Good Morning, Everyone –

And welcome back to the seminar, particularly you folks from IC-7, who fell off the Link during our last two meetings. I’m sure we’ll perfect instant communication with all the Ionian colonies one of these lifetimes but, alas, it just doesn’t appear that it’s going to during be this one...

Anyhow, it’s good to see you all, and I trust you’ve used the recreation interval since last we met to good effect, but not too good! Believe it or not, you’re not the first class and I’m not the first professor to struggle with students nodding off during an amazingly fascinating lecture. Supposedly, this has been going on ever since there have been students and professors! Imagine that.

I hope today will be an exception, however, and not because of the brilliance of your instructor, but rather because of the exceptional relevance, significance and just plain interesting nature of our subject.

When last we left off in our survey of the history of Later Earth Civilization (using the term ‘civilization’, as always, loosely), we had finished slogging through the horrors of the twentieth century, a time when the nexus of a globalized scope of interaction, industrialized violence, high technology and religions – both secular and not – brought a planet several times to the edge of the abyss. By the combination of good fortune and exceedingly large down payments in blood and agony, the human race managed to end the century having narrowly avoided catastrophe, and finding itself with a new and rare opportunity to forge a different and better planetary consensus around appropriate values and behaviors.

Which brings us to today’s story, the pivotal turn-of-the-century period three centuries ago, lasting from about 1990 to 2010, a drama of Shakespearean quality during which everything changed and then changed again, a time when conditions truly added up to constitute one of those rare genuine linchpins of history.

You might be tempted to think that some of those who survived the horrors of the twentieth century would have learned much from that sobering experience and acted accordingly. And, despite the predominant disdain in which we typically hold our ancestors from this time, you’d be actually be quite correct. It’s just that they were the wrong people. Europeans, who had hosted centuries of calamitous fratricidal wars finally got a enough wisdom together after the devastation of the Second World War to be able to discriminate between wars that were both just and necessary, and those that were not. Unfortunately, however, Europe in 1945 was largely a heap of rubble, and while the continent later grew economically prosperous, it remained by the turn of the century still somewhat peripheral to the major tributaries of international politics.

Not so, unfortunately, on either score for Europe’s errant child across the Atlantic. I’m afraid that the newly ascendant American hyperpower was neither chastened by war nor peripheral to power. It was, in fact, a highly arrogant and belligerent nation that, by 2000, was also the world’s only superpower by a long shot. Bad combination.

America had already been bellicose enough as it was feeling its oats throughout the twentieth century, but then what one historian has aptly named the Most Narcissistic Generation in History came to power. These were, of course, the so-called Baby Boomers, the highly indulged progeny of the so-called Greatest Generation, who weren’t so great, after all, when it came to child-rearing. The latter-day Napoleons they raised were the walking personification of what used to be described as the ‘id’, the part of human psychology that wants what it wants when it wants it.

This ascension of the ids produced all sorts of consequences domestically, of course, such as the absurd belief that you could have both public services and no taxes at the same time, with the resulting rapid deterioration of the country’s intellectual, moral and physical infrastructure, as education and bridges crumbled just as assuredly as had the US’s social safety net, already quite minimal to start with. These, of course, were America’s problems, arguably richly deserved by an undeserving rich (though not necessarily their children), and thus are less of our concern today, strictly speaking, to the extent that they didn’t impact others.

Unfortunately, however, the country’s relations with the rest of the world were, if can be imagined, even more infantile in character than its self-indulgences at home, to the point where the US wound up imperiling an entire planet.

The first Baby Boomer president was a cipher long forgotten to history by the name of William Clinton. Scholars struggled for years trying to decode his ideological commitments until one rather clever analyst pointed out that there weren’t any. “The ideology of Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton”, he noted, and he showed how this explained both Clinton’s perpetual pandering to whatever nothingburger idea du jour that polls showed was currently in the winds as well as the near complete irrelevance to which history has rightly consigned his presidency. Clinton is often reduced down to the absurd impeachment proceedings that were levied against him, but even that gives him too much credit. If there is one thing that best personifies this presidency it is the acts for which he was nominally impeached. His version of sex with his young intern was as non-committal and self-reverential as was the rest of his eight years in office: He couldn’t quite bring himself to do the actual deed with her, but instead played around the edges then went into the Oval Office bathroom and finished the matter on autopilot, in the sink. [Boisterous laughter] I know, I know... Well, don’t forget that the sexual mores of the time were as primitive as the sexual technology! [More laughter]

