McCoy sees the election of Donald Trump to Presidency as a defining moment. He does not think Trump himself is the cause of the waning American power, but rather a symptom of it. Nonetheless, McCoy regards Trump as likely to hasten the downward trajectory.
The historian writes that all negative trends that are plaguing America now are likely to get much worse, growing rapidly by 2020, and would “reach a critical mass no later than 2030.”
He describes the coming 2020s as a “demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness.” He blames decades of growing deficits on “incessant warfare in distant lands”. By 2030, the U.S. dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant reserve currency, marking the empire’s loss of influence.
This change will prompt dramatic price increases for American imports. Costs on overseas travel for tourists and troops will increase as well. Washington will be forced to slash its budget, causing a pullback and shrinking of American forces. Like a “fading superpower incapable of paying its bills,” America will then be continuously challenged by powers like China, Russia, Iran and others for control over “ the oceans, space, and cyberspace.”
“Nationalism” and national pride are “dirty words equated with racism, fascism, and right-wing fanaticism, Sempa explains, as Christianity and traditional values are banned “from the public square as part of a broader effort to undermine civic virtue….and normalize practices previously considered deviant,” what former sociologist and Democrat U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York described as “defining deviancy down;” while promoting “a Woke agenda, the sexualization of young children, and undermining (traditional) beliefs and customs.”
Francis Sempa alluded to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, describing how the ruling elites of that time introduced “a slow poison into the vitals of empire, extinguishing the fire of genius, and evaporating the military spirit,” which Sempa described as having “corrosive effects on the citizenry, manifested by “the collapse of public courage and diminished sense of national honor.”
Sempa concluded Gibbons described historical and contemporary reality, writing, “America’s elitist class is leading us down the path of (Ancient) Rome. Hopefully, it is not too late to change course.”
Had it not been for COVID-19, he would surely have achieved this in 2020. Even if he had lost the popular vote for a second time, the undemocratic electoral college would have assured his re-election. With the economy doing well, he would then have purged the military, judiciary, and administration and consolidated Trumpism.
Instead, the plague revealed his inability to govern. This and Trump’s lamentable refusal to demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter ensured that even the biased electoral system could not overturn a seven million plurality for Biden.
But it did mean the final count rested on fewer than 45,000 votes in three swing states. This gave superficial plausibility to the allegation that the outcome was “a steal” and justified the assault on the Capitol, whose aim was to reverse the process of appointing Trump’s successor at the choke point, when the final tallies are rubber-stamped.
The entire episode demonstrated that Trumpism regarded the Constitution instrumentally. This ancient document had always permitted racism; the efforts to legislate against it can be seen as a measure of its persistence. For almost a century, the rise of American supremacy abroad compensated for the decline of white supremacy at home. Indeed, during Barack Obama’s presidency, it had become minoritarian.
In a break from postwar multilateralism, the Bush Doctrine outlined the neoconservative belief that, as the only superpower in a now supposedly “unipolar” world, the United States had the right to take unilateral military action any time it believed it faced external threat of any imaginable sort. The result: almost 20 years of disastrous “forever wars” and a military-industrial complex deeply embedded in our national economy. Although Donald Trump’s foreign policy occasionally feinted in the direction of isolationism in its rejection of international treaties, protocols, and organizational responsibilities, it still proved itself a direct descendant of the Bush Doctrine. After all, it was Bush who first took the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and rejected the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change.