Cities of God
By 
Today’s events brought to mind something I’ve been contemplating for some time, which is the decadence and decay and eventual fall of even the greatest nations and empires.
A kingdom without justice is no better than a gang of thieves notes Augustine, bishop of Hippo, in his book written among the ruins of the greatest empire the world had yet seen.
We may well be living through the definitive decline and fall of the American empire, among the ruins of the American century, and it couldn’t be clearer that our government at the moment is no better than a gang of thieves, and in fact worse, since thieves rarely display anything like the grotesque pretensions of our leaders.
In the 50 years I’ve been old enough to be aware of them, two caricatures of America have dominated the imaginations of political extremists in this country. The hyper-nationalists, of which Ronald Reagan was an almost pure example, saw America as a City on a Hill, a beacon of justice to the world. The reverse hyper-nationalists, who by sharp contrast to their opposite numbers have never had a shred of political power, since that would require a genuine revolution, saw America as the true Evil Empire, to use Reagan’s term for the late Soviet Union. The most striking example of this mindset in recent years is provided by people like Glenn Greenwald, whose entire identities are structured around a kind of inverted patriotism. Such people can only love, and then only faintly, whatever countries are enemies of the United States, which remains their only true nationalistic passion, although one of a purely negative kind.
Somewhere roughly between these extremes lived everyone who saw America as something along the lines of a great if greatly flawed political experiment. That belief doesn’t lend itself readily to political sloganeering, which helps explain why it’s difficult to elaborate it in a way that wins elections. In my own lifetime Barack Obama came closest to successfully threading that particular rhetorical needle — and how he was hated for it.
Today I felt myself pushed hard toward one of the caricatured extremes of what this country really is. We really are, at the moment, the baddies. Our country is now explicitly aligned with the worst regimes in the world: with the Russians, and the Chinese; with Hungary and North Korea; with authoritarian imperialism, and ethno-nationalist kleptocracy.
All things fall and are built again, says the poet, and perhaps it will be our fate to try to begin to build again, among the ruins of what once was.