The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits. Jed Esty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.

In an age of great power competition, Jed Esty’s The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits is urgent precisely because it is countercultural to the DoD strategic-level documents that emphasize great power competition. Esty’s slim book charts what he terms “declinism” to powerful effect, distinguishing declinism from decline: “Decline is a fact; declinism is a problem. American decline is happening, slowly but inevitably. It is a structural and material process. Declinism is a problem of rhetoric or belief.”[1] This story of America on a downhill slide that Esty tells is not self-consciously set in opposition to today’s national security concerns—whether they are framed as integrated deterrence, multi-domain operations, or large-scale combat operations—but the implications of Esty’s account are profound for what America might look like on the backside of decline.

To get a sense of what Esty means by declinism, it is helpful to work through one of the early examples he provides. He points to the show The Newsroom, in particular an off-the-cuff speech by Jeff Daniels’s character, Will McAvoy. In a speech McAvoy briefly runs through America’s place relative to other countries to devastating effect, he laments the country’s lost achievement and ambition, before summing up, “America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”[2] Two ways of measuring declinism are worth lingering on here: the weighing of America’s standing against that of other countries and putting America today in the balance against America in the past to find it wanting. Esty’s examination of declinism within each of those measures is also multifaceted, spanning many arenas—from economic standing, to scientific and technological innovation, to cultural production and cache. I also take it to encompass concerns around how America cares for its people and how the state uses violence in their name.

Declinism looks and feels very different depending on who is deploying its rhetoric. A potent rhetoric that bears some relation to—but is not fully coextensive with—the structural and material conditions of decline, its rhetoric is exercised by people who occupy a wide variety of places on the political spectrum. Broadly speaking, Esty sees two groups employing declinism: “the technocratic center left” and adherents of a “center right pragmatism.”[3]

What interests him far more, however, than this taxonomy is their overlap—he is committed to taking seriously “the wonkish center” that practices “mainstream declinism.” Because it is here that declinism reaches its fullest expression: that America is not in decline but can perch for as long as it wants to at the apex of the global order. Declinism promises that decline can be slowed, halted, and even reversed. Just before his stark assessment of America’s standing in the world, McAvoy says that “[t]he first step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one.”[4]

A feature of declinism, then, is that it is about talking about talking about the problem of decline and greatness. It is not about the problem itself. Esty’s attention to rhetoric across domains as varied as politics, economics, and culture is a powerful reminder of his expertise in fiction and culture. The facts of decline, its features, causes, and effects, take a backseat to the prevalence of simply talking about an American downward trajectory in the same breath as talking about American greatness.

The contradiction at the very heart of declinism—that American greatness remains and that it has already passed—animates some of the best parts of Esty’s book. Instead of spending his considerable gifts only dissecting the nature of declinism and the forms it takes, he turns his attention to its latent possibilities. An America actually in decline, that can acknowledge itself as such, in Esty’s telling, may be a more just, equitable, and peaceable America than an America characterized by declinism. Esty conjures a vibrant, vital, and globally relevant America on the backside of decline; it is rich with care for those who need it most—children, to be sure, but not only children, and dotted with the new construction of revitalized infrastructure.

Most of all Esty sketches a future free from the anxious push and pull of declinism. Released from that burden, America might transcend the anxiety at the center of and produced by the declinism’s inherent dialectical tension and move into the possibility of creating and fostering new narratives in relationship to its people, and itself in relationship to the world. Esty presents his 10 Theses in a supremely compelling chapter, “After Supremacy.” He holds that:

1. American decline is neither catastrophic nor avoidable.

2. The fate of American capitalism is not the fate of global capitalism.

3. Global success leads to cultural and political stagnation for apex nations.

4. Declinism projects scarcity and austerity, but even on the downslope elite nations and elites within nations retain wealth for generations.

5. Hegemony describes an intranational and international set of relations.

6. Belief in national superiority is part of the moral infrastructure of white supremacy.

7. Rise-and-fall rhetoric reframes the expansion of empire as a masculine adventure.

8. Epic tales of imperial rise-and-fall distort the narrative of national decline.

9. The historical experience of the UK establishes the contours of decline culture, but American patterns will be different.

10. Narratives about decline are more powerful than metrics and statistics.[5]

Declinism is pernicious precisely because it is imbricated in existing structures of racial, economic, gender, national and international inequity, and exploitation of people’s labor and of the planet’s natural resources. Decline, by contrast, opens possibilities of remedy and redress. New forms of sociality within a country and relations between countries are not inevitable on the other side of decline, but they are certainly easier to imagine and realize than under the current conditions of declinism.

The Future of Decline—as its title might suggest—anchors itself in a number of different historical moments. These historical moments act in two ways: they help bring into fuller view the particular features of declinism, and they are examples of how countries organize themselves on the other side of decline. This enormous historical sweep allows Esty to chart America in decline and the particular look and feel of American declinism by placing its trajectory alongside that of the British Empire. A central feature of post-imperial Britain is nostalgia and reverence for a Victorian past, and what’s more the persistence of the values of that era into the twentieth century—the time when the Empire was at its full strength, when Britain was a superpower.

Esty does not find it inevitable that America will do the same, but America’s national attachment to the Cold War may indicate a strain of unwillingness to reimagine America. He writes, “Just as Victorian ruling-class values long held sway over UK culture and politics, now a reverential view of American greatness cuts across class and regions, locked in the amber of an Eisenhower-Kennedy era version of the technical triumph over economic limits."[6]

Culture holds a central place in the book as a whole but receives special attention at the end. Culture matters so much to Esty because it is one feature of declinism; moveover, it expresses the contradiction at the heart of declinism in particular ways. He comments, “Because American optimism is tinged with anxiety, melancholic stories of autumn and twilight, diminishment and collapse—or of Greatness Restored—always seem to command center stage.”[7] Today’s glut of remakes and sequels is an expression of the tug of war that characterizes decline because they either look to the past or rely on previously told stories. New forms of culture, fresh narratives, and novel ways of telling stories will be part of how America resolves its collective feelings about decline.

The very notion of greatness is central to today’s strategic national security, defense, and military documents. But greatness is not the only way that America relates to itself, that America relates to the world, and that Americans relate to one another. Esty’s focus on decline and declinism focuses attention not just on greatness but on the fraught and complicated ways that this idea interacts with greatness. For my own part, I don’t know whether the wager at the center of Esty’s book is right: that an America that actually dealt with its own decline might be more just and equitable than the way it is configured today. Nevertheless, there is something palpable and convincing in the notion that the future is worth our collective attention and that it is not circumscribed only by greatness.

Katherine Voyles holds a Ph.D. in English and serves as the Program Director for the School for Academic Degrees at the Graduate School for Army Chaplain Corps Professional Development in the U.S. Army Institute for Religious Leadership. She writes on issues of national defense in culture and the cultures of national defense. The views expressed are the author’s and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Barn Flag, Washington 2018 (Specphotops).

Notes:

[1] Esty, Jed. The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2022, 1.

[2] Esty, Decline, 6.

[3] Esty, Decline, 7.

[4] Esty, Decline, 6.

[5] Esty Decline, 33-56.

[6] Esty, Decline, 70.

[7] Esty, Decline, 92.