Decadence (from the root ‘to decay’): to fall, sink; a period of decline
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy? A Republic, if you can keep it.”
–Benjamin Franklin, on the outcome of the American constitutional convention, 1788
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
--Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
I. Overview
In early August of 2003, the blood-red sun rose implacably over the city of Paris. It was the hottest summer on record in Europe since at least 1540. Temperatures were regularly hovering at a sweltering 40 degrees Celsius, or a blistering 104 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat rose to wholly unaccustomed levels, many people—particularly the elderly—started dying. According to the French National Institute of Health, in France alone 14,802 people died of heat-related complications that sun-baked August, with a full 70,000 perishing across the continent.
Curiously, most of the deaths in France centered on relatively healthy older people living alone without immediate family, and not the elderly requiring constant medical care. Those cut off from what Burke would have termed ‘society’ fared far worse than the obviously feeble. As Stephane Mantion, a French Red Cross official, put it, ‘The French family structure is more dislocated than elsewhere in Europe, and prevailing social attitudes hold that once older people are closed behind their apartment doors or in nursing homes, they are someone else’s problem.’
And indeed as is the case with most catastrophes, there was plenty of blame to go round. Who had really let these doomed, neglected people down? There were many reasons for the carnage. Europe itself was wholly unused to such scorching conditions; people did not know how to react, particularly the imperative to quickly re-hydrate. Most homes built in France over the past 50 years have no air conditioning, as excessive heat was rarely considered a major health hazard to account for.
Beyond these technical explanations there was obvious political and social fallout as predictably the Chirac-led government and the doctors union passed around the blame for the catastrophe as if it was a hot potato. The President and his Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, blamed French families for not taking proper care of their elderly relatives. Family doctors also came in for criticism, as their leisurely response to this flash crisis was not sufficiently urgent. Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei was seen as particularly sluggish, and was swiftly dispatched in an ensuing March 2004 cabinet reshuffle. And that was about it. After all the immediate sound and fury, life went on in Paris much as usual, the incident as quickly submerging as it had arisen.
But it shouldn’t be forgotten. This is not just because of the obvious moral imperative that at some level systemic neglect was responsible for an entirely avoidable tragedy. That is too easy. Instead, let us go through the looking glass and see what was really going on here, for it provides a seminal clue as to why western civilization itself is presently enduring such an existential crisis.
One basic overriding thread connects all the culprits in this August 2003 tragedy: The absolute and ridiculous sanctity of the French summer vacation. In the place of religion or ethics, many Europeans have come to worship their comfortable (if economically unsustainable) way of life as the paramount goal of being, to the exclusion of all else.
At the time of the early August crisis, President Chirac was on holiday in Canada. He remained there for the duration of the heat wave. Likewise, Prime Minister Raffarin refused to return from his Alpine vacation until August 14th, the day before temperatures at last began to cool. Health Minister Mattei also exhibited highly dubious priorities, refusing to come back to a sweltering Paris when he was most needed. Instead his junior aides blocked emergency measures—including the state recalling doctors from their holidays—to attend to the afflicted.
But even this is too simple. Do French doctors really need to be told by the government that it is their duty to come back and deal with an obvious medical emergency? Do French families really need the state to instruct them that they must cut short their time at the beach to minister to endangered elderly relatives they had left behind?
This was a societal-wide conspiracy, in that no one was responsible because everyone was responsible. The overwhelming point is that literally thousands of individual, personal decisions—on their own merely dots in the national painting—all pointed in the same incredible, indefensible direction. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of Le vacances. Surely the moral imperative here ought to have obvious, heartbreakingly it wasn’t. The fact that these questions were not asked—or were more often quickly brushed aside—reveals the core problem that ails the West.
The term for it is decadence.
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Meanwhile, the American public is spending the lion’s share of its free time resembling a potted plant in front of a television while the country plunges directly into an iceberg. According to Nielsen, Americans spend on average 148 hours a month (6.1 days) watching television. Given that one-third of a month is spent sleeping and another third spent working, of their ten days left—during which people presumably eat, brush their teeth, walk the dog--Americans have opted to spend…six-tenths of that time passively in front of a box.
