No friendly act.
The Free Press article on Catholic women veiling at Mass is an interesting vignette on one small facet of a particular search for meaning that increasingly defines the twenty-first century West. Of course the search for meaning has always characterized humanity, but this one has a quality of being ex nihilo, in its way: it comes upon the culmination of what was to have been the end of all things. Having spent the past three to four hundred years buoyed upon the raft of progress, this generation now is the first to find that it has been the raft of the Medusa all along. The historical-perspective question is whether it is a mere lifetime’s pause in a great upward ascent, but that question is also irrelevant to the persons at hand, because a lifetime is all they have.
This framework is tremendously mediated through the American experience, which has elevated progress — material, political, and spiritual (although it frequently confuses the first two with the last) — to a religious faith, the denial of which is a denial of the nation, by which is meant the regime. The phrase “mandate of heaven” is invoked in the evermore-frequent discussions of Chinese regimes, but we have the same concept: we just don’t generally realize it because no American regime has ever lost it. But the end is in view as progressivism, modernity, and their conceits lurch toward bankruptcy, and what comes after is speculative work, so rarely fruitful.
Let that not deter us. We can guess that American decline under the present regime will look much like Britain’s. The British case is taken as so normative — of course a nation will decline after its empire is gone — that the normativity goes unquestioned. But this is the worst sort of history, determinative in retrospect, as if the loss of imperium (or more properly, the loss of imperial fiscal stability) set in motion dominoes that fell unstoppably until the latest squalid episode of Keir Starmer’s thought police. That isn’t how human events work, however: all things are contingent. Britain was, in the eyes of several European powers, reduced to a mid-tier power after the catastrophic loss of America at the opening of the 1780s — and a generation later it was the indispensable nation versus French hegemony. There was not any particular reason a comparable recovery ought not have happened in the generation after 1945, even with the loss the of the empire, and even with the great postwar crisis of the pound sterling. This was in fact the high-Tory view as set forth by Enoch Powell, who evolved toward a belief that the empire was a burden on Britain, which could ascend to its destiny and fulfillment by means of the British themselves.
That this did not happen is plausibly much the fault of the Americans, who did two major things — one of them unwittingly — to forestall this sort of recovery. The first act, undertaken with deliberation, was the credible American threat to destroy the United Kingdom’s finances and economy in the 1956 Suez crisis: in no way the act of an ally, and one whose psychological effects upon Britain’s governing elites were as significant as the hard-power effects upon Britain itself. (Though I am not a particular fan of De Gaulle, for reasons that may be discussed here later, he was unquestionably a better steward of the nation than his U.K. counterparts in his conclusion — admittedly coalescing a decade earlier — that a European state could be a major power, or it could be a junior partner to the United States, but not both.) The British regime’s reaction to the episode — to draw so close to the Americans as to abandon the nation’s strategic independence — thereby contributed powerfully to Britain’s subsequent diminishment. That diminishment was not simply in the realm of hard power: it was accompanied by a profound social and governmental malaise that has fluctuated across the decades but has yet to lift. Philip Larkin’s 1969 Homage to a Government captures it well:
Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.
It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.
Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
The superficial read of Larkin here is that he laments deriving purpose from other things closer to home. There is a baseness in the imperialist’s love of mission, and he misses the sublime in, say, the National Health Service. It is a dumb atavism: if the “tree-muffled squares … look nearly the same,” then why does it matter that “the soldiers [are] home”? This interpretation is wrong. What Larkin laments is the loss of the common and noble purpose in the civic partnership that makes the nation, as defined at the outset of Aristotle’s Politics — without which the nation fails to cohere, even if its regime persists. Despite the strenuous efforts of the left and progressivism across the past century, that virtuous end to which the nation has been directed has never been supplanted in its old forms — religion, glory, strength, creation — by any new ones of social programs or millennialist materialism. When Clement Attlee wrote in his 1920 The Social Worker that the Protestant Reformation was to blame for the moral degradation of charity, his solution was not the obvious one (which is to say, the restoration of Catholic England or at least its mores), but to interpose government where religion and its purposes used to be. His 1945 general-election invocation of building “Jerusalem” in England, directly quoting William Blake, logically followed.
But that is not how Jerusalem is built. It remains unbuilt, and the civic effects of the American fixation and what it facilitates redound across time. Nick Cohen accuses the modern British right of Americanizing itself, and that is largely accurate, but contra his indictment, the British left does the same in different ways. What the Americans did in 1956 was not a singular event — rather it was a punctuation on a process that had been unfolding in stages for the preceding forty years or so — but their objects got a vote too. That vote was to submit, a preference shared across right and left alike. That no American regime ever had Britain’s interest fully at heart (a truth with ample reminders, not just at Suez, but in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands, in Grenada, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan) did not alter this course, thereby making a triumph of theory unmoored from fact.
The other American action was unintentional but no less profound for it. American propositionalism, a frequent topic here, supplanted the Aristotelian nation as the basis of the state, and we have covered its outcomes at length. Britain as an idea rather than a historical gathering of discrete and definable peoples has been useful to the regime — also discussed at Armas — but because it does not reflect the reality of what a nation is, the Boydian mismatch between regime and people grows. Eventually either regime or people must adapt or end, and what we see in Britain now is mostly the regime’s preference that the people do the adaptation — or the ending. No American has a direct hand in this, but the substitution of American propositionalism for the traditional basis of the nation across the entire West — that the state is a mere container, that the regime dictates who is within and without the nation, and that there is no necessary inheritance or prior connection for that outcome — is at the heart of the thing. One might blame American cultural and ideological power for this, and there is something to it, but it is not the whole story. It is also useful to regimes and their projects, and again, in its persistent outcomes, it is a a triumph of theory unmoored from fact.
I wrote above that we can guess that American decline under the present regime will look much like Britain’s, and this is what I mean by it: the substitution of the state where history, mores, and religion used to be; the regime utility of propositionalism against the rooted people; the corrosive void where common purpose used to sit; and the dogged persistence in the course despite events. Much of this, most of this, already afflicts us. We lack only one thing available to the British, a benign (if not always friendly) protecting power to insulate us from consequences like invasion. But this is mere detail.
What is not detail is an enduring fundamental, to which the historic peoples have awakened in various ways: regimes can change.