How Is America Going To End?

A weeklong thought experiment on the United States' demise.

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina submerged my hometown. The storm broke my heart and messed with my head. With close to 2,000 dead in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, the government response close to nil, and then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert questioning the wisdom of rebuilding below sea level, it seemed plausible that the city could perish: Here today, drowned tomorrow.

In 2009, New Orleans is still suffering. The city has no comprehensive reconstruction plan and whole neighborhoods remain abandoned; as of July 2008, Orleans Parish was at 69 percent of its pre-Katrina population. But while the Crescent City isn't exactly thriving, it resolutely exists. There's a human impulse to rebuild after a catastrophe, and the United States' relative prosperity gives us the means to stand our ground. An American city, it turns out, is a hard thing to kill.

Hurricane Katrina proved that modern America is resilient. It didn't prove that we'll be around forever. After watching the place where I grew up avert total annihilation, I can't help but wonder what course of events will eventually wipe out New Orleans and America as a whole. When it comes to human civilization, entropy conquers all: Rome fell, the Aztecs were conquered, the British Empire withered, and the Soviet Union cracked apart. America may be exceptional, but it's not supernatural. Our noble experiment, like every other before it, has to end sometime.

The pessimists among us could be excused for thinking the country will run aground tomorrow. The U.S. military is understaffed and overstretched, global warming threatens to Atlantis-ize our coastal cities, and the strongest fundamental of our economy is that we need China to keep lending us money. General Motors—once an indomitable symbol of American might and ingenuity—filed for bankruptcy, and Glenn Beck, Fox News' ascendant superstar, makes ratings hay by forecasting the apocalypse, American-style. Russian political scientist Igor Panarin has even predicted that the United States will break apart in 2010.

Sure, Panarin is crazy—if he wants me to believe that America will split up in the next 12 months, he'd be advised not to suggest that South Carolina and Massachusetts will be part of the same breakaway republic. While Panarin's particular scenario defies belief, it does reflect a mainstream American impulse. In 1999's Is America Breaking Apart?, John A. Hall and Charles Lindholm write that "Americans like to be scared about the fragility of their society, despite its obvious stability and power." Perhaps that explains why the end of America is eternally popular fodder for movies and television series.

The best-seller charts are also full of fatalism. Hall and Lindholm, admirably self-aware, point out that books on America's disintegration are "bound to sell—which is the reason we did not entitle our book Why America Isn't Breaking Apart!" In 2007's Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy ponders whether we can avoid the fate of our Roman forebears. Jared Diamond's 2005 Collapse, a tome on civilizations that destroy themselves by destroying their environments, is a not-so-veiled warning about America's possible fate. We're also at a moment of anxiety about America's decline relative to the rest of the world. Fareed Zakaria believes we're on the cusp of The Post-American World, and Paul Starobin's After America argues that "the global economic crisis, in exposing the tarnished American model of unfettered free-market capitalism, is hastening the transition to the next … phase of global history."

Maybe the book-buying public is a mite too susceptible to the idea that America is half-dead. Still, it's hubris to assume the United States is too big to fail. Over the next five days, I'll be thinking through what it's going to take put the Stars and Stripes on the shelf forever.

Josh Levin is Slate's executive editor. You can e-mail him at , visit his Web site, and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Jason Raish.

Also in Slate

Hitchens: We Know Pakistan's Intelligence Service Is Aiding Terrorists. What Can We Do About It?
Rich Women Have Few Kids. Poor Women Have a Lot. That's a Problem.
Did Buffalo Outsmart Bill Belichick?
Mitch Daniels: Here's Why My Presidential Campaign Would Have Been Doomed

• Choose Your Own Apocalypse
  Make your pick from 144 different scenarios.
  Josh Levin | May 20, 2011
• How Is America Going To End?
  The apocalypse you chose. Plus, the end-of-America social network.
  Josh Levin | Aug. 7, 2009
• How Is America Going To End?
  Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.
  Josh Levin | Aug. 7, 2009
• Search for more End of America, The articles
• Subscribe to the End of America, The RSS feed
• View our complete End of America, The archive