Morris Berman's "Dark Ages America"

When former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern confronted Donald Rumsfeld with lies the Secretary of Defense told during the runup to the Iraq War at a public presentation at the Southern Center for International Policy in Atlanta on May 4, the crowd reacted with extreme hostility -- toward McGovern, not Rumsfeld.

"I did not lie then..." Rumsfeld insisted, and McGovern tells how "This was immediately greeted with what Pravda used to describe as 'stormy applause,' followed immediately by rather unseemly shouts by this otherwise well-disciplined and well-heeled group to have me summarily thrown out," in spite of the fact that McGovern, at that very moment, had the newspaper clippings in his hand which proved that Rumsfeld had lied.

Punishing the whistle blower seems to have become the norm in America, and God help the person inconsiderate enough to suggest that his or her fellow citizens are out of touch with reality. For that reason alone, I doubt that Morris Berman's "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire" (Norton, 2006) will make it to the New York Times best-seller list.

Best seller or not, Berman is in excellent company. "Dark Ages," which was released in mid-April, is part of what is rapidly becoming a consensus of informed opinion positing the rapid decline of the U.S. as a world power, and represented by such earlier works as Chalmers Johnson's "The Sorrows of Empire" (Holt, 2004) and Immanuel Wallerstein's "The Decline of American Power" (New Press, 2003). The thesis of all three is that the United States is a world empire in eclipse, industrially weak, economically vulnerable due to escalating debt, and committed to unsustainable regimes of petroleum dependency and mass consumption. And now, in addition, the U.S. is betraying and almost advertising its weaknesses through the belligerence and aggressiveness of the Bush regime, which paradoxically sees itself as projecting power.

Berman's special contribution to this conversation lies in his concentration on the political and social environment and the daily lives of ordinary people, which he believes has spawned and is the ultimate source our political and economic decline. In charging the American people with social idiocy founded on a "What's in it for me?" mentality, Berman commits the greatest possible heresy; he argues that democracy will avail us nothing, and that there is no way out of the mess we're in. The dark ages have arrived again, as they did at the time of ancient Rome's collapse.

"The greatest obstacle to progressive change in the United States," he says in the opening to his chapter called "The State of the Union," "is probably the people themselves. It would be nice to think we could somehow 'go in' and 'fix' things, and set the United States on an upward trajectory once again. But...the sad fact is that daily American life contains a great amount of violence and ignorance and is pervaded by a lot of (repressed) alienation and spiritual emptiness. How, then, could we go in and fix things? Who is the 'we' who would do this...?" (pps. 281-2)

Berman is not the first to place the blame for America's current sour malaise on the corruption and cluelessness of the mass of ordinary people, and he quotes Nicholas von Hoffman's book "Hoax," which calls Americans a collection of "asses, dolts, and blockheads," living in a glass bubble, cut off from both reality and the rest of the world, moving from their gated communities to bubbled malls "breathing their own, private air in the bubble-mobiles known as SUV's." However, Berman's argument appears the most comprehensive and exhaustive to date, and draws on thousands of sources and anecdotal examples.

These are not mass-readership books, and I'm sure most Americans would be deeply insulted, hearing themselves described by a bunch of snooty academics and arrogant journalists like Hoffman as self-centered, shallow, and delusional.

But the argument has merit, backed as it is by the overwhelming evidence available in America's shopping meccas, on 24-hour-a-day wingnut talk radio, and on the vulgar and offensive programming known oxomoronically as "reality television." "The shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave," says an Amazon book reviewer from California, Fred Strohm, "are not any more real when displayed on a 62-inch flat screen TV."

"It is, in any case," Berman adds, "not easy to find an analysis of our national decline in terms of individual behavior..." (p.282). And this is probably Berman's main contribution to the current discussion of where we went wrong; he just made finding such an analysis much easier.

Furthermore, while Berman adds a sociological emphasis to this discussion, it's worth noting that he, Chalmers Johnson, and Wallerstein are in absolute agreement on the main thread of their common thesis; all three argue that the U.S. is now and has been for some time an Empire, that it's in irrevocable decline, and there's nothing anyone can possibly do about it ("short of revolution," Johnson adds). This is not a line of reasoning you're likely to hear followed on the network news, however, since all three authors are academics: Johnson, a foreign relations professor at U.C. San Diego, Wallerstein a sociologist and research fellow at Yale, and Berman a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University in D.C.