Long Way Down
American decline in the near term
Becoming Leviathan
Two things, while seemingly contradictory, are true at once. First, the formation of the United States of America represents the single greatest rupture from the past since the discovery of the American continent some three centuries prior. The World Wars come very close, but their consequences would have been very different had the United States not already accomplished the miraculous task of both taming North America and wresting its most valuable land away from the British (and the French, and the Spanish, and the Mexicans, and the Russians).
Second, the formation of the United States of America would have been impossible if not for the millennia of historical, ethnographic, economic, and ideological conditioning of the Europeans who conquered North America. There would be no grand American Republic without the looming shadow of the long-defeated Roman Empire, the feudal economy which eventually replaced it, the Black…
