The Boy Who Cried Empire

I wish I'd coined that phrase, but it's from Arthur Chrenkoff, who's written a commentary on the new Star Wars flick (which I haven't see). Arthur isn't wild about the picture, for what it's worth, but his insight into Lucas's worldview, and its place in his movies, is insightful and on target:

It's true that the price of liberty is the eternal vigilance, but for the left the price of the eternal vigilance, in turn, has been the eternal paranoia, and the eternal tendency to see its own government as a greater threat to America and the world than any of the actual, existing, reality-based totalitarian tyrants that have ever roamed the earth. One can have reasonable discussion about the growth in size and reach of the government over the past two centuries, but the left's role in this debate has always been a boy who cried empire [emphasis added]. Thus (to is critics) the United States seems to be perpetually on the verge of tumbling into tyranny (the Civil War, the Gilded Age corporatization, World War One, News Deal, World War Two, Vietnam, the war on terror, or generally whenever the Republicans are in the White House), but somehow it never does (except to some of these critics, for whom it already had).

I think something similar can be said about the gloom and doom right, which sees America as a state in perpetual decline. Think of the venerable Richard Weaver, who, for all his insights into the malaise of modernity, may have gone just a bit overboard with his claim that the West has grown increasingly decadent since William of Ockham (d. 1347)! If that's true, we'd all be better off in, say, China, if not the back side of the moon. Among people worth reading, Weaver's pessimism is trumped perhaps only by that of Herodotus, who wrote that a man would be better off if he were never born at all.

But, of course, that isn't true, and those who think we're going to hell in a hand basket can't always be right (neither are they always wrong). A question I'd have for both factions of naysayers is: against what are you measuring our current conditions? What are your historical, cultural, moral, and intellectual yardsticks?