When We're Gone

It is natural for people to wonder, even before the twilight of life, what they will be remembered for. One can learn about one's self by posing this question. And so can nations.

Today's arrangement of 200 nation-states is a snapshot of a fleeting moment in history. The very idea of the nation-state is only about 300 years old. In those 300 years, nations have been born, killed, and reincarnated. In the last 60 years alone, the number of nations has increased from less than 50 to more than 200.

To take an even broader view, the location of today's continents is also a snapshot. We know about continental drift; if the very location and composition of Asia is not sacrosanct, then how sacrosanct is the 38th parallel bisecting the Korean Peninsula? Not very.

The point is that nations, just as mortals, pass away. It need not necessarily be a sad thing; in fact, death is the most democratic institution on earth. And we all love democracy. Well, what will the United States be remembered for when it fades away?

There are all sorts of reflexively jingoistic answers, of course, beginning with the assertion that the United States never will fade away because Americans can do anything. For those of us who are sober-minded enough to accept that the USA can't cheat death, we still might tempted to say something about democracy or somesuch.

We all think that the United States is a unique nation in some regard. And we're right; we are a unique nation. But not always for the reasons that we presume to be. For example, democracy.

The only period in our history when the United States was somehow uniquely democratic was from the Revolution until just before the Civil War. It is true that during this period, the United States was the only large nation with principles of democracy practiced among most of its citizens.

But "citizens" during this period is not to be confused with "Americans". Most Americans were not citizens at all, pre-emptively excluded by virtue of the accident of their birth. If you lacked a Y chromosome, for example, or if you were as dark as or darker than an Italian, you were out of the club.

So yes, we were the only vaguely democratic nation. But we were only vaguely democratic. If we had been a multiracial democracy, that would have been unique. If women had been allowed to vote, that would have been unique.

The savvy reader surely noted that the period during which our nation was relatively more democratic than all other nations was also precisely the period that we practiced chattel slavery on the most massive scale in the modern world. So.....yeah.

To re-iterate, when we actually were a uniquely free country, well less than 1/3 of American adults could vote, senators were appointed rather than elected, and millions of people born in this country were bought, sold, and worked to death without wages under color of law in a nation "based on laws".

Today we are democratic to varying degrees, but so is nearly every other nation. We have to look a bit harder to find our uniqueness.

What do we have aside from our form of government? Our wealth. But people won't remember us for our wealth, especially because the period of our unique wealth was paid for by two world wars, which were the two biggest windfalls in the history of the American economy. And especially America has the most uneven distribution of wealth of any industrial nation.

Our military might? Well, that's an interesting story. America used to be unique in a military sense because it was the only large nation that refused, as a matter of principle, to maintain a standing army.

Americans back then rightly feared what would come to be called the military-industrial-congressional complex, and intuitively grasped that aggressive wars are the greatest of sins, and that nations with standing armies had a curiously persistent habit of finding reasons to wage aggressive wars in the name of peace.

In contrast, Americans now think they are unique for precisely the opposite reason. We are unique now not because we refuse to live in a constant state of imminent war, but because we insist on reserving the right to destroy all life on earth in 20 minutes, should our Commander-in-Chief deem it strategically necessary.

The cynic might conclude that Americans presume they are unique, but are not particularly interested in the reasons for that uniqueness; the only principle at work is that we must be on top, regardless of what we are on top of or of how we got there.

For my money, if the human race as we know it is here in 1,000 years, the United States will be remembered for two things: inventing and using nuclear weapons and sending men to the moon. One out of two ain't bad.