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Gloomy Thoughts
Jul. 22nd, 2020 11:56 pmFrom a future Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the American Republic:
Having accustomed themselves to running increasing government deficits without immediate pain, the Americans largely failed to grasp that continued and accelerating increases in the public debt could not be sustained indefinitely. The two major political parties had come to differ only on the question of which projects and which importunate claimants to public largesse should be the recipients of federal expenditure, neither any longer making much pretense to fiscal responsibility. The decadence of a great nation was illustrated not only by the election of a President as unqualified as he was unprincipled, but by the refusal of his party to denounce his unlawful usurpations and remove him from the office whose duties he was manifestly incapable of fulfilling, and by the opposition’s inability to nominate a genuinely able and responsible candidate who might have arrested the descent to disaster.
Although some voices were raised in warning, the populace and the political elite largely failed to reflect that they were not at liberty to mismanage their domestic and fiscal affairs without weakening their international position, bringing themselves into contempt, and enabling hostile powers to revise the world order in ways unfavorable both to the American nation and to the liberal and Enlightenment values of which that nation had been an exemplar and a defender.
I greatly hope that I shall not prove to be a prophet.
Having accustomed themselves to running increasing government deficits without immediate pain, the Americans largely failed to grasp that continued and accelerating increases in the public debt could not be sustained indefinitely. The two major political parties had come to differ only on the question of which projects and which importunate claimants to public largesse should be the recipients of federal expenditure, neither any longer making much pretense to fiscal responsibility. The decadence of a great nation was illustrated not only by the election of a President as unqualified as he was unprincipled, but by the refusal of his party to denounce his unlawful usurpations and remove him from the office whose duties he was manifestly incapable of fulfilling, and by the opposition’s inability to nominate a genuinely able and responsible candidate who might have arrested the descent to disaster.
Although some voices were raised in warning, the populace and the political elite largely failed to reflect that they were not at liberty to mismanage their domestic and fiscal affairs without weakening their international position, bringing themselves into contempt, and enabling hostile powers to revise the world order in ways unfavorable both to the American nation and to the liberal and Enlightenment values of which that nation had been an exemplar and a defender.
I greatly hope that I shall not prove to be a prophet.