Even worse than the quantity of time is the quality of what they are watching. The prominence and huge popularity of reality TV, where D-list celebrities eat maggots in front of millions, is profoundly disturbing. Ethan Zuckerman, the Director for the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has come up with an ingenious tool for measuring America’s proud cluelessness…The Kardashian.
He defines the Kardashian with some precision. Named after the ubiquitous celebrity family that is the exemplar for attention wholly disconnected from merit, talent, or reason; it measures the inappropriately famous. Above all, it gauges how far America has strayed from any form of collective sanity; one does not need to be an elitist to go out on a limb and note that following the goings on of the Kardashian clan is a colossal waste on anyone’s time.
The Kardashian chronicles the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian and her even lesser family commands across all media over the space of a day; it is a unit of media attention. One Kardashian (determined by comparing Google’s Insight searches on any given day for any news story with how often people without anything to do trawl to see what Kim happens to be wearing) is a brilliant concept, as it gets at the Olympian disconnect between attention and importance that so characterizes and maims modern American life.
Devised by Dr. Zuckerman in anger at the neglect shown by the celebrity-obsessed public to the famine in the Horn of Africa, he calculated that the starvation of tens of thousands was worth only 1/23rd of a Kardashian, meaning Kim and her gormless sisters received 23 times the attention that the plight of Africa aroused.
But this result was not some anomaly. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons netted a result of .63 of a Kardashian, the Syrian uprising came in at .37, with the ongoing war in Afghanistan scoring a paltry .25. Even the momentous Egyptian revolution—the centrepiece of the Arab Spring--fell before the black hole of reality TV; its coverage amounted to .75 of a Kardashian. Nothingness has well and truly vanquished the world.
All this seeming nonsense has real and hugely damaging real world consequences. Perhaps at the head of the list is that this loss of value--of being able to gauge what matters and what eminently does not, as what is rewarded in society no longer bares any relation to inherent merit—has left us with a rising generation that is wrongly convinced of its talent. The American Freshman Survey, which annually focuses on 18-19 year olds just entering college, reaches conclusions that all of us who have been around college kids can identify with: They all think they live in a music video.
Those just polled are more likely than ever to label themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores (already shamefully inflated to keep up appearances) and time spent studying are in decline compared with previous eras. Over the past 30 years, the survey has faithfully chronicled an increase in narcissism of around 30%, in terms of those answering valuing the personal at the expense of any feelings of obligations to others. In the wake of the Kardashians is it surprising that we have created a generation of deluded narcissists, where the power of positive thinking has somehow superseded reality in America?
America’s Founders worried about exactly this. Just after the Convention of 1788 had birthed the Constitution, as he left the Philadelphia State House for the last time, Benjamin Franklin was asked by his friend Elizabeth Powel what form of government had been produced inside. The sage of America enigmatically replied, ‘A republic, madam, if you can keep it.’ His fears were in line with those of grave, passionate, farseeing John Adams who cried out, ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.’ The founders knew that freedom for all--wonderful as it appeared on the surface--unless ameliorated by education, personal wisdom, and restraint, contains the very seeds of its own destruction.
Schooled as they were in the demises of the few, rare Republics that came before them, the Founders were haunted by Plato’s gibe that in democracies the lowest common cultural and social denominator eventually wins out. The classical Greek critique of democracy (updated for the present age) goes like this: In a democratic system, politicians typically win elections by committing themselves to what attracts the most voters. Since voters like to receive benefits from government, but rabidly dislike being taxed to pay for them, all the practical incentives are for politicians to adopt policies that increase spending at a far greater rate than revenues. Over time, this must lead to economic disaster. Unthinking citizens—caring only about themselves and the present moment—are highly likely to hurry this process along. This victory of the mindless majority eventually destroys all in its path, leading to disorder, moral decline, chaos and then tyranny.
The snake in the garden from the beginning of America has always been the threat of destruction from within: The all-important race between educating the whole of society to produce knowledgeable citizens capable of helping shoulder the Republic’s burden, versus letting freedom be wasted on the willfully unknowing who partake of that freedom without giving anything back. It is little wonder many of the Founders spent their declining years starting universities in the hope that a wider public education would save America from itself.
