First read this dreadful, hateful, conspiracy-theory-ridden article. My debunking response follows. You can skip right to my response if you can’t stomach the filth.
Christians at the End of the Pax Americana
FROM A WARFARE STATE TO A WELFARE STATE
By Robert McTeigue | September 2022
Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., is a member of the U.S. Eastern Province of the Society of Jesus. He is the producer and host of The Catholic Current, a radio talk show that airs on the Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network, and he is on the National Ethics Committee of the Catholic Medical Association. His latest books from Ignatius Press are Real Philosophy for Real People: Tools for Truthful Living (2020) and Christendom Lost and Found: Meditations for a Post Post-Christian Era (2022).
“The king is dead! Long live the king!” These words have been used in both history and literature as a powerful means of reassurance. The populace is reassured that even in the face of crisis represented by the death of a king, there is an orderly transition of power: one king follows another, without interruption. (Whether the populace should find such an announcement reassuring is another question.) In neither history nor literature can I find this declaration: “The empire is dead! Long live the empire!” Why this lack, this lacuna, even though empires rise and fall and are succeeded by other empires in their turn? This question is on my mind as I watch in real time what I believe is the accelerating decline and impending demise of the American empire.
The only thing America “makes” a lot of these days is debt. It seems her most significant export is the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That privileged position is made possible in significant part by the American military (a claim I will review and justify below). Once that collapses — and it will because it must — how will the beneficiaries of the welfare/warfare state survive? (Hint: Not by wearing T-shirts with clever slogans or posting snarky memes.)
With the welfare/warfare state, one faces the chicken-egg conundrum: which came first? They are both features of empires, especially in the latter stages of an empire’s lifecycle. Each element is necessary to pay for and justify the other. An empire needs the pacification the welfare state brings. Peoples pacified are less inclined to be restive and more inclined to be productive — up to a point. A study of history shows that the fate of empires is to move past that point of equilibrium.
A populace disinclined to be restive can be counted on for the good order and predictability needed for the conduct of commerce. Commerce (ideally, ever-expanding commerce) is, of course, indispensable for paying for the warfare state (about which more in a moment). The danger of the pacifying work of the welfare state is that, over time, what was once considered a benefit eventually becomes perceived as an entitlement. We can see this dynamic at work in the program of “bread and circuses” provided to the plebeians by the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire. As with any addiction, more and more is required, with less and less resulting satisfaction. Prolonged pacification leads to a decrease in aspiration, even as there is a corresponding increase in demand. As the pacified populace moves from an emphasis on production to an emphasis on consumption, there will be a decrease in the generation of the revenue needed to finance the warfare state that is necessary to ensure the peace needed for the security of the welfare state. The consequences of the loss of revenue are both delayed and exacerbated by increases in taxation, inflation, and debt — a toxic and always fatal combination.
Let’s look a bit more closely at the welfare state. Many are inclined to believe that its pacifying efforts are aimed exclusively at people on the lower rungs of the social ladder. On this view, what was once the proper function of private and religious charity has become an insidious scheme of cultivating a dependent class willing to trade votes in exchange for donations from the public purse. What’s established is a cycle of mutual bribery that is impossible to break, absent a financial collapse or some other catastrophe. This view is correct, as far as it goes — but it does not go far enough.
What’s often overlooked is that the pacification and bribery efforts do not stop at the lower rungs of the ladder. The middle class, with higher aspirations, and therefore less easily satisfied, can also be pacified and then bribed for votes in exchange for public largesse. It just costs more.
It’s been said that members of the lower social strata will be pacified simply if they get something for nothing. In contrast, the middle class has demonstrated its willingness to be bribed by receiving something for the sake of something more. On this view, while those in the lower strata are willing to stay where they are if nothing else is expected or demanded of them, the middle class demands the opportunity (or, at least, the appearance of the opportunity) for advancement. We see this dynamic at work with the seemingly infinite funds made available for higher education.
There was a time when higher education in America was an exceptional rather than a common venture. Only people with exceptional resources or exceptional talent would set their sights on higher education. This was not necessarily a bad thing. The structure and vitality of the economy were such that a person could reasonably expect to own a home and support a family on a single blue-collar income. For many reasons, those days are gone.
