Courtesy Amazon
By Nick Fonda
Local Journalism Initiative
Almost 40 years ago, Quebec film maker, Denys Arcand, released Le déclin de l’empire américan. It was the first of a trilogy of films all set in Quebec with story lines that directly or indirectly examined higher education, health care, and the justice system.
Arcand has been widely recognized for his films which have won an Academy Award as well as awards at the Cannes Film Festival and numerous other film festivals as well.
The title, Le déclin de l’empire américan, comes from a line of dialogue in the film. A history professor is discussing a book she has just written that deals with modern society’s penchant for self-indulgence. This societal egocentricity is the opposite of the selflessness and self-sacrifice that mark societies that are growing and flourishing. The self-absorption in today’s society, the history professor argues, is a sign that the American empire is in decline. Quebec, the history professor notes, is on the periphery of the American empire and is similarly experiencing societal decline.
One of the signs of this decline is the systemic injustice that permeates academia. Any given undergraduate university course might be taught by a lecturer or by a professor. The work involved in preparing a course is the same for both, but while the professor will earn a six-figure salary for teaching three courses over the course of the school year, the lecturer will be paid a few thousand dollars per course. Worse, in a publish-or-perish environment, professors routinely affix their own names to work done by their graduate students.
The corruption to be found in Arcand’s first film is just as present in the other two films of the trilogy. Be it in health care or the legal system, the characters in Arcand’s films time and again find themselves dealing with institutions that have been corrupted by greed.
Not quite four decades after Le déclin, the phrase that is popping up on You Tube is the collapse of the American empire. Among others commenting on the collapse is Richard D. Wolfe who, in addition to hosting Economic Update, a weekly podcast, is the author or several books and a professor emeritus who taught at a couple of American universities and also briefly at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wolfe is unusual in that he is a Marxian economist who is very critical of American capitalism. (Being a Marxian is just different enough from being a Marxist that Wolfe can avoid arrest; it is illegal to be a Communist (or Marxist of Leninist) in the United States.)
Not unlike Arcand, Wolfe points out that corruption has permeated America and, although few are aware of it, the American empire (an economic empire backed up by the biggest arsenal in the world) has already begun to collapse. From Wolfe’s perspective, this is due in part to corruption which is fueled by capitalism and greed.
Le déclin was filmed just as Quebec’s schools were about to make a massive educational reform. This reform was American in origin. It minimized the idea of right and wrong by abandoning the old school emphasis on grammar, spelling, and syntax. It no longer asked students what they thought about a poem, story, or novel, but rather asked only how that piece of writing made them feel.
Wolfe points out that the American educational system fails the vast majority of the population. While the rich send their children to expensive private schools, public schools in the United States are severely underfunded and plagued by social problems, violence, and mass shootings. The result is that today the average American reads at the level of a Grade 5 student.
It may be worth remembering that the Greeks who first created a democratic system of government were also leery of it. To function properly, they said, a democratic society needs an educated, well-informed electorate.
Similarly, America’s health care system is dystopic. Rich Americans have access to arguably the best health care in the world. However, most Americans find themselves paying exorbitant sums for health insurance that, one time in three, will fail to cover the costs of the medical service they need. The United States is the only developed country in the world where private health insurance companies post multi-billion-dollar annual profits. Health insurance executives—like the one recently shot in New York—earn multi-million-dollar annual salaries. A very few capitalists, Wolfe points out, have grown enormously wealthy at the expense of the many.
As for the judicial system in the United States, the corruption rises like cream to the very top. At least two Supreme Court justices have been found to have accepted lavish gifts worth millions of dollars from individuals and corporations who had cases before the court. Yet both remain on the Supreme Court, above the law. During his two impeachment trials, Trump was found innocent by American legislators who were not concerned with right or wrong but only worried about Republican and Democrat.
Wolfe argues that America’s decline can be traced back to Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economic policies which began creating the wealth gap that today has a few thousand billionaires sharing the country with almost 37 million people (11% of the population) who live under the poverty line. More than half a million of those are homeless.
The America of the mid-twentieth century, Wolfe points out, was the envy of the world. That is no longer the case. Nor is America the dominant economic force that it was in the post-WWII era when it emerged all but unscathed from the global conflict.
American armies have suffered humbling defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan. American economic dominance is being challenged by BRICS, (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which, in the last decade, has continued to add more and more member nations. Wolfe points out that growth in the US and in the G7 nations (US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) has been less robust recently than that in the BRICS countries. America, Wolfe notes, is no longer the industrial and technological leader that it once was. Worse, it is a country that is enormously in debt ($36 trillion to start 2025) and making no effort to pay down that debt.
What does it mean for us in Quebec that the American empire (according to Richard Wolfe and others) is collapsing?
In 2018, Denys Arcand released a movie entitled La chute de l’empire americain. However, the film is an action film (although based on a true story) and it was originally called, Le triomphe de l’argent. It doesn’t add to Arcand’s original trilogy.
Wolfe has no specific advice for Quebecers. He does however say that the sooner we wake up and smell the coffee, the sooner we’ll be able to adapt to a new world order.