A short description of the end of the British Empire

A friend of mine from home (Columbus, Ohio*) recently joked that I should come back to the States and “help straighten things out”. Well this was overly complimentary of course, but my perspective is more long term (cultural history type long term), so I responded with a short description of this broader perspective, including incidentally a short description of the end of the British Empire, which more than anything else explains why I haven’t, and will not, return permanently to the US.

I wrote back:

There were those ‘at home’ in the eighties, as I was planning to move to New Zealand, who suggested I should stay, or at least come back soon permanently, to ‘help straighten things out’, haha.  But even then I was thinking in ‘cultural historical’ terms and could see someone like Trump coming along eventually.  Bush II seemed a step in that direction, but not a fulfilment of the Reagan destiny.  Trump, however, is a symptom and a symbol of that destiny.  But of course, he is not the cause of it all.  We need to look at the historical moment of the eighties.  The existential threat of permanent nuclear weapons and the emerging existential threat of ‘environmental destruction’, which has come to focus on climate change, as realized in the 60s and 70s indicating the massive changes needed, led to the desperate reaction in the eighties called neo-liberalism, beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan (male, A-boy), and PM Margaret Thatcher (female, A-girl) just to name the two most notable A-list leaders of neo-liberalism emerging in that period, which was actually also the beginning of the end of the British Empire, an end finally reached now and marked in the second decade of the 21st century by both the spasm known as Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump.

* Columbus, Ohio – home of The Ohio State University, which notably has a gridiron football team playing for the USA university gridiron national championship (versus The University of Alabama) Monday , Jan 11, which is Tuesday, Jan 12 here in New Zealand (2 pm NZ).  If any Wellington reader of this post wants to come over to our place to watch the game on ESPN television with me, please get in touch by e-mail, letters.by.rwk@gmail.com, or my usual e-mail so we can see if this can work out.