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Our mental image of a major nation in decline is Britain. And, in retrospect, the British handled their decline pretty gracefully. In just a couple of generations Britain sank from economic and political superpower to second-rank member of a second-rank regional bloc. Yet the transformation happened without much domestic rancor, despite Britain's supposedly bitter class divisions. At worst, the general attitude was a certain sullen resignation. At best, there was a jolly, fatalistic insouciance. The Brits almost seemed to enjoy their ride down.

America will not be so lucky. In David Duke, we have seen the face of American decline. Of course you can argue about whether the United States has entered a long-term decline similar to Britain's. And even if it has, you can argue whether politicians of one party or the other have the right formula for reversing course. But if decline is America's destiny, American society is not likely to take it as mildly as Britain did. America is so much more diverse and so much more contentious. Americans may be about to discover just how much of our ability to get along with one another has depended on that spiritual sense of American manifest destiny -- and, more practically, on a steady rise in the average person's prosperity. For almost two decades now this rise, which Americans take as their birthright, has stalled or at least slowed dramatically. David Duke is a political expression of that reality.

The former Nazi and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard ran for Governor of Louisiana in a campaign based on an open appeal to white people who feel they are being cheated of their American birthright by blacks, immigrants, liberals, New Yorkers and similar bogeys. The message is enticing because people are frightened about their standard of living. Yet whatever you may think about affirmative action, immigration and other ''hot button'' issues, economic stagnation is far more responsible than these controversial social policies for the sense of shrinking opportunity off which the David Dukes feed. When the pie isn't growing, people become more obsessed with their slice.

America is not homogeneous. We have no ethnic or religious bonds to unite us. We are proud of having built a working nation out of so many disparate parts, and proud of the tolerance that has made that possible. But was ever increasing prosperity the crucial glue? It's easy to welcome newcomers to the party when the banquet table is overflowing. It's easy to settle disagreements by splitting the difference if there's plenty to go around. In bad times hospitality shrivels and disagreements fester.

Firm class divisions may actually have helped Britain weather its decline. They made for social stability. By contrast, America's social stability came from opportunity. Our ''classlessness,'' as many observers have noted throughout the years, has always rested on the possibility of self- improvement. With unlimited opportunity, no one ever needed to feel stuck in his or her place. The first time people worried that this special American dispensation might be ending was a century ago, with the end of Western expansion. The West was America's social safety valve. American philosopher Henry George went even further. In his famous book Progress and Poverty (1879), he wrote that the empty West was responsible for America's egalitarian and optimistic spirit. ''The child of the people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the best seats at the banquet of life marked 'taken.' "Freedom from such limitations," George believed, could explain "all that we are proud of in the American character." But this gift was imperiled, he predicted, now that ''our advance has reached the Pacific."

Henry George was wrong. Geography ran out but prosperity didn't. America remained the land of opportunity. But he was right that America's sense of itself as a nation is wrapped up in the promise of ever rising prosperity in a way that is not true of other nations. The closing off of the West didn't shut the social safety valve, but a long period of stagnation might. Geographical claustrophobia didn't pervert the American character, but economic claustrophobia could do so.

The current wave of ''declinism'' got its start with Paul Kennedy's 1988 best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. That book posed a conundrum: a nation's military strength rests on its economic strength, but economic strength tends to wither when a nation devotes too many resources to the military. ''Imperial overstretch,'' Kennedy called it. The world has changed since 1987, and the danger of the United States bankrupting itself through military overextension seems a lot slimmer. Furthermore, the thought of losing our status as a military ''great power'' with defense commitments all over the world does not traumatize most Americans, I suspect. What does traumatize Americans is the thought of economic stagnation as a permanent condition. But there's another conundrum: the politics of decline produce exactly the wrong formula for reversing the economics of decline. The result: as decline becomes more evident, it also becomes harder to correct. We need politicians who can persuade the voters to make short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, and small personal sacrifices for the good of society as a whole. Yet the more people suffer from economic claustrophobia, the less amenable they are to such an appeal. Instead, they listen to David Duke, who tells them that Others are stealing their life-style.
It's an oddity of today's populist rage that it is directed at Washington rather than the more traditional target of Wall Street. That could change, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal are fools to be so gleeful. If the general sense of a nation in decline is not reversed, there will be plenty more David Dukes in America's future, looking for fresh scapegoats.


Copyright 1991 Time Inc.

Michael Kinsley, ESSAY: David Duke and American Decline. , Time, 11-25-1991, pp 110.