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Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) and Maddalena (Anouk Aimee) in La Dolce Vita, impossibly cool and chic, are like the Last Woman and the Last Man before the deluge of ‘tawdry cheapness.’
The United States may be destined for a shorter historical existence than the Mongol era established by Genghis Khan. A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature.
But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?
Michael Vlahos has
argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but
a "system leader" - "a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire." And, we should add, China - which he did not mention. The system leader is
"a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today."
Intel stalwart Alastair Crooke, in a
searing essay, digs deeper into how this
"civilizational vision" was "forcefully unfurled across the globe" as the inevitable, American manifest destiny: not only politically - including all the accouterments of Western individualism and neo-liberalism, but coupled with "the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too". Crooke also notes how deeply ingrained the notion that victory in the Cold War "spectacularly affirmed" the superiority of the US civilizational vision among the US elite.
Well, the post-modern tragedy - from the point of view of US elites - is that soon this may not be the case anymore.
The vicious civil war engulfing Washington for the past three years - with the whole world as stunned spectators -
has just accelerated the malaise.
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