When I was an undergraduate over 40 years ago, I was staggered to learn that anyone could be admitted to university while in need of “remedial” courses. Folks in need of remediation were relatively rare back then and tended to be found mostly among the ranks of the university’s “scholar-athletes.” When I started teaching some 30 years ago, I noticed that the number of students in need of remediation had increased significantly, even beyond the select ranks of the scholar-athletes. In the years that followed, my colleagues and I noted a steady decline in students’ abilities, skills, attitudes, virtues, curiosity, courtesy, and discipline. (There were always remarkable exceptions to that trend, of course, but the trend was unmistakable.) In other words, the mix of qualities one could expect to find in a student ready, willing, and able to benefit from higher education was harder and harder to find among the student body.
The increasing rarity of the necessities for university life was evident even as the ranks of students enrolled at universities were burgeoning. Student quality decreased even as grade point averages (GPAs) increased. Meanwhile, grand buildings popped up, campus amenities improved, and everywhere — everywhere — the bureaucracy expanded. More and more people were required to manage worse and worse educational outcomes.
It’s become increasingly common for students to spend more than four years (in both time and tuition) earning a four-year degree. Why the delay? It could be the number of remedial courses the student needs. Often, the student is indolent and either failed or dropped challenging courses. No matter — as long as the money is coming in, the university keeps a place open for such students. They might not be success stories, but these students deliver where, institutionally speaking, it counts the most: these students are revenue streams.
The competitive edge that supposedly merits a student’s investment of time, energy, and money is blunted by the fact that nearly everyone goes to college these days. Consequently, while once an employer might reasonably expect a certain measure of skill, knowledge, and discipline from a college graduate, nowadays that expectation is no longer reasonable. Today, an undergraduate degree, perhaps more than anything else, is a reliable indicator of a willingness to go into debt. Even so, higher GPAs and various honors are increasing among college graduates.
There’s more than just grade inflation at contemporary universities. Now it seems that anyone and everyone can get a university degree (based primarily on a tolerance for debt rather than a capacity for achievement). A baccalaureate degree in some fields is overshadowed by the expectation that one should earn a graduate degree for a real “competitive edge.” More coins go into the slot, the tune goes on, and everybody dances. Meanwhile, another associate vice dean is hired…
What keeps this decadent spiral going? Well, there is the illusion that a university education is a smart investment for anyone who can enroll. But that illusion can only be sustained by infinite resources and repeated propaganda. And propaganda is easy to come by. Financial resources (even of the finite kind) are not. What we’re seeing with the dynamics of the multi-tiered welfare state described above is a kind of Ponzi scheme. People of the lower social tiers “pay into” the pyramid scheme with compliance and complacency. The propaganda tells them that they are entitled to entitlements and that the “privileged” have an obligation to hand over at least some of the (presumably) infinite resources at their disposal.
People of the middle social tiers are also brought into the pyramid scheme, but in a different way. The scheme uses their own aspirations against them. The middle classes very much desire “advancement” and “a better life” for their children — yet, it seems, rarely, if ever, are the terms better or advancement examined, much less defined. The trope might be summarized as follows: Getting into a “good” school and getting a “good” degree inevitably lead to getting a “good” job that offers a “good” salary — the last term, of course, is the necessary and sufficient condition for a “better” life.
Take out higher education from the equation (so the story goes) and the whole dynamic grinds to a halt. No happiness for your children! What kind of parents accept such a bleak fate for their offspring? Likewise, what sensible young adult would willingly turn away from the only path to a life worth living?
Note a significant difference in what the pyramid scheme requires of the different social strata. For the folks in the lower tiers, the scheme asks only passive acceptance. Here participation is facilitated by an envy that fuels resentment, which, in turn, yields the intoxicating fruit of entitlement.
