Decline and Fall: Will Sun Set on U.S. Empire?

It is hard for an English person with even a modest sense of history to observe America’s current global preeminence without a sense of foreboding. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union turned the United States into the world’s only superpower; today, the collapse of the Asian model, and the inability of Europe’s stakeholder model to deal with the fast-paced world of computers and telecommunications, are turning the United States into the world’s only economic role model, too.

The stock market remains at unprecedented levels, despite some jitteriness of late. Many influential Americans are convinced their country’s current good fortunes will last for decades. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of U.S. News and World Report, among other publications, insists the 21st century will belong to the United States, just like the 20th century.

The last great power to confront the dawn of a new century with such self-confidence was Britain. The Zuckermans of the 1890s declared theirs was an empire on which the sun would never set. Britain controlled almost a quarter of the Earth’s surface; accounted for a quarter of its trade and manufacturing output, and invested more money abroad than the rest of the world put together.

The British spent the 20th century learning that suns set as well as rise. The empire collapsed; sterling gave way to the dollar, British gunboats to U.S. aircraft carriers; by 1979, Britain had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to save itself from bankruptcy. The parallel between Victorian Britain and Clintonian America is not just one of shared hubris, however. There are growing signs that the United States is beginning to suffer from the same disease that brought Britain to its knees.

Perhaps the most striking parallel between yesterday’s Britain and today’s United States lies in politics. Britain entered the 20th century with a political system dominated by ancient dynasties and preoccupied by abstruse debates that meant nothing to the mass population. In 1902, for example, Lord Salisbury was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew, Arthur Balfour--hence: the phrase “Bob’s your uncle”--and one of the main subjects of political gossip concerned Edward VII’s weakness for female flesh. Politics was decided in the great country houses as much as in the House of Commons.

The rule of these dynasties lasted well into this century. The chairman of the Conservative Party is currently Robert Cecil, direct descendant of the Robert Cecil who chaired the party in 1895 and the Robert Cecil who chaired it in 1945. Nor is the left immune from this weakness for dynasties: Names such as Gladstone and Asquith crop up in histories of the left almost as frequently as Peel and Cecil on the right.

Britain at least had the excuse of being a reluctant convert to democracy. But proudly democratic America is likely to enter the 21st century burdened with a similarly introverted political culture. The next presidential election may well be fought between the heirs of two long-established dynasties: George W. Bush, son of a president and grandson of a powerful senator, and Albert (“Al”) Gore, son of a senator who himself harbored presidential ambitions. Both Bush and Gore have suitably Victorian-sounding first names; Bush can even claim distant blood ties with Elizabeth II.

The growing introversion of U.S. political life is just one manifestation of its rising inequality. Ever since the Revolution, Americans have defined themselves in terms of their freedom from Britain’s rigid class structure. Yet, they have never been able to escape entirely from the British temptation. The late 19th century saw the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers building such gigantic business empires that it looked as if they might degenerate into a British-style ruling class, a development that populists of the time decried as “economic royalism.” Many of these “malefactors of great wealth” took their identification with the British aristocracy so far that they married into it.

These business empires eventually fell victim to antitrust legislation. But the past 15 years have seen the rebirth of a business aristocracy, this time generated by cable and microchips rather than steel, oil and trains. The United States now boasts 170 billionaires, 250,000 decamillionaires and 4.8 million millionaires who together constitute the sinews of a new ruling class. As the income of the top fifth of the population has soared, that of the bottom fifth has stagnated or even declined. The top 4% of U.S. households now control almost half its private wealth, not as bad as Britain in 1900, when the top 4% owned 90% of the wealth, but heading in that direction.

British institutions that grew rich catering to the British upper classes are finding a fertile market in the United States. Sotheby’s and Christies’, two auction houses synonymous with good breeding, are doing so well over here that both are moving to larger premises in New York. Holland & Holland has opened a shop on Rodeo Drive specializing in the accouterments of gentility, from deer-stalker hats to videos on grouse shooting. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the cohort of British editors who took America by storm in the 1990s owed some of their success to an instinctive understanding of the emerging landscape of class distinctions. Tina Brown cut her teeth on the Tatler, social bible of the British upper crust, before moving on to the New Yorker and Miramax.

In late-Victorian Britain, economic inequality was reinforced by the education system, which provided Gothic palaces for the elite and slum schools for the masses. The United States has always regarded itself as a land of unparalleled educational opportunity. But, again, it is edging in the British direction. Wealthy Americans fret about getting their children into the “right” prep schools (and then into the right universities) in much the same way that wealthy Britons have always fretted about getting theirs into Eton and Winchester. At the same time, children in places such as Compton are reminded by everything, from crumbling facilities to the annual “dance of the lemons,” as abysmal principals are moved from one school to another, that they are being shunted into a second-class life.

One damaging consequence of Britain’s stratified class system was a culture that looked down on industrial capitalism, as the aristocracy’s disdain for commerce infected the rest of society. The first thing that industrialists did when they had made their pile was to buy an ancient estate and take to country sports. The middle classes crowded into genteel professions--the further removed from the world of making things, the better--and schools and universities preached that money-grubbing was not for gentlemen.

In the U.S., the philanthropic foundations and universities are beginning to play the same role as the British aristocracy, turning a growing section of the intelligentsia against capitalism. America’s oldest charitable foundations, for all their good works, are fond of sponsoring research that treats markets as the problem and government intervention as the solution, and entire university departments have been taken over by “critical theorists” who regard capitalism as another word for exploitation. This anti-industrial message has a willing audience not just among the usual suspects, notably environmentalists, but also among suburbanites, who have abandoned cities for their own private Edens.

Americans clearly have many advantages over their British predecessors, from the size of their country to its openness to immigration, to the fact that Texas millionaires don’t give a damn what Manhattan intellectuals think about them. But America’s lurch toward the aristocratic principle needs to be watched. In one of his plays, George Bernard Shaw has a character observe, “Rome fell, Carthage fell, Hindhead’s turn will come”--Hindhead being a particularly complacent suburb. The United States could yet find that what is true of Hindhead is also true of Burbank and Glendale.*