YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION--WELL, YOU KNOW, WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD ---Episode 5

                                    THE ISSUES OF U. S. ECONOMIC DECLINE 

   Louis Hartz, the historian best known for his discourse on the liberal tradition in America, pointedly wondered back in the middle of the twentieth century what would become of American exceptionalism ---and the optimism of the electorate --- if the United States was forced to rejoin world history after a 150-year vacation from it. In the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, many scholars and pundits were convinced that this Hartzian hour was at hand. 

   Attention to decline, whether in Europe or the United States, has had its own rhythm. Each nation's early worriers, reacting to decline from an absolute zenith in share of world trade or manufacturing, have been premature, in practical terms, by some four or five decades. Yet their analyses are a useful jumping-off point. The stage at which considerable popular concern has developed --- in the 1890s, for Britain, in the 1980s in the U.S. --- has usually involved a stalling of previous advances for the working class while the upper classes enjoy a glittering cosmopolitan zenith: Britain in 1900-1914, the United States of the 1980s, 1990s, and millennium.

   Indeed, the wave of books assessing decline in Holland and Britain published in Europe and North America during the 1980s and 1990s suggests that full, open, and informed retrospect may even require the passage of of fifty (or 150) years. Even then, the disagreement among scholars can be fierce. Volumes published during a leading power's sunset have to be indirect or oblique, like Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, or limited to one evident dimension, like the English books of the 1890s sounding alarm bells about the American or German economic threats.

   Nevertheless, for U.S. purposes, the record of the three decades between 1970 and 2000 was replete with American moods, circumstances, and debates familiar from later trajectory of two previous leading world economic powers. The sullenness of the workforce, especially men. The concern with globalization and hitherto domestic investment flowing overseas. The growing awareness of the rich and conspicuous consumption, and THE HINTS OF PLUTOCRACY.  Other parallels include anger at the corruption of officeholders and anxiousness to democratize politics and increase popular electoral participation as well as a finger-pointing at financiers and incipient attention to increasing taxes on the rich to pay for popular social programs, pensions, health insurance, and the like. 

   The Dutch and British precedents that follow can be put alongside the short chronology of U.S. popular frustration and off-and-on Middle American Radicalism. It makes sense to begin with the broadest frustration : the desire for institutional, moral, and economic revitalization. 

   In either a reactionary, democratic, or some mixed form of government, "revitalization" has been a common agendum in leading economic powers once the public starts to identify national decline or the corruption of formerly vital political institutions . In ancient Greece and Rome, Plato and Plutarch wrote of the need to escape plutocracy.