Plague Journal (57): Are we living in an era of American decadence?

The word "decadence" keeps coming up these days, used to describe the current state of the country. There is undoubtedly a lot that might be said on this subject. What are the hallmarks of a decadent society? One answer that pops to mind is a loss of confidence in that society's ability to solve its problems.

America came out of WWII thinking of itself as the omnicompetent nation. Not only the most powerful nation militarily, not only the richest nation, but the most righteous nation (American exceptionalism on steroids), and also the most capable: the problem-solving-est nation. We were the best at science, you see, and science would solve all our problems.

But all that is now in question. Endless wars that accomplish nothing are now part of the inheritance of each new generation. None of these wars seem like "good" wars, and we do not seem like the world's "good" nation anymore. Furthermore, so many of our problems seem utterly intractable, and science has lost its standing. As the coronavirus crisis has revealed, a large segment of the population simply doesn't trust it.

Into the vacuum left by that decline of trust in science comes pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, myths and fables, and tales of great heroes who can "save the day."

Of course the election of Donald Trump was meant to reverse this lapse from glory, to "make Americas great again." Donald was the man on the white horse, the hero figure, in these return-to-greatness fantasies. One of the strange things about a certain large and vocal segment of his supporters (perhaps we can call them the True Believers) is that no blame for our current condition sticks to him. It's always the Deep State or the media or the Leftists who are to blame for our failures, never the man in charge. 

This article from The Bulwark speaks of another aspect of this American decadence: the turning by many to conspiracy-theories to explain our present condition. These theories explain all that has gone bad and wrong, placing the blame on sinister behind-the-scenes dark magic. The thing about these conspiracy theories is, they don't have to be rational. They don't have to make a lot of sense or even meet some minimum threshold of plausibility. They just have to explain our failures in a way that relieves us of this nagging suspicion that we are not the exceptional nation after all. In a way that allows us to believe, if only the right hero would come along, we can return to greatness!