I’m aeventy years old. I hope to be able to do something to help.
I keep thinking of Jacques Brel’s 1977 song “Voir un ami pleurer” (To see a friend cry), where he sings, in the long list of sad things:
Il n’y a plus d’Amérique
There is no more America.
As a parent of two Gen-Xers I mourn for the future as well. Since the 2016 election—in which my older daughter cast her first-ever vote for Hillary Clinton with all the excitement that implied for her future—she and her peers have been completely disillusioned and disgusted with America’s “promise” and “exceptionalism” they’re expected to believe in. I have spent many hours trying to talk them off the ledge; it’s for them that I cling with an iron grip to my belief that we the citizens of America can overturn this insanity and get through this. Perhaps not unchanged, but there will always be a place for the American Constitution and those who believe in it.
I read this wonderful essay yesterday on Substack. I’m sure I’ll be reading it repeatedly. They Are a Minority - by Hamilton Nolan - How Things Work
Well, yes and no. The Trump crazyness we can fix in some years. But we are also in an era of hypercapitalism. As we have no practical way to reduce the wealth of the 1%, we are stuck with hypercapitalism. Our kids (I have 2) are stuck as corporate slaves for the working life. Jobs past age 60 are hard to come by. Social Security is weak. All we need there is to tax all income at the same 14%. The billionaires will get less back from it than us, but that would save that. But none of that will happen. Even taxing the 1% is seen as bad. A faith in trickle down is strong.
If they are lucky. They are just as likely to be cast out on the whim of an oligarch.
Just as with the Soviet Union, America was built on a radical and unsustainable economic model. I think that America’s end will be quite similar to the Soviet Union’s: a sudden collapse.
It’s ludicrous to imagine Russia pulling off a military invasion of all Europe by force. Of course that’s true. But a lot of it won’t need to be by force. Little carrot-and-stick from Russia, little carrot-and-stick from America, a few corrupt European governments who are willing to sell out, and Russia’s in a position of advantage to do more or less what they want, with few or any shots fired.
If you don’t think that any teetering European governments of countries with weak economies would sell out so easily, I would simply point to how the US Republican party has essentially signed over its interests to Russia. At a time of peak economic and military security, a wealthy country that has nothing to worry about simply rolled over and showed its belly to a third-rate KGB bureaucrat who has nearly exhausted his country with a stupid military adventure. If it happened to the US it can absolutely happen to other countries.
I think Russia will indeed go after all 3 Baltic countries. After Ukraine is subdued. Finland has universal conscription and reserve soldiers number 800 000. Russia is not going to go after them, due to the bad experience every time they tried it. Past Czarist Russia. Finland and Russia go back to 1600s.
Russia will first invade Moldova, which is not a NATO country and then eventually the Baltic states. He will aim to reconstitute the Soviet Union before going into non FSU countries.
Unlikely, once the transition to fascism is complete dislodging them will basically be impossible. This isn’t WWII, there are no Allies who can conquer America and overthrow them. And once they finish off killing their opponents in a Final Solution there won’t be much of anyone left to try. “We” won’t be here anymore, only they will.
Into what? What does a “collapsed” America look like?
This is what happened. Trump is not what happened. Trump is just the avatar that was apparently inevitably going to show up. The fascism seed was started long ago.
A huge portion of Americans are fascists, so you get fascism. That’s how life works. A constitution is just a piece of paper; it only matters if pretty much everyone agrees that it matters.
France and the UK have nuclear weapons, so end of story right there. If the world gets as dangerous as it might, the likely response in Europe is a tight military alliance.
What threat could take Europe? Russia is ground down in Ukraine and couldn’t beat them straight up. The USA really cannot cross the Atlantic to invade western Europe.
The USA was not built on one economic model at all.
This is what YouTube shows me when I look for “living on the streets usa”. Not sure you will see the same suggestions, but I guess it will be close enough.
The others retreat into fenced communities, I guess.
So you’re suggesting that the USA is still a single country, but without a functioning government it re-invents feudalism?
There’s enough guns that I imagine the violence of medieval Europe would come roaring back.
Plausible, I guess. We’ll see shortly.
The comparison to the USSR wasn’t really correct, because the USSR was never a nation-state. So, its breakup was characterized but the dissolution of the union. The USA is unlikely to do that. In the USSR, Latvians though they were Latvians, Georgians thought they were Georgians, etc. But in the USA, everyone in the USA thinks they’re the correct Americans.
What could happen is the economy shrinking in the direction it’s going now; oligarchs have everything and the common man has little. That’s why the oligarchs are all Trump allies; they’re trying to loot you, and it’s working so far.
The next step will be dismantling Social Security and government-run health programs. Elon Musk can say he’s gonna balance the budget by ripping apart USAID but we all know where the money is really going; the OVERWHELMING bulk of it is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. So they’ll slash those, and ordinary Americans will be impoverished. They won’t be all out on the street but they’ll be packing into homes with extended family like it was in the Gilded Age when the Vanderbilts had everything and common people had dirt.
Trade wars will make it all worse, of course, for the common folk.
What happens after that, I don’t know; chaos is chaos. The invasion of Canada is likely, which will mean horrific violence all over the USA for a generation or more. More wars may happen but even if the USA isn’t directly involved, that reduces international trade, which hurts everyone. The 1930s again, basically.
Don’t know about a single country, doesn’t really matter: if the government doesn’t function, it is de facto not a country, single or not; feudalism seems locally possible to me. Not just black and white, up and down: there will be some shades of grey and levels in between. A gated community will need wardens, for instance. And garbage collection. But it will only be a nice place to live for a very small elite and even those will have to look the other way when the hoi polloi come occasionally close with their solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives. It is so hard to bear the misery of others, you know <clutches pearls>
Actually only France has independent nuclear weapons the UK’s are held by the US and cannot be used independently
France would use nuclear weapons to defend France. But probably not to defend Latvia.
Russia was unable to defeat a US-backed Ukraine. We are about to find out how well they will do against a Ukraine thats been abandoned by the US. Next we’ll see how well they’ll fair against a far weaker opponent (like one of the Baltic states) without US support
I think part of the trick is getting US-based wages to be agonizingly low.
Destroying the labor unions, mass layoffs, wholesale deportations, and elimination of the social safety net could go a long way in achieving that aim.
Then, we’d have jobs again!!
And the oligarchs would be thrilled to build factories – I’m thinking Triangle Shirtwaist, redux.
Mercantilism
Akin to the
Gilded
Age
Hearing David Brooks use this quote on PBS Newshour last evening literally haunted my dreams:
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
–The Melian Dialogue by Thucydides
In the views of Trump and Musk, this seems to be the natural order of things, veritably begging to be restored.
A lot like a collapsed Soviet Union, or a collapsed Germany. Massive economic upheaval, plunging life expectancy and other social/health indicators, greatly reduced international influence, hyper inflation and massive unemployment. The thing about collapse is it is unpredictable and my concern isn’t for the US, but for the fate of humanity. America is the leader of a global fascist movement and the sooner it reaches its high-water mark and begins to recede, the better. The fate of America isn’t relevant when compared to the fate of everyone else on the planet.
That is nonsense. The UK has full control over its warheads.