It’s inauguration week just as the Framers must have imagined it: citizenry streaming into the capital from every state to celebrate the most sober and symbolic moment in the democracy, even as the soon-to-be president tears into an American hero, fends off criticism from allies, deflects a sexual harassment suit and wails that his public approval ratings are rigged.
This is how the Trump presidency begins, and the American Century ends.
I don’t say this in a way that’s gloomy or hysterical; don’t count me among those who assume the nation is headed off a cliff. (Count me, instead, among those who think the odds of us doing all this again in three years or less are about 50-50.)
I’m only saying that political epochs, like the one into which every one of us was born, have demarcation points that can only be clearly seen in retrospect. And we’re living through one right now.
Any calendar will tell you, for instance, that the 19th century ended in 1901, the year President McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt took his place. But most historians would argue that, for any practical purpose, the previous century of British dominance — Pax Britannica and all that — really saw the curtain fall in 1914, at the onset of the First World War.
The empire would hold together for another 30 years after that, give or take, but beginning with the campaign against Germany and its allies, the orchestra was playing Britain off center stage. The costs of planetary preeminence, already a burden in peace, were unsustainable in war.
The 20th century as we think of it probably began about 30 years later, after Franklin Roosevelt solidified American dominance over the western half of a globe riven by ideology. From then on, Washington was at the epicenter of world events, the seat of unrivaled might among free nations.
America was the most expansive country in the world, but whereas Britain had chiefly expanded its physical domain, we expanded our standard of living at a staggering rate. We expanded our markets to much of the world, education to all reaches of the country and — at long last — civil rights to the citizenry.
We expanded the cultural reach of America — movies and sitcoms, soft drinks and sports teams, transcendent celebrity and defiant individualism — to every hamlet on earth where you could string an electrical wire.
But just as the British Empire strained to maintain its momentum in the decades leading up to World War I, so too did our vast expansion run up against the boundaries of time and technology.
Globalism, made possible by cheaper technologies and transportation, gave rise to competitors, even as automation made our own workers redundant. Factory towns cratered. The price of maintaining global hegemony, both in lives and in credit, became harder to justify.
Government continued to grow, but now so did the chasm between the rich and everyone else.
Still, well into the 21st century, the nation’s political establishment clung tenaciously to this ideal of an essential, expansive America. It was at the heart of George W. Bush’s calamitous adventure in Iraq and of his party’s bid to create a new federal program for prescription drugs. It was the vision behind Barack Obama’s health care plan, his pact with Iran and his failed effort to forge a new market in Asia.
And it’s precisely what Donald Trump’s election repudiates.
Trump has said all kinds of conflicting things about almost everything; I expect he’ll contradict himself a half dozen times on the Capitol steps alone. But in this one respect he has been faithful: He believes the time has come for withdrawal and isolation, rather than expansion and globalism.
