HOWARD EPSTEIN: IS AMERICA FINISHED?
You will note that I pose the title question before and not after we know the name of the next US president. I do so because I believe that it can be answered irrespective of the identity of the winner. I shall explain.
In my recently-published work: Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism, American in the Twenty-First Century, I consider, in my final chapter on American exceptionalism, whether the USA is already on the skids. I compare the state of the Union today with the fall of the Roman Empire, thus:-
“What marks out a polity at the height of its strength, and accordingly the start of its descent? Its characteristics will include:-
extended lines of communication • the need to maintain a quantitative and qualitative margin of superiority over not just one potential enemy but several • resultant excessively high fiscal pressures • a ruling class that has become both coddled and remote (particularly in terms of wealth) from other social groups • concomitantly, the lower social orders having been left so far behind that their weakness has become both structural and possibly irremediable.
All these may been seen in the cases of Rome at the beginning of the first century of the Common Era and the USA at the start of the twenty-first.”
As a footnote to the question, I added: No need for panic. That of Rome took several hundred years, and I concluded that America’s capacity for self-regeneration would save it.
If that were the end of the story, this would be a very short piece. As you can see, it is not, for I wrote that before Donald Trump got into his stride, and became the Republican’s candidate, and before some of the more egregious difficulties that now plague Hillary Clinton had fully surfaced.
What we are faced with now is the resistible force versus the moveable object. (You may decide which is which.) Instead of two political colossi facing off against one another 
on Tuesday next, we see a pair of political pygmies. Americans are suffering over this: either unable to discuss the matter with their friends and family, lest friendship or family fragments, or just plain embarrassed that the world’s greatest nation, of some 330 million people, has been unable to throw up contenders for its leadership other than these fundamentally-flawed characters. Ignominy rules, OK?
Hillary Clinton had not sunk so low a year ago. True she was tainted with having stood by her man, despite all that emerged in regard to his problems with his zipper and women that came into his political orbit from the Arkansas governor’s mansion to the Oval Office – and she is alleged to have leaned on several of his victims, not physically, you understand but menacingly, nevertheless.
In the past year also, Bernie Sanders, the Left Wing US politician, who pulled Hillary much further from her comfort zone in the center-left than she imagined would be 
possible, did a pretty good job in suggesting that Hill was in thrall to Wall Street and the giants of US industry; but it was not until the last few months that the problem of the blank pages in the diary of then Secretary of State Clinton (Wikileaked on a grand scale) suggested, or demonstrated, that it might have been possible, with a little help for and from the Clinton Foundation, for influence of one sort or another (or lucre) to open doors to and arrange meetings with a possible future president.
Then there was the question of the private server – and the affected failure to understand that “C” marked on State Department emails stands for “confidential”. What would she think C stands for? She was plainly either more ignorant that your average ten 
year old or just plain mendacious. The unbelievable initial refusal of the FBI to prosecute the would-be POTUS in July last (as she had been merely: “’extremely careless’ in her handling of classified government material”) was followed by the breath-taking revelation by the same august law enforcement agency, within a whisker of the election, that they would reopen their investigation into Servergate. (It is not just the pols that worry us. Can you imagine such hesitancy on the part of J Edgar Hoover?)
Things were to get uglier yet, as more emails were leaked and Clinton’s so-called “body”, Huma Abedin, without whom the would-be most powerful [wo]man in the world 
cannot function, reintroduced, via her estranged husband (The Weiner, as he is onomatopoeiatically, as it were, known), sexual peccadillos (from one Clinton to another) as a matter of mainstream political discourse. Abedin, however, having spent her formative years in Muslim Saudi Arabia, must offer comfort to those who hope to see her in the Oval Office by the side of a president who would succeed he (Obama) who had spent his formative years in Muslim Indonesia. There is nothing like a little continuity to provide reassurance.