Jefferson’s splendid University of Virginia is just the best known example; almost all the Founders wrote that only with public exposure to the things that really matter could Republican decline and decay be kept at bay. This was not some altruistic desire, but rather a very practical prerequisite for making representative government work. How can people govern themselves wisely if they don’t know anything?
It amuses and horrifies me to imagine what the Founders would make of the Kardashian and American popular culture in general, unexposed as they were to the present barrage of American intellectual mediocrity produced for the mass public. We suspect Alexander Hamilton would instinctively reach for his dueling pistols, seeing such cultural decay as a direct threat to the future of the country; one might wish him better luck this time.
The term for this is decadence.
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For Europe’s part, and in marked contrast to the rising powers, the current economic crisis has discredited capitalism itself in many quarters, without putting any other sustainable economic system in its place. Given their growth rates of the past decade, it is not necessary to lecture either the Chinese or Indian leaderships about the merits of the capitalistic system, for all its flaws, as the primary engine of growth and power. The same is not true for many Europeans.
At base, this is as much an intellectual and moral problem as anything else. The abetting sin of modern Germany is summed up in the word schadenfreude, which roughly translated is to take enjoyment from the misfortune of others. When the others are wealthy or famous, a very unsavory, barely concealed German glee is often the response. For the German pathology is about social envy, a jealousy of the successful. The problem is that Germans—despite being what’s left of the economic motor of Europe—tend to agree with Karl Marx that all property is a crime, that all wealth is based on some unfair maneuvering. To put it mildly, this makes it very hard to run a capitalistic society.
A prime example is the recent scandal that had all Germans talking: The fact that the high-flying, young, dashing, aristocratic Minister for Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had been sloppy with the footnotes for his PhD thesis, and plagiarized portions of his submission. This story--allowing Germans to wallow in the trivial rather than engaging with more dreary and important matters relating to being on the hook for Greek debt--dominated weeks of the country’s attention.
To be transparent let me say that zu Guttenberg is a personal friend of mine and a valued colleague, working with me over the years on matters relating to transatlantic relations as well as to the Iran crisis. I find him by far the best foreign policy mind among young German policymakers that I have met in the 15 years I have been engaging German politicians. Of course what he did was wrong. Of course he should not be given a PhD for such moral and practical mistakes. And I accept the view that resignation from his position should have happened, given his moral lapse.
Saying all this, ‘PhDgate’ hardly makes zu Guttenberg Charles Manson. You would not know that to hear the commentary in the German press—equal parts joyous and censorious--where the consensus view was that zu Guttenberg must be ‘punished.’ Listening to this shrill and all-encompassing roar from the commentariat for weeks at a time (with Fukushima, the Greek crisis, and the future of the EU all being eclipsed), it became pretty obvious what was going on here.
Good-looking, extremely wealthy, talented, well-married (zu Guttenberg’s wife is the direct descendent of Otto von Bismarck and beautiful to boot), zu Guttenberg was getting his comeuppance from people who didn’t hate what he did. Instead they hated what he was. Rather than his departure being seen as a tragedy for a country desperately in need of talented young leaders, his downfall became an orgy of joyful recrimination. Such a response is as telling as it is dangerous. Only the talented can save Europe from its peril. Perhaps they should not be run out of town on a rail.
The term for it is decadence.
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Throughout this past decade, the other pillar of Western Civilization—the United States, easily the most powerful country in the world—was up to its ears in similar moral confusions, if over a very different issue. After its thumping victory over Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, it quickly became clear that there was no comprehensive plan to replace the Baathist state in Iraq that America had just destroyed.
There was no plan to control public unrest and looting; there was no plan to cull the blooming insurgency; there was no plan to secure Iraq’s borders; there was no plan to deal with entirely predictable ethno-religious violence; there was no plan to engage legitimate representatives of the Shiite majority, such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the most popular man in the country. There was not even a plan to protect the nuclear materials at the Tuwaitha power station from falling into the hands of terrorists—something the whole war was supposed to have been about.
No one had bothered to think through what the pulverization of Iraq would mean for geopolitics in the vital Persian Gulf--a region where 40% of the world’s sea-borne oil exports pass—and for basic American national interests. Yet the geopolitical math can be explained to a five year old. There are only three significant powers in the region: Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Though economically a great power, the Saudis (due to demography) remain a military dwarf; every Saudi could fly an F-16 and they still wouldn’t have the latent military capabilities of either Tehran or Baghdad. The Saudis matter, but will never be dominant.
