The author is a seasoned journalist who has spent years each in 3 countries outside of his native UK, and he has absorbed knowledge from them. This book is startlingly insightful and very useful in understanding what is happening the US right now, as well as what is happening overall in many areas of the world affected by what has occurred in the US over the past decade. ( )

Not exactly sure what I learned from this book, or how it might have changed me, but I liked it. Basically a centrist rant about the current social situation, but well-written and brief. ( )

Luce focuses primarily on the decline of American power, economic influence and standing but also reviews the falling fortunes of Western European countries including Britain, Germany and France. The election of Donald Trump has further weakened our democracy and and trust by our allies. Trump has candidly said that he will put America first. Our allies may not be able to count on America for military or economic support. The analysis from this book is not exactly shocking if one watches or reads the news. But Luce does connect the dots and envisions that the Chinese will soon be the predominant power in the world.

Listed below are some of the sections that I highlighted from the book:

"Economists are notorious for getting the future wrong (just as they are peerless at
explaining the past). The joke is that they have predicted ten out of the last five recessions. In recent years, during what is now called the age of hyperglobalisation, bad forecasting has erred in the opposite direction. Economists have consistently predicted growth where none has materialised.

It was an Atlantic recession. In 2009, China’s economy grew by almost 10 per cent, and India’s by almost 8 percent.

Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century. Clearly what the typical American understands by growth differs greatly from that of macroeconomists.

To be clear: the West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.

There is now a higher share of French males in fulltime jobs than Americans – a statistic that reflects poorly on America, rather than well on France.

Having hundreds of Facebook friends is no substitute for seeing people.

The fastest growing units in the big Western companies are the legal and public relations departments. Big companies devote the bulk of their earnings to buying back shares and boosting dividend payments. They no longer invest anything like what they used to in research and development.

America, in particular, which had traditionally shown the highest-class mobility of any Western country, now has the lowest. Today it is rarer for a poor American to become rich than a poor Briton, which means the American dream is less likely to be realized in America.

Little wonder the tone of our politics has shifted so markedly from hope to nostalgia.

Similarly, every single one of America’s 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton. The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small town,
went for Donald Trump.

A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification.

Almost three quarters of independent workers in the US report serious difficulties in chasing up what they are owed.

The world now has twenty-five fewer democracies than it did at the turn of the century.

To put it more bluntly: when inequality is high, the rich fear the mob. In early 2016 I had an eye-popping conversation with a very big name from New York. He argued that there should be a general knowledge test for voters to screen out all the ‘low information voters’. He estimated the franchise test would cut the electorate in half.

The UFC is to popular culture what Trump is to politics – a brutal and unforgiving breed of show business.

During the campaign, one journalist summarized the gap between the heartland view of Trump, and that of the liberal elites as follows: ‘the press take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

As Western democracy has come into question, so too has its global power. America’s loss has been relative: its share of world GDP has declined. It has also devalued its global credibility by prosecuting reckless wars in the false name of democracy.

But I believe that protecting society’s weakest from arbitrary misfortune is the ultimate test of our civilizational worth. It seems blindingly obvious that universal healthcare ought to be a basic shield against the vicissitudes of an increasingly volatile labour market.
( )

I was quite disappointed with the first part of this book. It seemed liked the author couldn't live up to his lofty title at all - he just jumps from one topic to the next and cites lots of statistics without giving much thought to what it all means. Fortunately he finds the right focus in the second chapter when he begins to discuss the motivations behind populist politics both from the perspective of political elites and that of working class people.

In the middle part of the book the author lays out a hypothetical scenario for how the US might tumble into war with China in the year 2020. This seemed like an unnecessary diversion. Maybe it's an attempt to go down in history as the true prognosticator who predicted this war (if it would happen), but it serves no other useful purpose as far as I can see.

The author then moves away from guesswork towards the end of the book as he again returns to his political diagnosis. In the concluding chapter he makes a good point when he says that writing off half the population as ignorant buffoons will not advance the cause of liberalism. The polarization of society is a serious problem for democracy on both ends of the scale: between ultra-liberals and median liberals, and between anti-liberals and median liberals.

Pay no attention to the one and two star reviews...those are from rightwing trolls that probably didn't actually read the book, or if they did, Luce's text sailed way over their heads. Lucidly assembled, well-researched, well-composed, Luce writes as the journalist he is, though at times percolates a little too academic. Published in 2017, Luce while doing well to capture the contemporary conditions and lay out his thesis, unfortunately used a great many at-the-time current names that he could have no way of knowing just one year later have already been dismissed, fired, or left of their own accord from the debacle that the 2016 US elections results created.

Luce divides his book into four parts that he calls
- Fusion ... about the integration of the global economy and the impact to Western economies
- Reaction ... about the degeneration of Western politics
- Fallout ... about the decline of US, and Western leadership/dominance
- Half Life ... about what can be done

In Fusion, Luce rightly identifies, and explains his position, China's ascendancy to the top player in the global economy. He rightly identifies Trump as an accelerant in that. And the US, income disparity is a huge factor in the decline, tied to the trap that those on the wrong side are enmeshed. He quotes Richard Florida: "In the US your ZIP code is increasingly your destiny." A consequence of the global decline seems to be the "experts" missing the mark repeatedly. Luce says "Every January, the Davos [World Economic Forum] gathering sounds a little more bemused about what is happening in the world outside." He says that Davos "specialises in projecting the future from a recent past that took it by surprise." My notes on that were:

This is too common a condition in the western world. Short-sight extrapolated irresponsibly, and with implied authority and yet without rigor, only to be replaced by the next most recent crisis. At the mercy of the winds instead of exercising strategic initiative...{sigh}.

