It’s striking that two grimly titled but very different new books about America’s decline—Last Best Hope by George Packer and After the Apocalypse by Andrew Bacevich—both invoke a little-remembered 1940 jeremiad by the French historian Marc Bloch called Strange Defeat. In that short book, published a few years before its author was killed by the Gestapo, Bloch indicted his own people for cultural decadence and societal disintegration, leading to France’s subjugation by the Nazis.
Both Packer, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a National Book Award-winning author, and Bacevich, a historian and retired career U.S. Army officer, believe Bloch’s indictment of France is relevant to what the United States faces today. “Like France in 1940, America in 2020 stunned itself with a collapse that was larger and deeper than one leader,” Packer writes, referring to Washington’s often incompetent response to COVID-19. “Under invasion and occupation, few of our institutions held up.” Bacevich, too, suggests that, for different reasons, the United States is in a position analogous to that of defeated France in 1940, suffering a total collapse of leadership and vision. “My purpose in writing After the Apocalypse compares with Bloch’s,” he writes.