That leaves only Iran and Iraq. If Iraq is shattered that leaves only….Iran. Surprise, surprise, the Iraq war’s overwhelming strategic consequence has been to leave the Islamic Republic of Iran--America’s primary nemesis in the Middle East—as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and this at the cost of over $1 trillion of American money. This Kafkaesque outcome was entirely foreseeable and entirely avoidable. And yet it was allowed to happen. Again, why?
The neoconservative clique that ran the war failed to take any of this into account, despite formal warnings by experts on just these subjects in the intelligence community, think tanks, and the State Department—warnings that were deliberately and willfully ignored. Fatuously, it was felt that following the awesome display of American military might, Iraqis would just fall into line, embracing democracy imposed from the barrel of an alien gun.
Beyond all this, the Bush administration was ridiculously confident--despite its lack of intellectual curiosity--it could remake and transform an Iraqi state of which it knew almost nothing; as if societal transformation without a wealth of local knowledge was remotely possible. Nor were they alone. I well remember attending a senior meeting of the great and the good at the Council on Foreign Relations on what to do about Iraq, where it soon became painfully obvious that no one in the room (for all the glittering credentials) had ever been there.
Yet that did not seem to dim lazy, easy, confidence that Iraqi society could be magically transformed with little difficulty. After all, what did it matter if they were wrong? Given America’s limitless economic and geopolitical power, the personal consequences for those involved in running and supporting the war were bound to be negligible.
In the case of Iraq, Americans knew how to break things, but almost nothing about how to put them back together. The Bush administration resembled nothing so much as the feckless Tom and Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s peerless masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’
Predictably, after a decade of bloodshed and misadventure, Washington slunk away, leaving the battered people of the Mesopotamian region to spend the rest of their lives picking up the pieces. The almost beyond comprehension ISIS was the direct result. This is not just some intellectual or administrative miscalculation, but a profound ethical lapse, one of willfully ignoring the foreseeable.
The term for what occurred is decadence. It is the primary explanation for these four very different stories. Far more than this, it is the single greatest reason for nothing less than the end of 500 years of western global dominance.
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In the spring of 2011, I made one of my habitual trips back to Washington from Europe, making the rounds over the course of the week with insider DC friends and colleagues, staying plugged into one of the tightest-knit fraternities in the world.
Over the course of twenty-some meetings that week, a mesmerizing and altogether worrying pattern emerged. Whatever the coffee shop, restaurant, or dimly lit bar, my Dutch colleague and I brought up the unthinkable: Isn’t America its own greatest security risk? Are not domestic and increasingly unsolved home-grown ills--ranging from cultural worship of television and talentless celebrity to extreme political polarisation and an exploding debt—dooming America to decline? In almost every case, over these twenty encounters, the mood changed, my friends’ eyes invariably narrowed, they leaned forward, looked nervously about, and all said much the same striking thing.
Be they foreign policy hawk or dove, Republican or Democrat, inside or outside the administration (we met them all), the response was always the same. ‘Yes, John, of course we are in relative decline, and of course we haven’t begun to alter our policies to adjust for that. But you mustn’t use the word decline here in DC, or you will be branded a defeatist and never listened to again.’ Then always, invariably, the subject was abruptly changed, and as quickly as possible.
But it is not the use of the word ‘decline’ that should be worrying to all of us in the west; it should be the objective fact that we are in decline that perhaps we should concentrate on. If we cannot get to the place of acknowledging what is going on before our very eyes--as my friends in an effort to save their careers, surely could not--then we are very far gone, indeed.
Europe, if anything, outdoes America’s pathologies. Having wholly disregarded the linked ideas of work and benefits, the UK and Europe (in Peter Hitchens’s damning view) live in a world where, ‘The very idea that people should provide for themselves has become a horrible heresy, a barbaric view that no civilized person can hold.’ The cynical conspiracy between an electorate who doesn’t wish to hear that their lifestyle is simply no longer affordable and a political elite that fears the mere mention of tough choices has anesthetized Europeans from the realities of the world, but only for the moment. However, cracks in the European façade are beginning to appear. As a liberated Prime Minister Cameron blurted out at Davos in January 2013, ‘Europe is being out-competed, out-invested, and out-innovated.’
