Spengler On America’s Future

Is the United States a power with a future? Before 1914 superficial observers talked of unlimited possibilities after they had looked about them for a week of two, and post-war “society” from Western Europe, compounded of snobs and mobs, for full of enthusiasm for “husky” young America as being far superior to ourselves – nay, positively a model for us to follow. But for purposes of durable form records and dollars must not be taken to represent the spiritual strength and depth of the people to whom they belong; neither must sport be confused with race-soundness nor business intelligence with spirit and mind. What is “hundred per cent Americanism”? A mass existence standardized to a low average level, a primitive pose, or a promise for the future? 

All we know is that so far there is neither a real nation nor a real State. Can both of these develop out of the knocks of fate, or is this possibility excluded by the very fact of the Colonial type, whose spiritual past belongs elsewhere and is now dead? The American does not talk of State or Mother Country like the Englishman, but of “this country”. Actually, what it amounts to is a boundless field and a population of trappers, drifting from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute; for the law is only for those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it. 

The resemblance to Bolshevik Russia is far greater than one imagines. There is the same breadth of landscape, which firstly, by excluding any possibility of successful attack by an invader, consequently excludes the experience of real national danger, and, secondly, by making the State not indispensable, prevents the development of any true political outlook. Life is organized exclusively from the economic side and consequently lacks depth, all the more because it contains nothing of that element of historic tragedy, of great destiny, that has widened and chastened the soul of Western peoples through the centuries. Their religion, originally a strict from of Puritanism, has become a sort of obligatory entertainment, and the War was a novel sport. And there is the same dictatorship there as in Russia (it does not matter that it is imposed by society instead of a party), affecting everything – flirtation and church-going, shoes and lipstick, dances and novels a` la mode, thought, food, and recreation – that in the Western world is left to the option of individuals. There is one standardized type of American, and, above all, American woman, in body, clothes, and mind; any departure from or open criticism of the type arouses public condemnation in New York as in Moscow. Finally, there is an almost Russian form of State socialism or State capitalism, represented by the mass of trusts, which, like the Russian economic administrations, systematically standardize and control every detail of production and marketing. These are the real lords of the land in both cases.

It is the Faustian will-to-power, but translated from organic growth to soulless mechanization. Dollar-imperialism, which pervades the whole of America down to Santiago and Buenos Aires and seeks to undermine and eliminate West- European (and, above all, English) trade, is entirely analogous in its control of economic trends by political power to Bolshevik imperialism. The Bolshevik motto: “Asia for Asiatics,” too, corresponds in principle to the present-day conception of the Monroe Doctrine for Latin America – namely, all America for the economic power of the United States. This is the ultimate meaning of the founding of “independent” republics like Cuba and Panama, of the intervention in Nicaragua and the overthrow by the might of the dollar of unaccommodating presidents right down to the extreme South. 

But this “liberty” of existence on the purely economic basis, free of state and law, has its other side. Out of it has arisen a sea-power which is beginning to be stronger than England’s and controls two oceans. Colonial possessions have arisen: the Philippines, Hawaii, islands of the West Indies. And business interests and English propaganda dragged the country deeper and deeper into the first world war, even to the extent of military participation. But the United States has thereby become a leading element in international politics, whether it would or no, and it must either now learn to think and act internally and externally in accordance with a State policy or else, in its present form, disappear. There is now no going back. Is the “Yankee” equal to this difficult task? Does he stand for an indestructible kind of life or is he only a fashion in physical, mental, and moral clothing? And, moreover, how many inhabitants of the country are there who inwardly do not belong to this ruling Anglo-Saxon type? Quite apart from the Negroes, the immigrants during the twenty years before the War included – with only a small proportion of Germans, English, and Scandinavians – no less than fifteen million Poles, Russians, Czechs, Balkan Slavs, Eastern Jews, Greeks, inhabitants of Asia Minor, Spaniards, and Italians. The greater part of these have not been incorporated in Americanism, but form an alien, foreign-thinking, and very prolific proletariat with its spiritual home in Chicago. They, too, desire unrestricted economic war, but have a different conception of it. 

Granted, there is no Communist party. But neither did this exist as an organization for election purposes in the Tsarist regime. And in the one country as in the other, there is a mighty underworld of an almost Dostoyevsky sort, with its own urge to power, its own methods of destruction and of business, which, in consequence of the corruption prevailing in the organs of public administration and security, extends upwards into very prosperous strata of society – especially as regards that alcohol-smuggling which has intensified political and social demoralization to the extreme. It embraces both the professional criminal class and secret societies of the Ku Klux Klan order, Negroes and Chinese as well as the uprooted elements of all European stocks and races, and it possesses some very effective organizations, certain of which are of long standing, such as the Italian Camorra, the Spanish Guerrilla, the Russian Nihilists before 1917, and the agents of the Cheka later. Lynching, kidnapping, and attempts to assassinate, murder, robbery, and arson are all well-tested methods of political-economic propaganda.

In spacious, thinly peopled areas revolutions have necessarily a different form from that which they take in West-European cities. The Latin-American revolutions give incessant proof of this. Here there is no powerful State to be overthrown by fighting an army of old traditions, but neither is there one which can guarantee the existing order by the respect inspired by its existence. What is called “government” is here liable to melt away suddenly. Even before the War the trusts had often enough to defend their works in strikes by their own fortifications and machine-guns. In the “Land of Liberty” there is only the resolve of free men to help themselves – the revolver in the hip-pocket is an American invention – but this form of defense is as freely available for those in possession as for the rest. Only a short time ago the farmers in Iowa besieged a few towns and threatened them with starvation if they did not buy their products at a decent price. Not many years since, anyone using the word “revolution” in connection with this country would have been called an idiot. Today such ideas are quite in order. What will the masses of the unemployed do – I repeat, the majority are not “hundred per cent Americans” – when their sources of relief are exhausted and there is no State support because there is no organized State with exact and honest statistics and control of those in want? Will they fall back on their fists and their common economic interest with the underworld? And will the intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by the thought of money, reveal all at once, in face of this danger, dormant moral forces that will lead to the real construction of a State and to spiritual preparedness to sacrifice possessions and blood to it, instead of regarding war as a means of gaining wealth as hitherto? Or will the special economic interests of individual areas still pull the most weight and, as once before in 1861, lead to the disintegration of the country into separate states such as, say, the industrial North-East, the farming region of the Middle West, the Negro states of the South, and the area beyond the Rockies? 

-excerpted from “Hour of Decision” by Oswald Spengler (1933)