Where to now for the American dream?

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Where to now for the American dream?

By Review by Tim Lynch

POLITICS

Behold, America: A history of America First and the American dream
Sarah Churchwell
Bloomsbury, $26.99

In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred McCoy.

In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred McCoy.

In the Shadows of the American Century: The rise and decline of US global power
Alfred W. McCoy
Oneworld $34.99

Two new books complain about where the United States is at and describe how it got there. While dealing in different case studies, the authors are united in seeing America decline for many of the same reasons: internal decay (Churchwell) and over-extension abroad (McCoy). Their compelling accounts – readable, fluent, jargon-free – are partly right and partly wrong.

Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell.

Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell.

Sarah Churchwell is a British-based academic, originally from Illinois. She has written several popular books on American culture that have earned her regular spots in the op-ed pages of London and New York newspapers. In an era when academics depressingly prosper by ploughing narrow furrows, Churchwell has set herself up as a public intellectual.

Behold, America advances her claim to that status. It is a study of two dominant, but according to Churchwell, misunderstood, impulses in American history: the American Dream, which we foreigners rather like but which means nothing, and America First, which we don't but which means a lot. We are wrong on both counts, says the author.

We are wrong about the Dream because it doesn't exist, it appears in no foundational text, and "we just have no idea what it means anymore". We are wrong about America First in wanting to see it as a recent aberration when it has been present for at least the last 100 years.

The bogeyman in all this, argues Churchwell, are Fred Trump and his son, Donald. The current president is adored by his base as the embodiment of the American Dream, even though their hero declared it "dead" on inaugural day. Rather, writes the author, he rose politically by channelling xenophobia and racism – inherited from his father – into a re-awakened America First movement.

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Sarah Churchwell and Alfred W. McCoy's new books explain America's decline.

Sarah Churchwell and Alfred W. McCoy's new books explain America's decline.Credit: Elizabeth Parker

According to Churchwell, Fred was a bit-part player in Ku Klux Klan rallies in the 1920s. Donald turned this paternal prejudice into a winning presidential platform in the 2010s. Churchwell charts this evolution – "a pattern we haven't yet discerned" – across the last century.

America First was and remains a flirtation with everything vile about the last century, from the lynching of African Americans to German fascism. The American Dream, however, continues to offer hope of progress. They are in competition with each other. Positing "a dream" was Martin Luther King's greatest rhetorical device. His dream decries inequality and the excesses of American capitalism; America First, as Churchwell recounts, was a means to perpetuate those excesses.

Relying on newspaper sources from the 1920s to the '40s, she describes the rise of a dark nativism that was in "open conflict" with the aspirational dream of what American might be. McCarthyism in the 1950s tilted toward the darkness, progressivism in the 1960s tilted toward the light. Obama's 2009 "yes we can" light tilted back towards Trump's 2017 dark "carnage".

There is a rushed quality to the writing, as if a deadline obliged her to stop in 1945 and just project forward, in op-ed style. But the argument is an intriguing one. Scholars of the "meaning of America" (her phrase) divide on whether it tends toward the darkness or the light. Some see a perpetual cycle of one then the other. Under Trump, Churchwell sees only darkness.This pessimism is extended across a larger geography by Alfred McCoy. If you had spent your academic career in Wisconsin you might, like McCoy, have fixated on more exotic places. An expert in Southeast Asian (particularly Philippine) history, he has been documenting the follies of American behaviour in Australia's near abroad for several decades. His latest book is a eulogy to the demise of US power – something he claims is as inevitable as it is to be welcomed. Trump's infamous phone call with Malcolm Turnbull in January 2017 is cited as evidence of a US that can no longer hold its subordinates in check, "weakening one of Washington's key means of control on the Pacific littoral and beyond." But American problems are considerably deeper than this.

Key to the decline of America as a global power are decisions its government has taken – the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a disaster from which it cannot recover – and the opportunity this has presented to others to displace it, China being the key beneficiary. It is just a matter of time, argues McCoy, before Beijing overtakes the US. And America deserves to be overtaken. The Chinese have played a far cannier and long-term game. The Americans, in contrast, have succumbed to hubris and short-termism.

McCoy's case sounds compelling. But each generation, since the birth of the US 23 decades ago, has been taught that its decline was imminent. In 1800, the elites of Europe scoffed that a nation of backwoodsmen could not run a continental republic. After those elites were destroyed in World War I, it was the US that picked up the pieces. The USSR in the 1960s said it would "bury" America. But it was the Soviet Union that vanished in 1992.

Eventually, predictions of US demise will be right. Just not yet. McCoy makes two key errors. He underestimates the flexibility of the American system and he exaggerates the coherence of its presumed replacer, the People's Republic of China. Like Churchwell, he sees an internal darkness robbing the US of the structure and culture to make decisions that might extend the global market for its power. There was strong market-demand after 1945 as it waged a global war against communism. Americans assumed the demand would be renewed after 2001 as it waged a global war on terror.

Instead, argues McCoy, September 11, 2001 created a "military miasma" (in Afghanistan and Iraq, most obviously) that convinced allies and opponents that "America's global power had reached its limits". China took note and organised accordingly. Seemingly incapable of a counter-counter response, it has been downhill since then for the US. And there will be "no soft-landing", the author warns us.

Born in 1945, the author says on page 1 that wars, motivated by an "unbending ambition for global Pax Americana", have shaped his homeland. And, nearly 80 years later, they will be its undoing. This Americentric analysis downplays China's imperfections. Yet surely these are at least as great as those of the contemporary US? McCoy bemoans the prevalence of American war in his lifetime, but a Chinese citizen of the same age would know worse: civil war, famine, the profound dislocations of cultural revolution and now a renewed autocracy. And yet from this experience, China is meant to craft a world order capable of replacing the one America made.

By concentrating on America first, both these books rather assume the alternatives cannot be worse. Churchwell detests Trump. But perhaps his temporary power is indicative of a system not mired in racism but one capable of experimentation, of lurching from light to dark, and still retaining national unity and constitutional government.

Likewise, McCoy needs us to buy his description of endemic American weakness and to forget the country's only serious rivals are a communist autocracy (China) and a chaotic democracy (India). We are, as his title suggests, "in the shadow of the American century", but the shadow, given the absence of a clear alternative, will be a long one.

Tim Lynch is Associate Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne. He is writing a Cambridge history of post-Cold War US foreign policy. He tweets @tim_lynchphd

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