Baldwin: Loss of Empire Means Loss of Identity; Whither Palin’s “Real” America?

American expatriate writer James Baldwin was in Paris when the French lost at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954. He wrote the following observation in his 1972 book/essay No Name in the Street:

The French were still hopelessly slugging it out in Indo-China when I first arrived in France, and I was living in Paris when Dien Bien Phu fell. The Algerian rug-sellers and peanut vendors on the streets of Paris then had obviously not the remotest connection with this most crucial of the French reverses; and yet the attitude of the police, which had always been menacing, began to be yet more snide and vindictive. This puzzled me at first, but it shouldn't have. This is the way people react to the loss of empire—for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity—and I was to see this over and over again, not only in France. The Arabs were not a part of Indo-China, but they were part of an empire visibly and swiftly crumbling, and part of a history which was achieving, in the most literal and frightening sense, its dénouement—was revealing itself, that is, as being not at all the myth which the French had made of it—and the French authority to rule over them was being more hotly contested with every hour. The challenged authority, unable to justify itself and not dreaming indeed of even attempting to do so, simply increased its force [James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, New York: Dial Press, 1972, pp. 25–26].

Loss of empire... radical revision of individual identity... challenged authority... I open the floor for discussion of parallels between what Baldwin observed in 1954 France and the response of pale Palin America to the results of the last two Presidential elections?