A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations stunningly revealed that public opinion within the NATO Alliance overwhelmingly believes that within a decade China will be more powerful than a “politically broken” United States.
It also contained the alarming message that similar majorities believe their countries should remain neutral in any future conflicts between the U.S. and China or Russia.
Anyone doubting that our enemies have reached similar conclusions regarding U.S. decline need look no further than the remarkable first meeting between new American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, in Anchorage, Alaska, last month.
As described in a Wall Street Journal editorial (“China’s Warning to Biden,” 3/22/21), Mr. Yang gave Mr. Blinken a lengthy and severe tongue-lashing in which he rejected all U.S. criticisms of China by extensively citing all-too-familiar American media narratives to strongly denounce the United States’ alleged long history of violence, racism, human rights abuses, and chronic intimidation of other nations “through the use of force or financial hegemony.”
Touting the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy,” he reminded Mr. Blinken—accurately—that many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States. ‘
In current debates about decline, partisans will reflexively point fingers at either Biden or Trump and their dramatically different approaches to policy formulation. Yet all must recognize that such discussions have been going on throughout the twenty-plus years of America’s debilitating political polarization.
Accordingly, there is virtue in seeking greater understanding regarding the phenomenon of decline by turning to historians who can offer a depth and balance of insight far superior to the slanging matches that pass for political “dialogue” today.
One such historian is Niall Ferguson who in 2012 produced a brilliant volume that has held up very well in the intervening years: The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. Currently a history professor at Stanford, Ferguson previously held senior academic positions at Oxford and Harvard and has written a series of acclaimed books including The Ascent of Money, High Finance and Civilization, and The Pity of War.
Four Pillars of American Greatness
Ferguson’s analysis goes beyond the conventionally cited characteristics of decline—slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, and antisocial behaviors—to focus on the four institutional pillars that in his view define the American way of life. Those pillars are representative government, the free market, the rule of law, and civil society.
He persuasively asserts that it was these institutions, not geographic or climatic advantages, which enabled the historically unparalleled rise and dominance of Western civilization over the last five centuries and that their now-accelerating deterioration is what explains the decline of the West—pnowhere more graphically than in the United States.
In convincing fashion, he demonstrates how our representative government has broken the contract between the generations by heaping IOUs on our children and grandchildren; our free markets have been increasingly crippled by overcomplex regulation and debilitating economic and political processes; the rule of law has become the rule of lawyers; and civil society has been gravely undermined by gradually ceding the protection of individuality and liberty to government control.
In the decade since Ferguson’s book was written, the negative indicators he cites have only gotten worse. While the economies of the U.S. and Europe and the real incomes of their working classes have stagnated, the Chinese economy has consistently delivered robust double-digit growth. In just fifteen years real manufacturing wages in China have gone from one-twentieth of the U.S. level to one-fifth in 2020.
The bottom line is that life for the average Chinese family has dramatically improved over recent decades, and because of that the Chinese, who have no experience of democracy, readily acquiesce to the shortcomings of their unapologetically authoritarian government. Additionally, all evidence suggests that as a people they continue to view the world through a strongly nationalistic and patriotic lens.
In contrast, life for the average U.S. family has not significantly improved, and accordingly Americans are less inclined to tolerate the increasingly glaring deficiencies they see in their own government and society.
Decline is a relative term, but clearly by a preponderance of measures America is declining while China is ascending. The great question is whether this decline is terminal, or whether the American people—as they have done in past times of trouble—can rise to the occasion, break free of our current malaise, and deliver a national act of regeneration that will reanimate that spirit and pride which our people have manifested throughout our history.
William Moloney, Ph.D., is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.