America in Decline

Choice or echo?

by Dinocrat

VDH on the self-destruction and growth of nations and cultures:

... There was no reason that Athens at 338 B.C. needed to lose to Philip of Macedon at the battle of Chaironeia, or even that the loss there meant the end of the freedom of the Greek city-states. Macedonian forces were a fraction of the size of a far larger Persian force that had swept down from the north into a far weaker Athens a century-and-half-earlier in 480 BC, and were soundly defeated.

... In terms of culture, no law in stone decreed that drama of the quality of the Orestia, Oedipus, Ajax, Bacchae, and Medea had to give way to the lesser sitcoms of Middle and New comedy of the fourth century BC. Complacency and collective loss of confidence, brought on by affluence, leisure, and poor leadership far better explain retrenchment than environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion, or financial implosion…

... If Rome was supposedly “doomed” by the 5th century AD, why did the Eastern Empire at Constantinople last another 1,000 years?…

... Why did a bombed out Frankfurt and Tokyo (200,000 incinerated in March 1945 alone) rather quickly out-produce a less damaged Liverpool (4,000 killed in the blitz) or another former industrial hub at Manchester? Between 1945-1949, the United Kingdom chose a path of deliberate retrenchment, redistributive large government, high taxes, and socialism that a once flattened, and suddenly desperate Germany and Japan did not…

We live in a most peculiar time. The possibilities for this nation are greater than they have ever been, and we have a gang in Washington — often on both sides of the aisle — who appear to embrace decline.

For no good reason at all.