Satyajit Das: American Greatness?

What the report says

Naked Capitalism published an essay by author and former banker Satyajit Das, introduced by Yves Smith and described as adapted from a longer version that appeared in the print edition of the New Indian Express. Written as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of independence, the piece argues that past American “greatness” was real in some respects but has often been explained too narrowly or mythologized.

Das attributes the country’s rise to a mix of favorable geography, vast natural resources, relative insulation from wars on its mainland, immigration, and public as well as private investment. He emphasizes that U.S. development was also shaped by violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, cheap labor, tariffs, government-backed research, infrastructure spending, and the postwar role of the dollar as a reserve currency. In his view, the common story of purely free-market success leaves out major state support and structural advantages.

The essay says many of those advantages have weakened. Das points to environmental and resource pressures, deindustrialization, reliance on outsourced production, loss of skilled manufacturing capacity, uneven educational outcomes, dependence on foreign technical talent, and signs of social distress such as deaths linked to drugs, alcohol and suicide. He also argues that U.S. military strength has been challenged by lower-cost asymmetric warfare.

Das is sharply critical of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” framing, saying it misreads the sources of U.S. strength. He contends that restrictions on immigration, political polarization, pressure on rule-of-law norms, use of sanctions and tariffs, and threats to dollar confidence risk accelerating the very decline they claim to reverse.