He further observes, "For every risk, Davos offers an identikit fix. Most of its Latinate prose sounds innocuous. But the lexicon betrays a worldview that is inherently wary of public opinion. Democracy is never a cure." Calling out Davos: "One potential solution could be to make better use of technology in the process of government – not only to deliver services in a faster, more transparent, inclusive and consumer-oriented way, but also to establish a 'digital public square' with more direct communication between leaders and people." My response to that is be mindful of the lessons told in Democracy Hacked. He closes out the Fusion section with

When you put on the Golden Straitjacket, ‘your economy grows and your politics shrinks’. [Thomas] Friedman possesses an uncanny knack for catching the spirit of the age with revealing insights. But he should have dropped the word golden. Straitjackets are for lunatics. We can hardly complain if our democracies have begun to lose their minds.

I thought that an interesting adulation with backhanded disparity. Friedman may once have been insightful and influential, but with soundbites only, and nothing of substance. Bad writing sells books because bestsellers rarely get read, and more rarely are understood, and even more rarely have critical thinking properly applied. Friedman's bloviating tends to buffalo many, prompting an image in my head of the pseudo intellectuals pontificating on the merits of Bukowski or Foster Wallace, or Mark Rothko.

As Luce examines the Reaction leading to the decline, he looks at the impacts of the fall of the Soviet Union, the fallout (not his later section) of the Al Queda attacks.

It is hard to overstate the damage the Iraq War did to America's global soft power - and to the credibility of the West's democratic mission. Operation Enduring Freedom, which began after 9/11, was followed by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Both were rashly named. It is one thing to go to war in the name of liberty; quite another to be clueless about it. Even without the doublespeak of the ‘war on terror’, it is highly questionable whether democracy can be installed from the barrel of a gun."

That last bit was rather well put.

From America’s post-9/11 blunders to Donald Trump’s election, the twenty-first century has been generous to autocrats everywhere. It is tempting to believe these were historic accidents that will iron themselves out in due course. The human, social and technological forces favouring democracy will ultimately prove far stronger than the ‘shit happens’ school of history. It is a train of thought we should avoid. Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright, famously said: ‘Would it not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?’ In a strange way that is what Putin does by manipulating and remaking Russian public opinion to suit his purposes. Messing with people’s heads is also Trump’s specialty.

Spot on, that specialty. Here's a sobering observation:

In America, the share of voters describing themselves as independent has been creeping up for years.15 This is no measure of Socratic equidistance. For the most part, independent is a fancy word for apathetic.

While there are plenty of end notes, I did flag a few that did not have cites, and to me, that changes the color of the relation of possible facts to pronouncement and opinion. In talking about Trump's pagentry, Luce relates a story about Trump's foray in to the world of professional "wrestling", eventually leading to Linda McMahon getting a cushy appointment. He discusses Chris Hedges's book Empire of Illusion, about WWE, but then

Hedges was writing in 2009. Since then, WWE’s popularity has been overtaken by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which attracts tens of millions of viewers and earns its biggest stars tens of millions of dollars. Unlike wrestling, the UFC is not scripted. The contestants fight it out in a large octagonal steel cage. They really do aim to hurt each other.

I have observed publicly that UFC is a descent into barbarism. It is a symptom of the retreat of civilization. Gladiatorial pugilistic violence as spectator sport was big 2,000 years ago in Rome. That it resurges today is pitiful. As noted above, Luce could not have dreamed up the chaotic mindnumbing daily trials of the 2017-current as of this writing US executive branch. He says in one passage "Putin, who is the only world leader Trump admires[...]". Enter Kim Jong Un and some love letters. Now, as he tried to outline the historically normal powers would keep the executive in check, here is a shot far wide of the mark...it may have made sense when he was writing the book but...If I were a budding Mark Felt [Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat"], I would leak my material to John McCain, the ornery senator from Arizona, or his fellow Arizonian Jeff Flake, or Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina. There are few who revile Trump more than the Republican hawks.Right on McCain, obviously before his passing; wrong on the spineless Flake; and so wrong on the politically bi-polar Graham as to be embarrassingly wrong. Luce must be thinking "I can't put out a new edition...everything has changed!" But the real crying shame is this:

Finally, there is the judiciary, America's third branch of government. There is nothing to stop a US president from ignoring the courts.

Ahem...{whispers aside}...now he has Kavanaugh.

For Fallout, Luce opens with a "plausible" (his term) scenario about a near future war with China. He's actually correct that it is plausible, and that T is the cause, but he names all the players from State to Defense to political advisors to even the Federal Reserve Chair. The only US players still there are T and Jeff Sessions! I submit that Luce would have thought it inconceivable that the nine other named aren't in their positions anymore! And to pile on, Luce says in commenting on Xi Jinping's term expiration in 2022,

It would be a disaster if Xi broke with Chinese precedent and prolonged his hold on power.

Well...if "for life" means anything to "prolong"... Luce has to be reeling everyday something new comes along to shatter his backup data! The thesis is still sound...just the reasoning that got him there is no longer valid. But the chaos is. He says himself "This book does not dare offer precise forecasts. But it is safe to say that if Germany fails to lead Europe, the European Union will fall apart." Yeah. forecasts are so far off...but to be fair, how could anyone not assume that T wouldn't have even a shred of respect for the office or the country?

I didn't make any notes for the Half Life section. I don't think he had much to offer in the way of what can be done. And in the pace of the technological world today, nothing would work anyway.

So...good, sobering recount of what's happening, some good thoughts on how we got here and what the consequences are, but no tangible help to recover. Worth the read. ( )