"Fire and ice."

How will America fail?

A Storm over the Rigi. J.M.W. Turner. 1844. Watercolor on paper. (Wikimedia Commons.)

To our readers. The Floutist has been traveling, most recently to deliver lectures in Switzerland. We ask that you bear with us on occasions, such as this, when our publication schedule is extended.

— C. M. and P. L.

15 APRIL—A decade ago I published a book wherein I reckoned the U.S. had 25 years to come to terms with the loss of the geopolitical primacy it had enjoyed for the previous seven decades. I called the book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. I took as my beginning date 2001, when, in my reasoning, the 11 September attacks in New York and Washington brought “the American century” to a stunningly abrupt close.

“Can America transform itself from a nation with a destiny into a nation with a purpose?” I drew this distinction from The Promise of American Life, a book Herbert Croly, the noted Progressive Era social critic, published in 1909. The question I posed was key to my case: Destiny, holding people in the space of timeless mythologies, confers upon them a semi-sacred “mission.” To have a purpose is to live in the stream of history, with earthly things to do. 

A century after Croly wrote his classic commentary, the events of 2001 had lent the transformation he proposed a new urgency. America could accomplish it, and so accept its place as one nation among many, with grace, wisdom, dignity, imagination, and a measure of courage. Others had made such passages successfully, I argued, and come out vastly the better for it. Or America could resist the turning of history’s wheel—resist the 21^st century altogether—and surrender its global hegemony only after a prolonged, incessantly destructive struggle to defend it. 

My prediction was not so difficult to make. And, 23 years after the traumatic attacks of 11 September 2001, the choice America’s purported leaders have made is now evident—gruesomely, disastrously evident. I wondered, as I prepared to write this commentary, whether the chaos, disorder, and human suffering that now overtake our world is without precedent in modern history. This may be a matter of judgment, but there can be no question at all that the United States, in its refusal to accept the realities of our new century, has dragged us into a very dark time of war, violence, and inhumanity.