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Kevin Phillips’ Tired Cassandra Act

Erstwhile conservative and now doom-and-gloom quasi-populait Kevin Phillips rolls out another “America in decline” article:

… there’s almost no chance of another sequence like the Great Depression, where the stock market dove 80 percent, joblessness reached 25 percent, and the Great Plains became a dustbowl that forced hundreds of thousands of “Okies” to flee to California. But Americans should worry that the current unrest betokens the sort of global upheaval that upended previous leading world economic powers, most notably Britain.

The antidote for this sort of silliness is to look at Phillips’ trackrecord. A few minutes research on Nexis reminds one that he’s been pitching the same sort of crap for decades.

Here’s his article, WHAT THEY WON’T TALK ABOUT, from the Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) October 16, 1996:

People in the United States don’t understand fully that North America - all three nations - has become a debt-ridden continent and a cheap-currency continent. The Rock of Gibraltar years are over. A chart of how the United States, Canadian and Mexican currencies all have declined against the Japanese yen, German mark and Swiss franc in the last 25 years bears an unnerving resemblance to Niagara Falls. Ironically, one discussion point in how Canada might break up is how to divide the top-heavy national debt.

As the United States tightens its southern boundaries against immigrants, the political and economic divisions within Mexico could grow more explosive. The Mexican government has talked about two different, indirect approaches to U.S. politics: one would encourage Mexicans in the United States to take out citizenship and vote in the United States without losing certain Mexican rights; a second development allows Mexicans living in the United States to vote in Mexican elections.

What used to be English-speaking North America already shows signs of developing three spheres of foreign-language influence. It’s conceivable that, within 20 or 30 years, Quebec will be a French sphere of influence - independent, French-speaking and perhaps with ties to France itself. The border from Texas to Tijuana - now called “el tercer pais” (the third nation) - could become a Latino sphere of influence with joint citizenship arrangements; and the Pacific Coast could see cities from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Los Angeles become 25 percent to 40 percent Asian, developing new trade and joint citizenship ties with East Asia.

Wrong! (Although in fairness he’s got 8 uears left on his lower estimate.)

Morning Edition (NPR 6:00 am ET) June 29, 1994:

The dollar is caught in one of those periodic credibility crunches that undercut the currencies of great economic powers in decline.

Wrong again.

Then there’s THE POLITICS OF FRUSTRATION SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER April 12, 1992, which basically implied that a populist revolution was brewing:

… two historic downturns may be underway simultaneously: the slow decline of the United States as the world’s leading economic power and the related erosion of the middle class.

And his Populists, Royalists and The Trumpet Of Revolt The Washington Post February 23, 1992:

Challenger Patrick J. Buchanan’s stunning showing would appear to leave Bush eminently defeatable, except for two considerable problems: Political precedents are becoming less meaningful in a frustrated and declining America, one epitomized by Bush even as he fulminates against doomsayers. Second, and even more important, none of the Democratic candidates now in the race looks like a winner. ,,, [Bush] has a unique role in history’s upheaval: not to preside over a mythical New World Order, but to furnish a caricature of second-rate leadership for a declining America.

And his TROOPS MUST COME HOME TO WIN THE ECONOMIC WAR: Los Angeles Times March 4, 1990:

Another warning signal is the decline of America’s share of the world gross national product.

And his THE INEFFABLE ISSUE FOR AN UNSPEAKABLE CAMPAIGN Los Angeles Times October 9, 1988:

A year ago, the Wall Street Journal noted that officials in Tokyo’s Ministry of Finance have charts tracing Japan’s global rise as the United States declines in the manner of Edwardian Britain. “Morning Again” in Tokyo, maybe, but not in the United States of America.

