Declinism looks and feels very different depending on who is deploying its rhetoric. A potent rhetoric that bears some relation to—but is not fully coextensive with—the structural and material conditions of decline, its rhetoric is exercised by people who occupy a wide variety of places on the political spectrum. Broadly speaking, Esty sees two groups employing declinism: “the technocratic center left” and adherents of a “center right pragmatism.”[3]
What interests him far more, however, than this taxonomy is their overlap—he is committed to taking seriously “the wonkish center” that practices “mainstream declinism.” Because it is here that declinism reaches its fullest expression: that America is not in decline but can perch for as long as it wants to at the apex of the global order. Declinism promises that decline can be slowed, halted, and even reversed. Just before his stark assessment of America’s standing in the world, McAvoy says that “[t]he first step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one.”[4]
A feature of declinism, then, is that it is about talking about talking about the problem of decline and greatness. It is not about the problem itself. Esty’s attention to rhetoric across domains as varied as politics, economics, and culture is a powerful reminder of his expertise in fiction and culture. The facts of decline, its features, causes, and effects, take a backseat to the prevalence of simply talking about an American downward trajectory in the same breath as talking about American greatness.
The contradiction at the very heart of declinism—that American greatness remains and that it has already passed—animates some of the best parts of Esty’s book. Instead of spending his considerable gifts only dissecting the nature of declinism and the forms it takes, he turns his attention to its latent possibilities. An America actually in decline, that can acknowledge itself as such, in Esty’s telling, may be a more just, equitable, and peaceable America than an America characterized by declinism. Esty conjures a vibrant, vital, and globally relevant America on the backside of decline; it is rich with care for those who need it most—children, to be sure, but not only children, and dotted with the new construction of revitalized infrastructure.
Most of all Esty sketches a future free from the anxious push and pull of declinism. Released from that burden, America might transcend the anxiety at the center of and produced by the declinism’s inherent dialectical tension and move into the possibility of creating and fostering new narratives in relationship to its people, and itself in relationship to the world. Esty presents his 10 Theses in a supremely compelling chapter, “After Supremacy.” He holds that:
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American decline is neither catastrophic nor avoidable.
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The fate of American capitalism is not the fate of global capitalism.
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Global success leads to cultural and political stagnation for apex nations.
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Declinism projects scarcity and austerity, but even on the downslope elite nations and elites within nations retain wealth for generations.
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Hegemony describes an intranational and international set of relations.
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Belief in national superiority is part of the moral infrastructure of white supremacy.
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Rise-and-fall rhetoric reframes the expansion of empire as a masculine adventure.
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Epic tales of imperial rise-and-fall distort the narrative of national decline.
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The historical experience of the UK establishes the contours of decline culture, but American patterns will be different.
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Narratives about decline are more powerful than metrics and statistics.[5]
Declinism is pernicious precisely because it is imbricated in existing structures of racial, economic, gender, national and international inequity, and exploitation of people’s labor and of the planet’s natural resources. Decline, by contrast, opens possibilities of remedy and redress. New forms of sociality within a country and relations between countries are not inevitable on the other side of decline, but they are certainly easier to imagine and realize than under the current conditions of declinism.
