The anti-Amity Schlaes Fine Whine of "Declinism"

Peter Baker wrote a fine book about Putin's new version of Stalinist totalitarianism in 2005 and his wife Susan Glasser helped him co-write it. But she echoes Richard Holbrooke, whom I lunched with [twice] in Lyon, France soon after he founded Foreign Policy, a great mag in the beginning which has declined to become another DNC sounding board. Glasser is now Editor-in-Chief of the Zhdanov/Goebbels type mediocre tripe FP produces nowadays. Here's her latest whine about the Tea Party:

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

If Pat Buchanan is an "agitator," then Glasser is an agitprop specialist, let's call her an "agitpreppie," whose adherence to the Axelrod/Plouffe party line is finely-tuned to keep the restless Volvo-and-brie crowd from escaping the Demonrat plantation.

Holbrooke was a unique combination of lover/fighter/asshole who did have the gumption to get things done, like the American Institute in Berlin of which he should be proud to be the founding godfather. But FP has simply become another dishonest knock-off of Pravda for the pretentious Chardonnay-loving lefties of the Upper West Side.

I knew Warren Christopher personally as an FSO back in the day, and he was always a dependably uninspiring drudge whose legacy led to Madeleine Albright, whom I worked for in the Mondale campaign in 1984 and who is the true author of the phrase that the USA is the "indispensable nation."

It still is indispensable, but is being led by another uninspiring mediocrity who resembles Les Gelb's famous statement about Holbrooke that, "rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half-Jewish are only half-true." Obama is only half-black, but is descended from SLAVEOWNERS and SLAVERS* on both sides of his weird pedigree. He wants to keep the rest of the American blacks on the plantation.

*Barry Soetero's father is a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya who served as middlemen in capturing other black Africans for the slave market in Zanzibar who would be sold to the Arabs and sent to work in the salt mines of Mesopotamia or the harems [after painful castration in which one of ten survived because sand was used as the antioxidant in the grisly procedure] of Cairo and Istanbul. His mother is descended from slaveholders who moved to "B leading Kansas" in the 1850s after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 made Kansas a state which would vote on whether or not to remain slave or free. Many famous western outlaws, including Jesse James and the Clinton Gang were also slaveholder advocates who "went rogue" after their cause was defeated in the Civil War. Connect the dots....