The folks in the middle strata are equally duped, but in a different way. In their case, it is precisely their aspirations that facilitate their glad participation in their own deception and disablement. Here naïve ambition blinds members of the middle tier to the fact that their place in the pyramid requires that they surrender their common sense. If the story they’ve been sold is true — namely, that higher education will give their offspring a competitive advantage over nearly everybody else — what happens to the advantage, the mark of distinction, if everybody else also gets a college degree? How can this obvious point have been so widely overlooked for so long? Meanwhile, high school graduates who can’t calculate interest on a loan saddle themselves with massive debt and have no idea how they will pay it all back.
The economist Peter Schiff made a brief video years ago in which he took a camera crew to the notorious Bourbon Street in New Orleans on a Friday night. There he interviewed bartenders, bouncers, waitresses, dancers, and pedicab drivers. These folks all had one thing in common. They all had given years of their lives to higher education, in the pursuit of a “better life,” and they had little to no hope of fulfilling their dreams precisely because of the ruinous debt they had accepted as a necessary condition of their “only path” to a life worth living. Lower-tier participants in the pyramid scheme are left with nothing. Middle-tier participants, for the most part, are left with nothing but debt.
Sadly, participants in the pyramid scheme squander their abilities and their future. Young people are drawn away from the circumstances and resources necessary to start families and small businesses. The demographic, financial, social, moral, and spiritual consequences are catastrophic. A very large portion of society is being formed to be dependent, disappointed, and in constant need of pacification. The means necessary for such an extensive and prolonged process of pacification are both expensive and dangerous. And that brings us to the warfare state.
The concept of a just war has a longstanding place in both Catholic social teaching and the natural-law tradition. War, as a means of last resort, can, under certain circumstances, be used to protect the vulnerable and pursue justice. That war is a powerful instrument subject to terrible abuse cannot be denied.
What I am focusing on here is the role of war in the lifecycle of an empire. Restricting my scope to the years since 1900, it is beyond dispute (even if it is not common knowledge) that war has been exploited by the wealthy few to become even wealthier. Likewise, it is beyond dispute that certain corporations and financial institutions work together to supply the war efforts of the opposing combatants of the selfsame war. For example, during World War I (a.k.a., “the war to end all wars”), profiteers grew rich selling simultaneously to the British Crown and the German Kaiser. Same again during World War II, selling to both the Allied and Axis powers. As I write this, those rushing arms to invaded Ukraine had only recently sold arms to invader Russia.
One of the most highly decorated members of the U.S. Marine Corps was Major General Smedley Butler. Known as “the Fighting Quaker,” he published a little book called War Is a Racket: The Profit Motive Behind Warfare (1935). He saw firsthand how a nation’s war-making serves ends other than legitimate defense and the pursuit of justice. Focusing on the First World War, he detailed how an elite class became very rich (or, in some cases, very much richer) while ordinary people were impoverished and suffered every imaginable form of loss or privation, and millions of combatants and civilians died. Butler himself died in the 1940 as war drums started banging around the world again. He suggested that one way to make war less frequent is to make it less profitable. History shows that no one seriously explored that option.
In our own time, we can see that the war in Afghanistan, despite ending in humiliating failure for the United States, won mindboggling amounts of wealth for some Americans. A look at the finances of the leadership of Lockheed-Martin, Supreme Foods, and Blackwater USA confirms what Gen. Butler warned about 87 years ago: war is a racket. Members of Congress, who are allowed to invest in defense contractors before appropriating public funds to war efforts, would, if they were honest, agree.
So far, we’ve been talking about the warfare state as a kind of corporate welfare. We need to hone in on the role of the warfare state in terms of its service to empire, especially in its support of the enterprise of welfare-for-the-masses, in particular, toward the latter stages of an empire’s lifecycle.
It’s become common in recent years to accompany with various illustrations the following summary of historical cycles: “Hard times make strong men; strong men make good times; good times make soft men; soft men make hard times.” In the latter stages of an empire’s lifecycle, a large and expensive military is necessary. Why? The empire needs a vast military, not just to enrich the elites from time to time but to prop up and secure the welfare state.
It’s costly to maintain the good times established by strong men. It becomes costlier and more difficult (to the point of impossible) as the passage of time removes strong men and replaces them with soft men. It is ruinously expensive to prop up the good times as the ensuing soft men begin to prevail. The bread of the bread and circuses promised to the plebeians will not be made by the plebeians — yet someone has to make it, and someone has to pay for it. The welfare state for the lower strata comes at a burdensome cost to the empire. But an uprising of unpacified plebeians (whether the uprising is successful or not) is even costlier.
