is so fortunate. (Not to mention Europe.) The direct consequences of our most recent quarter-century of foreign adventurism have mostly been other people’s problems; we have been insulated from the worst of everything, thanks to the world’s two largest oceans and the Federal Reserve. Even poor Americans enjoy a high standard of living. We will call this the American Enterprise Institute Theory of Things Actually Being Basically Fine—or, for the sake of brevity, the Why Are You Upset Theory.
Yet people are in fact upset—the number of people who think the country is on the wrong track, who have been in the comfortable majority for over 15 years, is creeping up again after a big dip around last January’s inauguration. No wonder the America 250 program seems a bit muted, especially when compared to the pomps of the 1976 Bicentenary. The long-running Gallup confidence in institutions poll, conducted every other year, tells an interesting tale. In 1975, 78 percent of the country had at least some confidence in Congress; 40 percent reported having a “quite a lot” or “a great deal.” Today, the respective numbers are 36 percent and 10 percent. In 1975, 81 percent of Americans reported at least some confidence in the presidency (this was two years after Watergate!), with 52 percent reporting quite a lot/a great deal. Today, 47 percent and 30 percent. The riposte to the Why Are You Upset Theory seems to be cultural or political, not material—people are disaffected from the polity, and their disaffection has largely accompanied the polity’s departure from its traditional forms.
This is not fresh news, but it is worth considering whether anything can be done to reverse the trends of the past 50 years. While it appears that the long withdrawal from the sandbox may soon be completed and the current management has little appetite for long-term foreign occupations, the legal and political consequences of the War on Terror are still with us: FISA, mass state surveillance, and an utter absence of any kind of check on executive war powers. No amount of patriotic AI slop on the White House YouTube channel can disguise the facts that the American polity has in fact fundamentally changed, that many of the changes are recent and radical, and that the current management isn’t interested in giving up its toys. The Congress does not seem interested in reasserting itself. (Madison was wrong; he assumed that everybody liked wielding power as much as he did. Make an AI video about that.) Nor is it particularly clear that—despite everyone being alienated from and ticked off about the government—a majority of the population is exactly clamoring for a return to constitutional norms.
Most conservatives traditionally have an affinity for American constitutional traditions—for a republic, not an empire, as someone once said. But the neoconservatives and their fellow travelers won—“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”—and that seems unlikely to change any time soon. We’re well off and unlikely to face any kind of serious threat to our security or welfare in the foreseeable future; we are also bereft, apparently irreversibly, of the traditions of republican self-government that in large part defined the nation, and have not replaced them with any sort of imperial norms or traditions. No wonder people aren’t in much of a flag-waving mood; they don’t know what they’re celebrating. What even is America at its quarter-millennium?
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