This week Vice-President Biden eulogized the American job market: “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.” He then went on to the litany:
“We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.” [CBS News]
The story has not changed in over a year. Only the jobs figures grow more grim, more certain. Biden’s pronouncement only serves to confirm the picture of a changed America the March, 2009 issue of Atlantic Magazine featured in an article titled:
How the Crash Will Reshape America
The Great Depression was a national crisis—and in many ways a nationalizing event. The entire country, it seemed, tuned in to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
The current economic crisis is unlikely to result in the same kind of shared experience. To be sure, the economic contraction is causing pain just about everywhere. In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Economy.com* published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.
No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. Nonetheless, as the crisis continues to spread outward from New York, through industrial centers like Detroit, and into the Sun Belt, it will undoubtedly settle much more heavily on some places than on others. Some cities and regions will eventually spring back stronger than before. Others may never come back at all. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a wholeway of life.
And the German finance minister summarized it beautifully:
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008. As a result of the crisis, “the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire—the fall long prophesied by Paul Kennedy and others.
[Or as Fahreed Zakaria put it]: this transition is defined less by American decline than by “the rise of the rest.” We’re to look forward to a world economy, he wrote, “defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.”
The Glenn Beck Review
June 26, 2010
The decline of empires are historically violent periods. There are very few exceptions to this, possibly only one; and we’ve lived through it. The peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union was unique in history.
Will we be able to manage this decline without violent spasms, at least no more than we are already involved with? It’s not likely.
All empires fade away, and ours will too. Only the modern language is about the “decline of international power.” It’s just getting started in the financial sector in the last two years. The military sector may not be far behind.
Then what world order will be shaped? Bipolarity (two powerful states in balance)with China this time? Or can the world “think out of the box” as Glenn Beck puts it, and come up with what terrifies Beck, a democratic world goverance?