On both sides of the Atlantic things then are approaching the terminal, a tipping point at which decline becomes the only reality, with examples of western decadence all around us. For my old Washington friends are wrong. Rather than tiptoe around pretending the West isn’t in peril, we should shout this from the rooftops. Only then, can we begin to grapple with what needs to be done to save the western way of life. It is in answer to the cowardice I encountered that is why this essay is being written, and being written now.
Something is very wrong with the world. Publics in the West sense this, mostly as a general feeling of unease, even if they uncomfortably cannot place the exact cause of the malaise. They do know the list of problems confronting the developed world is daunting and growing. Worse, they can clearly see that western governments and western society itself is simply not up to the task of meeting the immediate challenges strewn in their path.
A Public Policy survey of January 2013 found that of those polled Congress had an approval rating of a miniscule 9%, with an overwhelming 85% disapproving of its efforts. This placed it behind the popularity of head lice, cockroaches, and root canals, which were also measured. The RealClearPolitics Right Track/Wrong Track average as of January 2, 2013 makes for sobering reading: 35% of Americans polled feel the US is on the right track generally, a whopping 55% believe America has somehow gone horribly wrong.
It is not too much to say that there is ample practical evidence, dots seemingly unrelated on the societal map, that confirm the existence of a fundamental crisis in the democratic legitimacy of the current governments of the West. In all three major centres of the modern West (America, Europe, and Japan) the massive and intractable problems of political dysfunction, economic sclerosis and debt, and societal decay have become all-too apparent. Particularly in the two primary pillars of the west—America and Europe—these existential crises have emerged seemingly out of nowhere. There is little doubt that we are moving towards a bipolar or multipolar era, just as there is little doubt that the West has yet to develop a coherent strategy to manage this systemic change, and to thrive in this new world.
According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, in 2000 the EU accounted for 25% of all global product, trailed closely by the US at 23%, with China bringing up the rear at 7%. By 2030, a blink of the eye in historical terms, these numbers are set to be dramaticallyreversed, with China accounting for 19% of global product, the US 16%, the EU countries 15%, and India (up to now a blip on the global economic screen) amounting to 9%.
While the global economic crisis provided a bolt of lightning to illuminate this trend of power ebbing away from the West and migrating toward Asia, the pattern was established long before, harkening back to Deng Xiaoping’s opening in December 1978 and to then Indian Finance Minister Singh’s liberalising efforts in the early 1990s. From an admittedly low base, China and India have experienced an unprecedented two-decade economic boom. Even before the Lehman Brothers crisis hit in 2008, China and India together accounted for more than one-half of all global economic growth generated. Whether the West is prepared or not (and it isn’t) the world is clearly on course for a radical change in the distribution of both global economic and political power.
Meanwhile the West, like doomed passengers on the Titanic, has spotted the economic iceberg dead ahead, but made precious little effort to right the ship of state’s course. In Europe, the demographic problem is especially stark. Already one-quarter of the indigenous European population is over the age of 60. At the exact moment its share of world GDP is set to shrink substantially between now and 2025 (from 26-15%), its demographic bill is coming due.
And the bill is already ruining all efforts to emerge from the post-Lehman wreckage, leaving Europe economically stagnant. In March 2013 the European Commission announced that it projected that euro-zone GDP is set to contract this year for the third time in five years, with overall unemployment having reached record levels in February 2013. Overall debt in the euro-zone countries stands at 90%, explosively above the 70% level it was at as recently as early 2010.
Even in austerity-driven Britain, entitlement commitments are devastating efforts to crawl out of the deficit hole. British social security spending is set to increase from 28.5% of all government spending in 2010-11 to 32.5% by 2017-18. In effect, much of the decrease in spending so painfully achieved elsewhere is simply being gobbled up by even higher spending on entitlements, especially related to pensioner’s benefits.
