I have heard from those, on this board and other places, that not only is the U.S. on a nonavoidable path to collapse, but the sooner it happens the better because what will replace it has to be better.
What do you think will replace what we currently have going on, and what prevents things from getting worse instead of better?
We’re kind of stuck in that dreaded in-between where things are bad enough to suffer, but not bad enough to create major change. So I can see where these folks come from, even if I don’t agree.
They hope we’ll get single-payer universal healthcare, and hope that MAGA is so thoroughly repudiated it won’t rise from the ashes again, leaving the progressives in charge. They hope we’ll have a worker economy that strongly values the well-being, high pay, fewer working hours of the workers. They hope democracy will have lots more safeguards built-in to ensure conservatives are kept out and progressives are kept in.
As for what prevents things from getting worse? Well, not much. They’re banking on what they think is goodness and decency to prevail. Which is pretty optimistic.
I expect it will collapse eventually, when the stupidity of fascist policies causes the system to break down beyond its ability to sustain itself. At which point I expect the last act of the collapsing regime will be to use nuclear weapons on every major population center of the planet, including in America.
So what will come after? Scattered survivors in a worldwide radioactive, toxic, ecologically collapsed wasteland. That is the future of humanity.
But it doesn’t seem that you actually want it to happen or that you are looking forward to the collapse happening, which is what this thread is about.
“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution (1996)
For some reason I had it in my mind that this was from George Carlin, but Wikipedia tells me it was Claire Wolfe.
I don’t think the United States is on a “nonavoidable path to collapse”, but the problem is that none of the people who could make decisions to avoid the slide into to autocracy and complete decay of what institutions of democratic governance still exist are not evidencing any willingness to step up and stop it. Not Republicans, even those of whom recognize the corruption and incipient demagoguery of Trump (and what will follow him) are two wrapped up in their desire to consolidate power to oppose him, and not the majority of spinless and irresolute Democrats, clinging desperately to febrile dreams of a fanciful ‘blue wave’ that will wipe this all away and return to the halcyon days of Clinton-era politics (never mind how it was Clinton who set us on the path of deregulation of the banking industry and a failure to control adverse use of the internet that led us here). The handful of mostly progressive Democrats who are willing to speak up about serious issues are largely marginalized while Gavin Newsom—a guy who never met a camera he didn’t love or a tech bro he didn’t have his hand out to—gets constantly celebrated as the Great White Hope by basically aping everything Trump does with just a slightly less conservative spin to it.
I hope that the US collapses because that would be a generation that in the most optimistic view would take a generation to recover from, and I don’t expect that things will be better if it happens. Indeed, for as many problems as the United States has and the criticisms that can be levied against it throughout its history, from attempting to perpetuate chattel slavery well after the rest of the developed world eschewed it to the hypocrisy of big flowery documents talking about freedom and liberty while denying to to the majority of people living within it, it has also made great social, educational, and technological advances, combatted tyranny(at least, when they weren’t supporting the business interests of those in power), aided millions of people and promoted global welfare, and established a system of support for scientific and medical research that was the envy of the world. That all of this is being systematically torn down to the cheers of nihilistic MAGA supporters who have eagerly embraced nascent fascism (and not that this is the first time that there have been substantial turns toward violent nationalist populism and the rhetoric of persecution of easily scapegoated minorities) is a part of a larger global trend of regression from democratic and egalitarian institutions, as is the rejection of science including the critical understanding and monitoring of the warming climate and oceans.
The US could again take the lead and turn away from this, and many would follow but there is too much fear by those ostensibly in control of losing their power and influence. They would literally rather bring the temple crashing down upon their heads (including the radical Evangelical Christians who are every bit as destructive and genocidal as ‘Jihadist’ radical Muslims) than to cede and iota of control or acknowledge that anyone else, especially ‘the experts’, might have a valid perspective.
What would follow a collapse of the United States—a massive nuclear weapon power with great technological means and still a vast amount of wealth—would make the collapse of the Soviet Union look like child’s play, especially without any moderating power to encourage stability. So no, I don’t welcome the collapse of the country or wish to accelerate it, but I’m also not sure there is any other path that people who have control are willing and courageous enough to take. I also don’t think it is useful or intelligent to deny the increasing likelihood that this will occur, or to glorify or fantasize what life in a post-collapse North America and potentially post-apocalyptic wasteland would be like.
