We're asking readers: At what point did our political system become decadent? One writes:
The Clinton impeachment, hands down. The long list of ridiculous investigations leading up to it were bad enough, but taking a step designed to remove an elected President over a personal affair showed that the view of politics over country now ruled the day. The proceedings were political Kabuki Theater at its basest.
Another writes:
It was nothing but aggrandizing personalities out for political gain based on a personal misjudgment on the president's part, the country be damned – party and personality above all. That was the political manifestation. The social and economic manifestation of our Late Imperial phase was indicated by the 9/11 attacks when the barbarians rode in on our Appian Way to pillage the Forum.
Another:
I have a vivid memory of reading the Kenneth Starr report on Monica Lewinsky one afternoon in the company of a number of my then-colleagues. Looking back, it is almost embarrassing how much we all giggled and snickered over that document.
(It is also interesting to consider that that must have been one of the first, if not the first, source documents for a major news event that we all read over the Internet.) I think that was the point at which I knew we had begun our decline and fall. Probably
what Clinton said about the cigar, and knowing the circumstances in which he said it, and that he was our head of state and at the time in his official office (in every respect), is what put me over the top. And if that didn't do it, surely the arguments about the meaning of the word “is,” the blue dress, and the impeachment proceedings would have. Any time a society is laughing at its leader the way we were all laughing at Bill Clinton, you have to know that something serious has ruptured in that society.
But I think the better way to think about the question is to ask not when did we realize that the political system has become decadent, but to ask when the decadence actually began. I think the best answer to that question is that it began before many of us were born: when Lyndon Johnson began lying to the country about Vietnam. Moral authority is the most powerful kind of authority there is, and at that point, at which our political leaders lost our trust and respect, they lost any sort of moral authority over the citizenry. In a democracy, where the people are sovereign, this means that we quite literally lost respect for ourselves.
Of course, what followed the Vietnam era did not help. An interesting question is where would we be today if Humphrey beat Nixon in 1968, or if Watergate had never happened. Jimmy Carter's national malaise (a word, I learned recently, he never actually uttered in his infamous speech) did not help either. But it was all made possible, I think, by LBJ.
I think this is a fascinating, even if depressing, question. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is something I have always wanted to read. I guess at this point I am saving it for retirement, but I suspect it is more topical than any of us would like to thank. Another fascinating question – and obviously I am far from the first person to think of this – is the extent to which our decline has been accelerated by modern information technology. Vietnam was the first war covered on television, and I doubt I would have been laughing at Bill Clinton in quite the way I was without the Internet. And let's not even talk about Weinergate.
Another:
I'm British and lived in the US during the second half of the '90s. What I saw profoundly shocked me – I actually used the word "decadent" to describe it at the time. It was the most extraordinary extra-democratic campaign and I'm thrilled that two of the ring-leaders' (Tom DeLay and Trent Lott) careers ended in disgrace.
By the way, it was an article of yours about Clinton that caused me to finally give up reading The Sunday Times. My ONLY solace is that you are now writing some real sense about neo-cons, Palin et al so I'm an avid reader now.
The Dish 