But I digress, and Clinton did have one important legacy, after all. He both personified the Democratic Party in America in its multi-decade descent through treasonous abandonment of its constituents and ultimately into ideological irrelevance, and he also gave it the greatest push in that direction of anyone outside of Wall Street. By the time later that half of America would come to completely lose its senses, the party representing Clinton’s half could hardly figure out anymore what it stood for, apart from avoiding controversy, that is, which it inevitably got slapped with anyhow.

Which brings us, of course, to the infamous era of the second Bush presidency and the rise of the rabid right in America. Historians still love to debate which historical figure better combined callous destructiveness, sheer personal absurdity and amoral sociopathic degeneracy – was it Caligula of Rome or America’s Bush the Younger? Hard to say, hard to say. Of course, neither figure was as outright murderous as Stalin or Hitler. But then neither of those two thugs were responsible for wrecking a relatively thriving democratic tradition in their respective countries, as did our boy Bush. And neither Stalin nor Hitler injected the embarrassing levels of moronic immaturity into their depredations that young W did, leaving Bush in a class by himself as the Clown Prince of American politics. Just listening to him speak – with his slurred pronunciations, his breathtaking malapropisms, his embarrassing over-emphasis of terms he had obviously just learned, and his substitution of smirking plaintiveness for persuasive argument – this is an experience I simultaneously both wish for you as historians, and would hope that you could avoid as decent human beings. It boggles the mind that twenty-first century humans could actually listen to this caterwauling for eight years without requiring medical intervention.

Bush was the at the apex of a remarkably malignant movement which was prevalent in the United States during his time. No people – not even the Romans – had ever experienced the global power, prosperity and influence America had in the late twentieth century. And yet, astonishingly, neither has anybody ever matched Americans at that time for their fear, paranoia and insularity, and their willingness to indulge those emotions in the most shameless behaviors abroad. Bush’s movement – the Regressive Right – mobilized these sentiments into the most crass and bellicose foreign policy America had ever known, with domestic policies to match. Of course, the great irony in all this was that throughout, the elites of this movement secretly laughed at the religious patsies whose fears of their own precarious masculinity made them prime fodder to be enlisted as shock troops in what was ultimately actually a kleptocratic campaign of pure class warfare.

Americans eventually caught on – or at least as much as late-period Americans could ever be said to have understood anything – but by then enormous damage had been done, both to the republic, and by the (now former) republic, abroad. Years of political dumbing-down paid off handsomely for conservatives, as the American body politic gladly participated in the dismantling of its own democratic traditions with hardly a peep of protest. No other president was as fiscally irresponsible as Bush. None damaged America’s military and its reputation more than he. None of his predecessors managed to lose two wars through sheer incompetence, let alone against relatively defeatable ‘enemies’. None exacerbated a known environmental holocaust rather than preventing it. None fiddled as a major city drowned. None remained on vacation while threats of a major attack were ringing alarm bells. None so politicized the government to the extent that even political opponents were arrested and tried simply because of their party affiliation. None stole two elections, or so radically cheapened the currency of American political discourse. No president so thoroughly dismantled the major provisions of the American Constitution, such as separation of powers, Congressional oversight, respect for treaty obligations, search and seizure restraint, due process, habeas corpus, and more. And, astonishingly, no president ever did all these things simultaneously.

Even Americans could eventually figure this one out. [Laughter] By the time Bush attacked his third Islamic country, late in his second stolen term, he was already viscerally hated at home and largely protected from impeachment only by the combination of general public indifference to politics and a clock which was running down anyways. Of course, in the classic fashion of his personal Machiavelli, Karl Rove, the bombing of Iran was meant to buy time through duress, in the hope that another wartime scare would be sufficient to keep Bush and Cheney in office past the constitutionally limited end of their terms, and thus kept safe from prosecution by being the prosecution.

