Will America remain a winner, or become a loser to history?

How do you know when a nation is successful? David Solway defines it as having three complementary components:

the ability to survive intact for extended periods; the achievement of approximate prosperity in a largely impoverished world; and the fostering of a relatively free, confident and vigorous citizenry.

There have been winners and losers. Foremost among the losers were the soviet Union's attempt at Communism, and Islam's attempt at theocratic totalitarianism.

Rome may have been the biggest winner in history, but America is not far behind. However, solway writes that in America,

exhaustion and decrepitude are nigh. The great experiment in republican governance, individual liberty, free market economics, industrial potency and energetic entrepreneurship was doomed by the inexorable forces of human corruption, naked greed, endemic stupidity and the onset of relaxed indifference to the kinetics of continued prosperity, the desideratum of internal unity and the harsh demands of survival in an unforgiving world. Its early decline may be understood as a function of its precipitous success and, in this sense, the current woes afflicting the nation may be considered as entirely predictable and strictly unavoidable. Debt, dependency, unproductivity, preoccupation with untenable theories and fads, internecine conflict, racial politics, affirmative (or infirmative) action, the multicultural salad bowl, intellectual debasement of the general public, a decadent clerisy, incompetent and sybaritic leaders and a climate in which, to cite Victor Davis Hanson, “profits create suspicion; failures earn subsidies”

Solway asserts that America's decline is

invariably accelerated by “the inner loss of the civilizing imperative, the erosion of pride in accomplishment, of political integrity, fiscal sobriety and belief in a system of core values, laws and conventions.”

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America

they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once…A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.

Solway adds,

When one examines the social and political conduct of the United States today, one sees both anarchy and absolutism at work: a divided citizenry, giving the impression that America comprises really two — or more — competing nations, with the threat of secession floating in the air and economic chaos in the offing; and an increasingly autocratic political administration governing via executive privilege, the bypassing of Congress, the proliferation of draconian laws and regulations, internal espionage, stygian secrecy, constitutional delinquency, bureaucratic engorgement and the assumption of elitist privilege converging in the person of a “great leader.”

History has been kind to America for an ephemeral moment in aeonian time; and America has been good for the world. But not everyone loves a winner. Envy and resentment rather than gratitude have been its international reward. But what is even more damning and far less resistible is the spirit of envy and resentment that emanates from within the republic as it turns against itself — envy directed toward the productive classes; resentment for accomplishment and earned stature. And once an entitlement mentality asserts itself and begins to determine public policy, as Milton Friedman warned, the tipping point relentlessly approaches. When, as it has been said, there are as many people riding the wagon as there are pulling the wagon — the socialist conundrum — the wagon moves ever more slowly before grinding to a halt. This is precisely the condition of America today, where we appear to be witnessing the impending end of republican democracy and the “fundamental transformation” of a flawed but admirable nation into a neo-Marxist caricature of itself.

The only issue that remains is whether a winner that is losing can reclaim its place on the podium. Secession of a vital part from a sickly and imploding whole may go some way to restoration, but only for the part, and even then it is a risky proposition. A noble and determined leader — charisma is not enough and may often be destructive, as we have seen in the U.S. today — emerging unexpectedly on the scene may stave off disaster, at least for a time. For all his foreign policy blunders — withdrawing the marines from Lebanon, arming the Islamists in Afghanistan — such a leader was Ronald Reagan, who in his Farewell Speech pointed out “what it means to be an American,” namely, “a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions,” without which that “rare” and “fragile” thing, freedom, would be lost. A winner who lets freedom slip away becomes a loser before his time.

But the forecast is not encouraging. Reagan’s proud city “strong and true on the granite ridge” is sliding brick by brick and building by building into the environing ocean whose waves he thought it could withstand. Barring a miracle or a propitious awakening, the future has been written. History is claiming its due and history does not play favorites. Indeed, history does not play.