Signs of a Dying Empire

[Eric the Green]

(05-04-2022, 06:10 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

Your preferences and attitudes are not shared widely. Does America want to give up? Or does it really matter to many of us anymore whether someone is part of "America"? Maybe Americans have not given up, but maybe they don't think we are qualified to push other nations around, and many people might be wising up to the fact that our identity and our goals are our own, not defined as members of a nation (or religion or race or whatever false group we may depend on for our identity because we don't know ourselves and our real connection to real life and divinity).

And yet almost half of America still identifies strongly with America, and wants "America First!" And they seem to support a (now former) president that wants the USA to militarize to the teeth, even if he is less interventionist than the previous president they followed (W). What this means is that the USA today is culturally deprived, and this is a serious situation. Our scale of values has become seriously warped. Brower has touched on this too.

So, it's complicated.

Millennials are acting out their hero role fairly well, for what it really is. Organization and courage are not "masculine." Organization is their forte, but not through becoming corporate drones so much, as the GIs did, but through social media and other groups. They have some concern for political and social matters, such as climate change and inequality. The previous civic hero generation supported civil rights and feminism to a large degree. A civic generation understands that we are all in this national project together. This is not identifying with a nation we have given up on. It is practical attention to how things get done in our country.

The trouble is the huge influence of Reaganism and neoliberalism, which has sapped belief in our civic institutions and cut back on civics education. This means millennials have to learn their proper role, which means to support and participate in civic institutions, and not sit back and wait for somebody else to do something because they might not get everything that they want. Obama is a good teacher, but I don't know if that's enough this year.