Stranger
It’s collapsing like a soufflé collapses. We’ll lose our peaks, the best we have to offer, and we’ll just… sink. We’ll be a lot like Brazil or Mexico.
Okay, now I’m confused. Is this a thread to discuss what we want to happen or to discuss what we expect to happen?
The explanation is in the OP.
Okay, here’s my prediction.
The Republicans have a leadership cadre that is independent of the Trump administration. This Republican leadership is making long term plans. They’re using Trump as a tool in these plans.
His role is to distract public attention to his very blatant crimes while the Republicans quietly put their own loyalists into key positions throughout the bureaucracy, court systems, military, and law enforcement.
The Republicans are telling Trump this is being done to make him dictator. But he’s a patsy.
When the people are in place, the Republican leadership will tell Trump it’s time for him to make his move and declare himself. Trump will do it and make a big speech about how he’s cancelling elections and declaring martial law to save America.
And then the Republicans will stab Trump in the back. They’ll declare that they are totally shocked by what Trump has said. They’ll say they are completely opposed to Trump’s plans to become dictator because they love America. And they’ll tell everyone “Join us in this fight to stop Donald Trump!”
What are people going to do? Fight on Trump’s side? The Republicans will become the leaders of the anti-Trump opposition by default. Remember they’re putting Republican loyalists in positions of power throughout the country.
The Republicans will round up Trump and his maga supporters who stay loyal to him. They’ll proclaim that America has been saved from a wannabe dictator. And most Americans will be relieved.
After that, the Republicans will settle in and run the country. They won’t establish a one-party state and tear up the Constitution. They’ll allow the Democratic party to still exist and even let them win some elections. But the Republicans will control the election system and they’ll make sure that the Democrats always remain a helpless minority.
So we’ll have the illusion that nothing has changed and the United States is still a democracy with the rule of law. Most people will be willing to believe the illusion and get on with their lives.
With Trump’s old age, they wouldn’t even need to betray him. They could just hope Father Time does its job.
That sounds great for the business types, but too subtle for the hardcore evangelicals and racists to agree to. What about them? Why would they agree to anything less than minorities and non-Christians in death camps? Kind of hard to pretend to be a democracy then.
For all the student protests and millions of people marching through Paris, Charles de Gaulle won big in the June 1968 elections…
I don’t get that. People think that here will be a point of time in which no government will exist in the United States, everybody will be standing around wondering what to do, and then a bunch of good people will stand up and decided to build utopia from scratch? That’s not how it works. There will always be some form of government in the country, good, bad or worse, and any change that takes place will have to be one that alters the existing structure of power. The idea that at some point there won’t be ANY structure of power is absurd.
Countries don’t collapse. They sometimes change their system of government, and sometimes they lose their colonies, like Britain and France post WW2 and Russia post-1989, but the country always remains. It can never be rebuilt, only fixed.
Yugoslavia would like to have a word with you.
That’s something to consider - a collapse of the US government is one thing, but you also have 50 State governments out there. And the US government acts through the State governments for a lot of things, providing funding for State-run organizations to do the actual work. So that’s one way things could go. Not a dramatic, overnight collapse, but the Feds gradually losing their legitimacy, as they focus more on the Stupid Trump Stuff, and less on the government work people actually want done. More and more of that gets off-loaded onto the States, and eventually who is President and who runs Congress becomes mostly irrelevant.
Yugoslavia was never really a country to begin with. It was basically what was once called a “personal union”, first under the Serbian royal family, and then under Tito. It broke up because there was no longer anything holding it together.
But you have a point - any “collapse” the United States suffers will be in the form of balkanization, with the State governments taking over completely. Which means that the pro-collapse people now have to worry about rebuilding 50 countries instead of just one.
Nah, just re-build your own, and maybe a coupe of neighboring states. Let other people worry about theirs. But it probably won’t stay as “50 countries” for very long, regional associations will likely spring up, if for no other reason than so many states would be land-locked. Commerce will still be important, no matter who is in charge.
“Collapse,” in this context, might mean different things to different people. I found this article useful as a reference point:
As long as the federal government has nukes, they can force the states to submit to them. One reason that the USSR collapsed was that Gorbachev wasn’t another Stalin, he wasn’t willing to drown the USSR in blood to keep control.
American fascists on the other hand would glory in it. They’d love to just purge the evil liberals with nuclear fire.
Maybe he’s a really big fan of the Fallout series?