Similarly, the pacification process for the middle strata over time becomes progressively onerous for the empire. The elite can’t allow too much upward mobility for too many of the middle echelons. After all, being elite isn’t very elite if anyone and everyone (or nearly so) can ascend the ladder.
The mid-levels, to remain pacified, must have at least the illusion of a reasonable and reliable hope for advancement. For most, that means luring young people into the hamster wheel of higher (and higher) education, enclosed by initially unacknowledged but later inescapable debt servitude. Very many are encouraged to reach high for the brass ring, but their upward mobility is vitiated by the weight of their student loans.
Where does all that money come from? Government borrowing, money printing, and inflation can go a long way toward financing the expenditures needed for the pacification of a soft populace. But it won’t be enough.
The empire will have to expand its reach, in search of cheaper labor, cheaper resources, and cut-rate manufacturing. The goods need to be brought back safely to the empire. Such expansion and reclamation need to be protected by a powerful, far-flung, and terribly expensive military.
If an empire is especially aggressive (and very lucky), it may enjoy, for a while, the intoxicating benefit of having its currency serve as the world’s “reserve currency.” This means that the empire has become so rich and powerful that most nations will trade with one another with their transactions denominated in the empire’s currency. That privilege can help an empire enjoy international pride of place even after its true wealth and power have diminished. Once the empire’s currency loses that privileged status, however, the rate of the empire’s decline accelerates relatively quickly. We’ve seen this dynamic before with the rise and fall of the Dutch guilder, for example, and, more recently, the British pound. That loss of status is coming for the U.S. dollar. No one can honestly specify a precise date for when that will happen, but I believe it will happen in my lifetime, and sooner rather than later. I am 60 years old.
The Pax Americana, that is, the system of law, trade, finance, and culture, with the United States as hegemon since the end of World War II, is winding down. The warfare state gave America its empire, and it made possible the empire’s welfare state. The welfare state will collapse the empire. That is the way of human wealth and power.
In the United States, the cessation of the flow of entitlements to the lower strata will lead to shock, outrage, and worse. For the middle strata, the evaporation of the dream of inevitable advancement will lead to bitterness, disillusion, and despair. Will there be violence as well? I don’t know. I would not be surprised if there were.
For nearly everyone, there will be a startling and humiliating awakening. Individuals, families, communities, and institutions will discover that they do not know how to feed, shelter, educate, or defend themselves. They will learn, to their dismay, that they lived most of their lives without learning how to cultivate virtue or civility. And there will be no more infinitely rich Uncle Sam to provide for them, protect them, or give hope to their dreams.
Recent events in Europe, bad weather, poor American energy policies, as well as uncertainties regarding inflation, debt, and currencies will likely affect the global food supply chain in the coming years. The witting and unwitting cultivation of generations of citizens who have neither a clue nor curiosity about where their food, water, heat, medicine, and energy come from results in a population ill-prepared to adapt to the disruption of the necessities and conveniences of life.
Schools that see their mission primarily in terms of teaching children how to don condoms or hunt for subconscious prejudice seem unlikely to impart the knowledge, skills, and character needed for self-sufficient and hardy communities of virtue. University students taught to accept the en masse shouting down of unwelcome words seem unlikely to ask, much less answer, the question, “What happens if our government can’t save us?”
I have a well-grounded suspicion that generations have been deliberately cultivated to be nearly helpless rather than self-sufficient, entitled rather than generous, dull rather than curious. Such cohorts are easy to manipulate. And such cohorts can become frightfully dangerous when they no longer receive their perceived entitlements, or when their aspirations are frustrated, denied, or, perhaps worse, disappointing even when realized.
Yes, panicky mobs can be dangerous. They can also be numbed to quiescence by a technocratic system that offers less sophisticated but more reliable bread and circuses once they have had a brush with hardships and their own inadequacies.