And his Reagan’s Decline Is Good News For the GOP The Washington Post August 2, 1987:

One hardly need embrace novelist Gore Vidal’s recent observation that power is now shifting to Tokyo much as it moved from London to New York 70 years ago to suggest that Ronald Reagan has failed to reverse the United States’ own neo-imperial decline during the 1980s. On the contrary, he may have even speeded it up, sacrificing U.S. global economic power by borrowing money overseas to finance a debt level that permits painless rearmament.

In sum, Kevin Phillips has been predicting - wrongly - America’s decline for over 20 years. Of course, Phillips is smart enough to anticipate that somebody might point out that Emperor Phillips isn’t wearing any clothes, so his latest screed gives an implied nod to his earlier miscalls:

Before we amplify the contemporary U.S. parallels, the skeptic can point out how doomsayers in each nation, while eventually correct, were also premature. In Britain, for example, doubters fretted about becoming another Holland as early as the 1860s, and apprehension surged again in the 1890s, based on the industrial muscle of such rivals as Germany and the United States. By the 1940s, those predictions had come true, but in practical terms, the critics of the 1860s and 1890s were too early.

Premature fears have also dogged the United States. The decades after the 1968 election were marked by waves of a new national apprehension: that U.S. post-World War II global hegemony was in danger. The first, in 1968-72, involved a toxic mix of global trade and currency crises and the breakdown of the U.S. foreign policy consensus over Southeast Asia. Books emerged with titles such as “Retreat From Empire?” and “The End of the American Era.” More national malaise followed Watergate and the fall of Saigon. Stage three came in the late 1980s, when a resurgent Japan seemed to be challenging U.S. preeminence in manufacturing and possibly even finance. In 1991, Democratic presidential aspirant Paul Tsongas observed that “the Cold War is over. . . . Germany and Japan won.” Well, not quite.

Of course, Phillips can’t bring himself to admit that he has been one of the chief purveyors of premature fearmongering. Nor can Phillips admit that he is now so invested in the story of American decline, that one suspects he hopes for it to come about. After all, what prophet doesn’t want to be proven right.

Phillips has going for him the same thing that Cassandra did; namely, he only has to be right once. Indeed, he has one up on Cassandra, in that history tells us that eventually he will be right. No people, tribe, cisty-state, nation-state, or empire has retained superpower status for ever. Since history did not end just because Francis Fukuyama said it had, the historical precedents tell us that eventually the United States will be eclipsed. We can hope it will be a slow and gentle slide at the end of which the US plays France to China’s America, for example.

The big question thus is not if but when. And here I see no evidence to think that it will come in Phillips lifetime or, I suspect, my own. As for those of my readers young enough to expect reasonably to make it to the second half of this century, however, it might be worth asking John McCain and Barack Obama how they plan to shore up the American Empire.

Update: Matthew Yglesias comments on Phllips’ article:

Kevin Phillips stuffed the middle of this op-ed with plenty of caveats, but still winds up direly warning that “The loss of global economic leadership that overtook Britain and Holland seems to be looming on our own horizon.”

It’s worth taking a deep breath and looking back at those caveats. The United States is currently the richest country in the world by a pretty wide margin. Since China and India are both growing from a much smaller base, it should be possible for them to maintain higher average growth rates over an extended period of time eventually overtake us in terms of overall GDP. But it should be noted that there’s nothing inevitable about this—poor policymaking kept Chinese and Indian growth slow for a long time, and poor policymaking could easily return. How confident are you—is anyone—that China will go the next twenty years without a major political crisis?

But more to the point, even if that did happen, the typical American would still be substantially better off than the typical Indian. Visit the Netherlands some time and you’ll see that it’s a very nice country whose residents enjoy a spectacularly high standard of living. It just happens to be a very small country so the overall Dutch GDP is, in PPP adjusted terms, smaller than that of their ex-colony Indonesia. But nobody’s sitting around in Amsterdam saying “it sure would be better if we were an economic leader like Indonesia!” They’re doing fine, and we’ll be doing fine, too, if big, poor countries eventually turn into big middle-income countries.