Is America in Decline?

Americans have very high self-esteem. We are the greatest because we believe that we are the greatest. We have received massive doses of therapy and have come away thinking that we can beat anyone, anywhere, anyhow. If you say otherwise you will be quickly denounced and voted off the island.

When Tom Friedman suggested that America is not a serious country because it cannot build high speed railroads, the outcry was swift. The noise did not advance any rail projects, but it made us all feel good to vent.

Anyway, today we have a few words from one David Goldman, formerly a member of a Trump administration China taskforce, and also an advisor to the Ted Cruz for president campaign.

It doesn’t matter whether you inhabit the political left or the political right, you are aggrieved. You are up in arms about one thing or another. You are protesting and complaining, because we Americans have mastered the art of protesting and complaining-- of giving full throated expression to our grievances. Don't imagine for an instant that this is limited to the political left.

In the meantime, we cannot build much of anything. High speed rail is just the tip of the iceberg. 

As the world looks to America, it does not see a role model:

The people with big jobs in Washington came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was the technological marvel of the world, and American inventions created the digital age. We haven’t done a lot lately except code some complicated software.

Besides, as we noted in a post a few days ago, Silicon Valley is largely being run by Asians and by Asian Americans.

Goldman asks how we are doing with broadband infrastructure:

China has installed about 80% of the world’s 5G mobile broadband capacity, the carrier for the Fourth Industrial Revolution as much as railroads were for the First Industrial Revolution, and is moving much faster towards smart cities, automated ports, autonomous vehicles, self-programming robots and a wealth of other 5G applications.

And also:

It doesn’t boast a single company to compete with Huawei, Ericsson, or Nokia in 5G broadband. China, with its robust supply chains and abundance and diversity of skilled workers and engineers, is likely to get a jump on the United States in the new technologies that will transform economic life.

That includes hydrogen fuel cells: China’s chemical industry produces 30% of the world’s hydrogen as a by-product.

Yes, you will exclaim, with increasing exasperation, but we are woke. We are diverse. And diversity is our strength:

Europeans view with distaste the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where the “woke” equivalent of Red Guards hold self-criticism sessions at corporations and universities to extract confessions of racism, homophobia, transphobia and so forth.

So, Goldman concludes that countries around the world are looking at America and seeing a declining power:

It’s pointless to complain when America’s allies ask in so many words, “What have you done for us lately?” To the rest of the world, America looks like a declining power, because it is a declining power.

If America wants to get the world’s attention, it should try doing the things that captured the world’s imagination a few decades ago. America needs the moral equivalent of a moonshot, a rededication to manufacturing leadership, a revived meritocracy that produces business and scientific leadership.

True enough, we believe that Germany should have walked away from the Nordstream pipeline. Yet, no one in Germany believes in American energy reliability.

Instead of complaining about how the Germans jilted them, American politicians should take a hard look at where America is going, and do something about it.

Good luck with that.