The Post-Mercedes World

One way to think about how things are and will be different from when we were young

Fareed Zakaria wrote a book, quite a few years ago, called The Post-American World, in which he mused on a world with no superpower. That’s the basic reality that analysts think in now. I just saw Thomas Friedman posit a “post-America world,” in which the country itself isn’t really recognizable from the POV of someone with grey hair. Those two things are closely related, and our keen awareness of that has much to do with a sharpening of consciousness rather than a drastic alteration of the underlying reality. I’m not arguing that the underlying reality hasn’t changed; it’s always changing, and in a present of unusual instability in high places, it’s difficult to identify real change from the blur of chaos.

When I was young, Mercedes-Benz was clearly and indisputably the benchmark of the car industry, worldwide. It’s not accurate to say they had no rivals, but it is accurate to say that they were more than first among equals. When your rivals explicitly benchmark you in their own advertising, which was routine in the 1980s, you know you’re on top. “Engineered like no other car in the world” wasn’t just a slogan; it was true. If you could afford one, you bought one—and most people could not afford one. Even the most “basic” Benz was a really expensive car.

Since the 1980s, M-B has been trading on their name. I hasten to qualify that by adding that I don’t mean they have become a second-rate marque. What I mean is that they do not sit above the entire market as they once did. It was a big deal in the late 80s when they introduced their first compact sedan, and since then, they’ve offered a car in just about every market segment. Some “brand dilution” was inevitable as a result. M-B used to build cars pretty close to cost-no-object. They haven’t done that in the 21^st century. They’re still important; huge, profitable, still enjoying serious cachet, and the S-class is still the technological showcase it has been all along. But reliability, which largely reflects build quality, is so-so these days, and their rivals are true rivals now.

I think the U.S. is the Mercedes-Benz of nation-states right now. It would be nice if what’s going on right now turns out to be analogous to the Daimler-Chrysler misstep of the early aughts, but we’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps where my analogy starts to crack a bit is that the U.S. was “trading on its name” well before it found itself in a “multi-polar” world. No observation stands out to me as sharply as that of the Tik Tokker’s Polish daughter-in-law who told her that the difference between the U.S. and other countries is primarily just that we were always taught we were different and we believed it, and now we are experiencing the uncomfortable process of being disillusioned as we have not been since 1969. This is less about reality and more about self-deception. The U.S. has long been a right-wing state, especially in world affairs. We have engineered coups that have brought some of the world’s most brutal dictators to power. We have invaded countries so that our corporations could continue doing business-as-usual there and retain impunity from those countries’ governments. We have always acted in what our high politicians have deemed our self-interest, and if that happened to align with supporting right versus wrong, fine, and if not, they could always dress it up in sanctimonious language. We have, most of us, bought into some degree of “American exceptionalism,” and it has blinded us. It’s ironic that the very regime that is attempting to explicitly enforce American exceptionalism as an official ideology is the same regime that is doing the most to disabuse us of it.

We have grossly exaggerated the beneficence of the postwar U.S.-dominated world order. That is not to say there was not significant good to that order. But the U.S. has been an imperial militaristic power for over a century, and, as Niall Ferguson has written, has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that fact.

We are having to grow up, I think, in a way that Europe and the UK and other older societies have had to do before. It’s not a comfortable or reassuring process. It’s not possible to predict what will come of it. But, all my life, Americans have been rather oblivious people in general. So many of us have lived like kids in a candy store while doing our best to ignore the millions who don’t got no candy—right here, not to mention abroad. Reality comes knocking and eventually you can’t ignore it any more. Accepting reality is, in the end, always good, but getting there can kind of suck.

Anyone with a functioning brain knows that business-as-usual in this country, and in this human world, cannot continue. It may seem as though we’re going backward. In the current moment, we are. How long that lasts, how far it goes, and how it ends is up to us, collectively. Reaction is unfortunately a normal occurrence in human affairs.

But, we will go on, and we will continue to be significant in the world. Mercedes-Benz hasn’t gone anywhere, but it has to do business in a world that has Lexus and where BMW and Audi are much more successful rivals than they were back in the day. And who in the M-B boardroom in 1989 would have predicted that, 35 years later, they would face serious competition from South Korea?

We can’t predict the future, and we can’t operate in it—but we can influence the present, and the present determines the future. The world is changing, and that’s scary (the devil you know…), but it has to change and the toxic noise that dominates the “news cycle” is so far from an accurate representation of all the change that’s actually going on. As a society, we have to pay attention to reality as we never have in our lifetimes. We may have to get kicked in the ‘nads to do that, but at least when we finally do, we will all, everywhere, be better-off.