As the dislocations and disruptions begin to proliferate and accelerate, the more likely scenario is excess-of-law, rather than absence-of-law, more 1984 than Mad Max. One can argue whether the impending crisis was deliberately precipitated. I think it is inarguable that as the crisis unfolds, the rallying cry of the technocrats and bureaucrats will be, “Never let a crisis go to waste!”
Yes, we can and should insist on the primacy of parents as the principal educators of their own children. But: Nemo dat quod non habet (“No one gives what he does not have”). Too many adults suffer from academic and catechetical deficits themselves, not to mention defects of character. Facing the dilemma starkly: Our children need to be taught and formed today, right now. Yet too many parents today don’t have what it takes to do a good job of it. So, which group do we treat first, parents or children?
I don’t have a prefabricated remedy to offer. I can make a few obvious observations and recommendations. What I am writing here can be used as part of a longer and wider conversation. The formation of small communities is essential. Pockets of resistance can be a natural locus and focus for the formation of children and re-formation of parents and other adults. A simple survey of the skills, knowledge, and resources of each member is a good place to start.
Similar provisions should be made for religious resources, including material necessities for the sacraments. No one really knows what the future may hold. We do know (or, at least, we should) that the structures of parishes and dioceses that so many Catholics in America take for granted have not been vouchsafed for us in perpetuity by Our Lord.
Every day there is another headline about the breaking of another strand of the social fabric. Every day I happen upon another thought-provoking article regarding the decline of the dollar, the rise of the ruble, the mysteries of cryptocurrencies, and the perennial meaning of gold. My daily reading is sprinkled with horrifying or hope-inspiring events within the life of the Church. And every day Christ speaks through the proclamation of the Gospel and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
The American empire that emerged after 1945 is winding down. History shows that this decline and fall (and likely replacement by another emerging empire) is all but inevitable. In God’s Providence, we are alive in this time and place. Many have profited (if not always benefited) from America’s imperial ascendancy. Many (perhaps very many) failed to heed Sacred Scripture’s warning to “put not your trust in princes” (Ps. 146:3). Perhaps we sought, found, and rested with the comforts and luxuries of hegemony. Perhaps we have not been good heirs and stewards of all that has been entrusted to us or that otherwise came into our possession. In any case, as the Pax Americana draws to a close, Christians and others will soon have ample opportunity to discover who their prince really is, and whether that prince is trustworthy.
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My response:
Father Robert McTeigue—Fact Checked
By Thaddeus Kozinski
Fr. Robert McTeigue’s screed, “Christians at the End of the Pax Americana,” is typical boilerplate of the right-wing, MAGA, Greatest-Catholics-Of-All-Time, America haters. Actually, come to think of it, it’s hard to tell it apart from the leftist, Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-war propaganda that our students are getting in precisely those indoctrination centers called “higher-education” that McTeigue denounces! Is Father a MAGA cultist or a Marxist libtard? Well, anyway, I need to debunk and fact-check at least some of his loony disinformation and hate speech—for which he should immediately be held legally and financially accountable (I’ve already sent his article to the Anti-Defamation League and Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board—and no, it hasn’t been “paused”—that’s just MAGA disinfo).
Before I begin, I must say I’m surprised this Jesuit fruit cake didn’t gift us with his ravings about the “deadly-vaccine,” the “scamdemic,” and the “New World Order” cabal’s agenda, led by Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and other James-Bond-cartoon villains to depopulate the earth and install a totalitarian, Hunger-Games “Great Reset” (by the way, all this is lampooned in depth at my satire substack, “Clemmy,” if you’re interested: thaddeuskozinski.substack.com). But there’s plenty enough to debunk, with all his talk of “Ponzi and pyramid schemes” (antisemitism anyone?) and “notorious Bourbon Street” (racist much?—do Black Lives Matter to you, Father White Privilege?) to land this anti-Francis, rad-trad, Marxist-leftist, right-wing extremist Jesuit in Facebook and Twitter jail, at the very least.
McTeigue: “The only thing America ‘makes’ a lot of these days is debt. It seems her most significant export is the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That privileged position is made possible in significant part by the American military.”