By this time, of course, the even the hapless American public had finally had enough, and I needn’t recount the story of what came next – you’ve all seen the classic video reels of the two being dragged from office and tossed into jails, where Bush spent the rest of his unhappy natural life. (I don’t need to remind you of the evil Mr. Cheney’s quite famous but rather less happy fate). [Loud laughter] Not even the military rode to their rescue, and the few movement regressives who appeared on the streets attempting to defend the coup were furiously attacked by a public which had somehow finally reached the limit of its endurance.

But, of course, the damage was well done by that point. America plunged precipitously from its prior high perch as the undisputed economic, military and cultural leader of the world community down to a status that was, shall we say, somewhat rather less distinguished. The hatred directed toward the country from abroad was mostly undiluted by the relief that it had finally come to an approximation of its senses. This was especially true when the effects of global warming peaked in the 2040s, and people everywhere remembered that, not only had five percent of the world’s population in the United States produced twenty-five percent of the greenhouse gases whose effect was then ravaging the planet, but that its government had actively worked to dismantle even the feeblest prior international efforts to prevent a disaster of such completely unprecedented and horrifying magnitude.

By this time, of course, the United States had already known its share of distress, as if it were being subjected to a biblical succession of plagues. Its fiscal house was a disaster, and when Chinese creditors pulled the plug on their share of the $17 trillion in debt the country had rung up, the economy was plunged into chaos, and the currency became wheelbarrow worthless. The unrelenting wave of terrorist strikes in the US by angry Iraqis and Iranians whose relatives had been slaughtered by the American military machine was followed by a brief second civil war, as populists tried to recover money looted from the national treasury by the super-wealthy, who responded by hiring the famous Blackwater private military to defend their riches. Fortunately, the conventional military sided with the public, or we might well not be having this discussion today.

When the dust cleared, though, the United States was a broken and demoralized country in every way, and no longer even united either, as centrifugal secessionary movements seized the opportunity presented by weakness at the national core to blast the former superpower into pieces. Naturally, these fragments of the erstwhile singular country then set upon each other in a series of calamitous border and resource wars, aided by the militaries of the revived Chinese, Russian and European superpowers, who once again used the New World as their imperial playground, until the fighting finally ended a decade later. But, of course, that was when the effects of global warming finally kicked in hard across the American dust bowl.

All in all, it was a truly remarkable turn of events from the perspective of history. Never has an empire fallen so far, so fast. Even the British Empire’s implosion over the first half of the twentieth century was slower and far less complete. All of which begs the question: What happened?

Of course, there are multiple theories, but the best dimension for understanding this remarkable set of events is clearly the psycho-emotional. Odd as it may be, it is nevertheless certainly the case that the same country which rightly should be regarded as the first political project of the Enlightenment, and the same country that was rational and scientific enough to produce the automobile, the airplane, the atomic bomb and the first moon landing, was at the same time also a country heavily in the grips of the deepest demons, fears and superstitions. These came to be embodied in the regressive movement of which Bush the Younger was merely the most powerful embodiment. In fact, by his time it had captured the entirety of the American government, using the Republican Party as its vehicle. Regressive is truly the only term that does this movement justice, as it actually sought to reverse not just decades, but centuries, and in some respects an entire millennium, of political progress theretofore made by Western civilization.

These were very frightened people, and they were grasping for the strangest of straws in a desperate effort to stave off their personal nightmares. They seem, for example, to have developed a curious and very unhealthy obsession with all things sexual. It’s now pretty clear that this was the product of males in the society whose sense of personal masculinity was deeply threatened, and who had previously lost much of the capacity for self-soothing that had been built into the society’s prior-standing gender, racial and sexual-orientation hierarchies. No longer fully able to bolster their deteriorating sense of power and worth by subjugating and attacking women, minorities and homosexuals (though continuing to try), they redirected their energies toward conservative political movements that expertly tapped into their only thinly-veiled insecurities. This produced some wonderfully bizarre historical vignettes, as one obsessive sexual moralist after another was outed for engaging in behaviors even more ‘twisted’ than the ones they publicly railed against. As entertaining as this might prove in retrospect to us today, however, make no mistake but that this was a nasty little political virus, and the damage that it did at home and abroad was massive.