Hillary’s health is patently not as robust as one might wish for someone entering into what is arguably (outside the PMO in Israel) the most pressurized office in the world. You may discount the more lurid speculation about Hillary’s medical
(Photo credit ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP/Getty Images)
condition(s) but few will be confident that she is in rude good health. Russian leader, Putin (64 but an avid judo participant, reportedly daily) and Chinese leader, Xi Jinping (53) look somewhat less exhausted than Hillary (69). Putin is recently divorced and has been associated with ex-gymnast, Alina Kabaeva (32), while Jinping married Chinese contemporary folk singer and performing artist Peng Liyuan (54) in 1987. Perhaps it is just as well that Hillary will be too preoccupied with her “issues” to have time for much romantic diversion in the Lincoln Bedroom with husband, Bill (70 going on 80, judging by recent appearances). I apologise for lowering the tone but it is plain that, in her role as Commander-in-Chief (should she prevail on Tuesday), her greatest adversaries will be fitter and more 
rounded personalities. If Hillary does not have a bunker-mentality now (as her famous stiffness and stridency suggest), it will be very surprising – and her disposition is unlikely to improve.
What, you ask, of he who is known as “The Donald”? And what have things come to when one so coarse, so lacking in ideas, devoid of policy (not to say principles), utterly without social skills, given to insulting just about every 
social group in America – not least the minorities whose votes he should be courting – abandoned by the party he putatively represents and barren of political antennae, is within a whisker of absolute power (as anyone with access to THE CODES may properly be described)? Here is a man who berates his opponent about her husband’s sexual record knowing (assuming he has a memory) that he has never been squeaky clean himself. The truth usually will out and it did so with a recording of Trump boasting about which part of a woman’s anatomy he preferred to grab. (No, not there. Lower.)
Despite all the bluster and noise, we feel as though we do not know the real person who would be President Donald Trump. There is one who does, however. Step forward writer Tony Schwartz, who co- or ghost-wrote the famous Trump business book: The Art of the Deal. It was Schwartz who spent 18 months ensconced in the gold-plated and gold lamé bling that surrounds Trump, and defines his environments from the Trump Tower to his jet, helicopter, hotels and Florida home. It was Schwartz who was a fly-on-the-wall wherever Trump went, and who was privy to Trump’s telephone calls. By the time he was done, Schwartz had brought about the publication of the book that launched Trump as a star in the American firmament, from where Trump could aim even higher – at the White House, no less.
What does Tony Schwartz ($2M to the good) say of that endeavor now? “I put lipstick on a pig.”
Wait. It gets much worse than that. Here are extracts from his interview with The Times (of London) published on November 5, 2016:-
“I’m the only person who has spent a significant amount of time with Trump….. “Not the only person but one of the only people who either has chosen to speak out or is legally permitted to speak out . . .” …. “I feel that burden on my shoulders all the time,”
“I had to learn not to argue with him, even where I thought it would be in his own interests.” ….“I felt like there was a deep emptiness in this man,” …. “He had such incredibly limited inner resources that he needed to constantly look to the world to prop him up.”
“I really do believe that this is a man of such a stunning blend of ignorance and hubris that the chance that he would try to prove how tough he is by . . . setting off a nuclear attack feels completely plausible to me.”
Ouch, Tony! This is the man whom you launched as a major US power player? Thanks a bunch!
So there we have it: the oaf versus the discredited. He uneducated and ineducable. She with her integrity holed below the waterline. If he is elected, even American democracy (perhaps humanity) may not survive. If she is elected, she risks becoming the second President Clinton to be a semi-detached president.
Throughout 2008, the President, Bill not Hill, was beset with the Paula Jones harassment litigation and the Lewinsky/blue dress impeachment process. Being ever so pre-occupied, as I explain at some length in my book, Bill missed the pointers to 9/11 (and signed away Roosevelt’s check on the banks, thus facilitating the Credit Crunch). 
Hillary, and America, will be extremely fortunate if she is not greatly diverted by one legal enquiry or another. Who knows how Hill will have the energy, the clarity of thought and the fortitude – ground down as she already is and as she may yet become if her own political or personal survival is at stake – to cope with Russian and Chinese expansionism?
Altogether, the prospects for America appear less than wholesome. Yet, I for one believe in America’s capacity for regeneration. America’s trajectory is plainly downwards at present but, given time, it can reinvent itself, even after what may prove to be twelve (or sixteen) years of American-style socialism or four years of American ideals and democracy being Trumped. Fasten your seat belts. The ride will be bumpy. Whilst it is too early today to try to discern its shape and size, hope of a good outcome should not yet be abandoned.
© 2016 Howard Epstein
Howard Epstein is a political commentator and the author of Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century, recently published by Amazon and on Kindle. He writes:-
There is no need for me to tell you that the scourge of gun crime is perhaps the most pressing issue in the USA. My book takes a new approach – support failing gun control by viewing gun crime through the prism of gun culture.
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