Fact-check: This is straight out of the Marxist-Chomsky playbook—and it’s certainly antisemitic—those usurious Joooos! And how dare you even imply that our heroic American military, the greatest force for good on the planet since the beginning of time, is just a mercenary engine of financial enslavement! Shall we defund the military that secured your freedom to sit in your ivory tower and type on your expensive MacBook, Father? Should we allow you to disparage the brave soldiers that are now fighting and dying for our freedom in Ukraine against Putin, the new Hitler? Why is New Oxford Review publishing pro-Russian propaganda? Next thing you’ll be telling us is that the Federal Reserve is a “private corporation,” and raving about “fiat currency” and the evil schemes of the “international bankers” in funding both sides of the World Wars! Oh, you already kind of said that (see below). Well, were the Twin Towers blown up by pre-planned explosives so that the traumatized, brainwashed, mass-formed masses would support the Deep State’s destruction of “seven countries in five years” on behalf of elite oligarchs, Father?
McTeigue: “On this view, what was once the proper function of private and religious charity has become an insidious scheme of cultivating a dependent class willing to trade votes in exchange for donations from the public purse.”
Fact-check: What is the majority skin color of that “dependent class” Father, would you tell us? “Private religious charity”? We know what it was like to live in those days, when the Church and the “free-market” were in charge of the “common good”—widespread illiteracy, husbands ruling over their wives and children as dictators, women forced to have many babies, no science, no freedom of belief, no progress, no sex-change operations. The Secular State has saved us from the rule of popes and patriarchy, given us the freedom to love who we want, and has now liberated the gender-oppressed to make use of the technological and scientific progress only it has secured to safely substitute one set of genitals for another. Do you want to go back to the dark ages? “Trade votes in exchange for donations?” Father, I think you mistake the New America under Biden, who is returning us to our democracy, for the MAGA cult of domestic terrorists that infiltrated our sacred precincts on January 6, a day that will live in infamy, a cult that was decisively voted out by the vast majority of science-loving Americans. I am glad you didn’t talk of “voter-fraud” in your article, Father, for I would have had to go straight to Merrick Garland and Anthony Blinken with that terror threat.
McTeigue: “Likewise, it is beyond dispute that certain corporations and financial institutions work together to supply the war efforts of the opposing combatants of the selfsame war. For example, during World War I (a.k.a., “the war to end all wars”), profiteers grew rich selling simultaneously to the British Crown and the German Kaiser. Same again during World War II, selling to both the Allied and Axis powers. As I write this, those rushing arms to invaded Ukraine had only recently sold arms to invader Russia.
Fact-Check: Where do I begin? How dare you imply that World War II was anything but America’s heroic and self-sacrificing victory over the evil forces of fascism and Nazism (ideologies stemming from a belief in absolute moral truth and the scapegoating of “certain” people as evil—a legacy of the religious intolerance and anti-semitism of Christendom that American progressives finally put out of its and our misery with Roe vs. Wade, which was recently overturned because of women-and-freedom hating fascists like you “Father”! And Ukraine!!!! Ukraine!!!! I have no words. Oh yes, Zelensky is a Jewish man, is that it Father!?
McTeigue: “For nearly everyone, there will be a startling and humiliating awakening. Individuals, families, communities, and institutions will discover that they do not know how to feed, shelter, educate, or defend themselves.”
Fact-Check: This is the only truth in the whole article.
As the Interim Leader of our soon-to-be free world has told us, and we receive it with joy: “You will own nothing and be happy.” As we await the Great Reset that Covid, Ukraine, Climate Change, and Pope Francis have helped to bring about, and the New World, with Its Beloved Leader, that await us (as soon as the last remnants of intolerant “truthers” like McTeigue die off or are permanently deplatformed—are you with me?), let us close our ears to the purveyors of hate and disinformation, and open our ears to the One Who Is To Come—but first get your booster.
Thanks for fact-checking this post-liberal blowhard into irrelevance Thad!
Thank you for referring me to the article by Fr. McTeigue, I agree with virtually all his points. It’s not often I find myself in such agreement with a Jesuit scholar- with the notable exception of Father James Schall, may his memory be eternal. Bless you my friend, and +AMDG+.