Over the course of the next decade, German retirees will grow from one-fifth to one-third of the population, while the overall number of Germans shrinks by one-tenth; who is going to pay for those endless vacations and for the overly generous social safety net? The broad policy responses are as simple as they are unpalatable: Raise taxes (hardly possible), lower benefits and raise the retirement age (hardly popular), or take in significantly greater numbers of immigrants (hardly likely). Instead, a fin de siècle sunset is descending on the continent. Rather than facing up to these monstrous problems just ahead, surely another piece of cake is in order?
The very means to provide part of the answer to Europe’s systemic economic problems--greater liberalisation and labor market reforms leading to higher systemic growth rates--has been severely intellectually discredited. But without the motor of the market driving economic innovation, it is very hard to see how Europe--should it choose to address its existential economic problems--can successfully slay the demographic dragon it confronts.
The seemingly never-ending euro crisis perfectly illustrates the continent’s haplessness in the face of reality. The never-discussed economics lurking beneath it all bears concerted thought for a moment: EU countries comprise eight-nine percent of the world’s population, account for 25% of global GDP, but consume a staggering 50% of the planet’s social spending. However many mind-numbing summits Europe’s leaders foist upon the rest of us, however often they repeat the comforting mantra that ‘More Europe’ will save the continent from the dangers that lurk all around them, the bleak truth is that these numbers are simply unsustainable. Europe is not going through some little local difficulty; the way of life it has known and enjoyed from 1950 to the Lehman crash will never return.
The vaunted European social safety net--designed in the 1950s and 1960s when Europe’s growth rates were the envy of the world—has not decreased one jot now that the continent competes on the capitalist field of battle with low-wage economic giants, such as China, Turkey, India, Indonesia and Brazil.
Rather, as Europe has slipped into an economic coma with negligible growth, its laughably lavish rates of public spending have continued on as if nothing had changed; a system created during the very favorable economic circumstances of the post-World War II era has gone heedlessly on, even though we live in a very different time. But free markets on the continent simply can no longer provide enough wealth to pay for the entitlement largesse which European general publics have been led to expect is their birthright. It is an intractable economic, psychological, and above all, a moral problem.
This is because despite the economic data being available to all, no European statesman in their right mind would tell their constituencies the inconvenient truth that over time benefits reflect a country’s economic success, and are not a God-given right. To do so would be to commit political suicide. To not do so is to enable the European electorate to live in its current fantasy world, where the link between growth and what a state can actually afford to provide has been irretrievably broken. It is a form of decadence.
But if Europe is burying its head in the economic sand, America, too, is failing to deal with the perilous structural problems that lie dead ahead. The imminent rise of the American debt burden--and both parties’ signal inability to confront this reality--epitomize the cancer lying at the heart of the American political system.
In terms of America’s freedom of action, this is debilitating in the long-term as foreign investors hold over half the American debt, with China alone owed $1.4 trillion. As Jefferson put it, ‘we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.’ Remember these numbers the next time a politician of any stripe goes on television, selling the comforting snake oil that we have no real problem here.
In February 2013, the CBO estimated that the government is on track to grow the deficit by $6-9 trillion over the next decade. In line with these estimates, White House projections suggest an average deficit of 5.5% being run for the next decade, far above what almost all economists find to be a sustainable level. In both cases, the narrative is the same: The brief fiscal respite of the present will come to an abrupt end, as the real tsunami hits; when the profligate, feckless baby boomers retire en masse. The reason for this is a series of long-term bills coming due at the same time the American political system seems chronically unserious about tackling the country’s structural economic problems.
By 2020, the top 5 elements of the federal budget—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense Spending, and paying the interest on the debt—will account for 80% of all federal spending. Clearly, failure to innovate and change this scenario will hasten American decline.
And it is a case of apocalypse now. For the first time, Social Security is paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes; this has been true of Medicare since 2008. Either the economic elephant in the corner of the room will be recognized and dealt with, or he is likely to trample the rest of us under foot.
One-third of all working age Americans have no private retirement savings of any kind, only that publicly provided by Social Security. FDR’s marquee social program was designed to help the very old (at the time) get from about 60 to 62; it was not and has never been intended as an alternative to individuals taking financial charge over their declining years. With people now regularly living beyond 80, in the words of the great Johnny Mercer, ‘Something’s Gotta Give.’
The root cause of this is decadence. It must be acknowledged, and then it must be overcome if the West is to survive.