Why I'm Optimistic About America's Future
Our messy and ever-transforming America will outlast Trump and his notion of an eternal age. The genius of individual liberty gives rise to the very traits that materialism was thought to extinguish.
Edwin Eisendrath hosts It’s the Democracy, Stupid on Lincoln Square and WCPT820 AM/Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. Subscribe to his Substack.
Something new is happening in America. Something entirely new in the world. Again.
European historians and philosophers since Plato have argued that democracies progress into tyrannies. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, first published on the eve of World War I and finalized in 1922, went further, arguing that whole cultures are like living organisms with life cycles — and that they all die. In his formulation, cultures pass through phases. There is the creative, inward, religious, and artistic phase.
Then there is a phase characterized by technical mastery, outward focus, and urban life. In this latter phase, the political forms created earlier become corrupted. Spengler described Western civilization, that thing J.D. Vance is always talking about, as Faustian. He meant that it is a culture of striving. He saw the invention of perspective in painting, the creation of calculus, the discoveries of physics, and the technological advances that gave humans vastly more power as all pointing to a soul that would not be contained. And yet he expected that spirit to be crushed by its own materialism. In his view, money and mass entertainment come to determine national direction; political forms become meaningless.
In this final era of a culture’s life, people would no longer see any point in elections — or in whatever system their culture had adopted to determine political power. Instead, their popular will thwarted, they would turn to leaders grounded in myth and force. Spengler calls this Caesarism. In that last phase, the leader harnesses those with money and media. It is where cultures go to die. And about 20th-century Europe, he was correct.
Many see a similar pattern here in the United States. Instead of leading to collapse, however, the pattern points to revival. In Donald Trump and MAGA, we see the Spenglerian turn from civilization to Caesarism at work. Its main narrative is that America has been betrayed and humiliated by cosmopolitan elites, immigrants, and globalism. It claims the primacy of decision-making over law and of force over procedure. It uses lies that everyone knows are lies to create a myth of overcoming. We see, as Spengler predicted, those with money and control over media harnessed by the myth-making strongman. And yet, at the very moment when America faces a decisive cultural breakdown, its people have posed a constructive counter force.