These ‘angry white men’ were expertly deployed by the malefactors of wealth, who quite cleverly managed to use them as shock troops for the looting of the public fisc by harnessing their energies and votes to what was in actuality an agenda of national kleptocracy, while feeding their insecurities by throwing the occasional meaningless bone of slight sexual repression in their direction. The rhetoric was constantly about controlling vaginas and errant penises (other people’s, of course). Meanwhile, the real action was the picking of pockets. It may seem remarkable today, but I assure you that the methodology was quite effective there and then. Before long, a society that had demonstrated significant egalitarian tendencies during the century prior had come instead to look much like any Latin American banana republic of the time in terms of its distribution of wealth.

It was bad enough, of course, that such a large and angry segment of the population had been seduced via their own insecurities into leading the entire country (not least including themselves) off a cliff. It is difficult to find a rival, anywhere in the history books, for a whole society so deluded into obsession with trivialities while in the midst of multiple real crises. Sure, Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but he was one person. This was a case of nearly an entire people creating and exacerbating their own societal destruction while demonstrating a seemingly unlimited capacity for obsession over the inconsequential – whether that be personal sexual choices, athletic contests, or the latest celebrity gossip. I can think of no other culture in human history that ever demonstrated so many manifestations of collective insanity. Nor one that had less reason or need to hide from reality.

But what was perhaps worst of all was that everything in the American polity broke down at once. There have always been madmen masquerading as great political leaders, of course, and the insightful Founders of the American nation understood this well. That is why they created their very unique constitution, which was concerned, above all, with diffusing concentrations of power wherever possible and building in a series of bulwarks against the damages that could be wrought by such megalomaniacs. Hardly anything is more discouraging to the historian of this period, however, than the speed with which each of these would-be ramparts capitulated to the rapacious madness we have since come to call, wherever it appears, Cheneyism. Congress was supposed to check and balance against an imperial presidency. It did not. The opposition party of Democrats were supposed to provide a critique and an alternative vision for the country. They seemed instead to interpret this as a mandate to soil their underpants at every opportunity and just nod in helpless agreement at whatever was the latest regressive transgression against democracy, the Constitution and common sense. The free media was intended to air the truth about the government’s depredations, but instead it simply became a cheerleader and an instrument for promulgating them, laughing all the way to the bank. As for the American people themselves, the full concern for their stewardship over the gift of democracy and freedom given them by preceding generations could be found in their chronic bouts of television-induced narcolepsy coupled with stiff and frequent doses of retail therapy at the location of ever-expanding commercial metropolises. Oh, and of course, bumper-stickers proclaiming their patriotism and concern for the troops.

In the end, as well you know, the once-great superpower simply imploded from the unsustainable load brought about by the combination of a series of very angry and very real problems ignored, on the one hand, and national attention devoted instead to those that were completely bogus, on the other. Amazingly, the very folks who had brought about this unprecedented destruction of any great power anywhere managed still to cling to their fantasies, claiming that the America’s precipitous decline was the work of the Christian deity, in retribution for America’s sexual decadence. What is that expression the French have about ‘the more things change’...?

Now, some would argue that while history can be cruel, she is often ultimately just. Those with such beliefs will probably find solace in the American story. For, when the dust had settled on the America’s half century from hell, a survey of conditions revealed a land of bloodied zombie-like creatures, many aimlessly walking the rubbled streets of a society Balkanized, impoverished, subjugated and stunned from a succession of environmental, political, military and moral disasters.

And few could avoid noticing the similarities. America had managed to bring home to itself the same policies that it had previously delivered to the good people of Iraq. And with precisely the same consequences.

And so ended the American empire, once the most formidable in history. The decline was breathtakingly precipitous, and almost entirely attributable to the suicidal choices made by the society to empower a cancerous regressive movement in the period around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Surely if ever history was ever kind enough to scream out to us an emphatically clear lesson for succeeding generations, this cautionary tale is it: Avoid, at all costs, the insecurity-fueled insanity of regressive conservatism, particularly when it is backed by the depredations of kleptocratic class warfare.

That way lies madness.

Well, that’s it for today, class. Be sure to study hard for next week’s midterm! I know, I know, many of you think exams are an anachronism in our advanced era. Chalk it up to another useless perennial college ritual if you like, my friends. And call me old-fashioned, if you must. I’m just devoted to producing historically wise citizens however best I can.

After all, I couldn’t bear any of my students becoming the George W. Bush of the twenty-fourth century!