Off the Spectrum

Here's the transcript of a remarkable interview with Andrew Bacevich from the Bill Moyers Journal. It's the sort of clear-sighted disillusionment that seems to float around in intellectual magazines and blogs, but rarely breaks through in the mainstream without sounding cynical. While there are any number of places where one could disagree with Bacevich, I think he absolutely nails a some key insights about the American people, what we want, and what we refuse to discuss on the national stage.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't live within our means. I mean, the nation doesn't, and increasingly, individual Americans don't. Our saving - the individual savings rate in this country is below zero. The personal debt, national debt, however you want to measure it, as individuals and as a government, and as a nation we assume an endless line of credit.

As individuals, the line of credit is not endless, that's one of the reasons why we're having this current problem with the housing crisis, and so on. And my view would be that the nation's assumption, that its line of credit is endless, is also going to be shown to be false. And when that day occurs it's going to be a black day, indeed.

BILL MOYERS: You call us an "empire of consumption."

ANDREW BACEVICH: I didn't create that phrase. It's a phrase drawn from a book by a wonderful historian at Harvard University, Charles Maier, and the point he makes in his very important book is that, if we think of the United States at the apex of American power, which I would say would be the immediate post World War Two period, through the Eisenhower years, into the Kennedy years. We made what the world wanted. They wanted our cars. We exported our television sets, our refrigerators - we were the world's manufacturing base. He called it an "empire of production."

BILL MOYERS: Right.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Sometime around the 1960s there was a tipping point, when the "empire of production" began to become the "empire of consumption." When the cars started to be produced elsewhere, and the television sets, and the socks, and everything else. And what we ended up with was the American people becoming consumers rather than producers.

Michael Sandel argued, in Democracy's Discontent, that we as a nation basically exchanged our ability to discuss the meaning of our freedom for a society in which the government leaves us with our rights while carefully managing an ever-growing economy. At this point, it is clear that the “American way of life” is largely about negative freedoms: freedoms to acquire, to accumulate, to be left alone with our stuff. Is this really what we want? Or do we want control over our political lives?