Yes it did, for a time, and as you point out it took a massive investment in blood and treasure to make it whole again.
2 things are different this time:
The forces of good really have no appetite to go to war, while the forces of evil do.
The forces of evil control the state monopoly of force.
Back then most people were subsistence farmers, so there weren’t many institutions or systems that could collapse or fail. Things are different now.
It’s not hard at all to see fractures between US petro-states plus their allies, and everyone else. It’s hard to see how we get out of this. Things are different now.
I’m not trying to be a doomer here but things are different this time around. It’s possible there will be a restoration, but it won’t look like any previous non-violent restoration.
My boss is very okay with military in the streets to control the massive crime and clear away the homeless. He will not be convinced that trump is not a genius.
The men who work for him are here from Mexico and most don’t speak English well. I don’t know the legal status except to say they have social security numbers they have used for years.
We are in California so maybe these men will be okay, but he just shrugs it off when I suggest what a pain in the rear it will be for him if all his guys get picked up. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him that people are being picked up just for speaking Spanish. His spouse speaks Spanish. He makes a joke about how funny it would be if his wife gets deported by accident.
He would be lost without his wife and his business would suffer greatly without his crew. I sometimes can not help but think it would serve him right if any of those things happened, but I very quickly squelch the thought because the people it actually happens to will not think it’s amusing or something to shrug off.
He’s very kind to me and we both have enjoyed our conversations over the 3 years I’ve worked for him. But I’m never going to say the magic words that will ‘remove the planks’ from his eyes. Of course, he believes the planks are in my eyes.
I think we are well and truly fucked.
I don’t understand what’s happening. I can’t for the life of me imagine what kind of world people like Russell Vought think they are creating.
If he’s going to “fire” any Supreme Court Justice, it’s not going to be Roberts. He has a particular pattern where he somehow almost always singles out people like Ketanji Brown Jackson, i.e. female and Black, especially the ones brave enough to be speaking and ruling against him.
I wouldn’t think so. Anyway, it’s much easier for him to just selectively ignore their rulings, as there don’t seem to be real consequences for doing so. But I can see him mouthing off about specific ones who annoy him, perhaps referring to them as whatever the MAGA equivalent is of troublesome priests.
I think the US (and civilization as a whole) is likely to collapse by 2100 but I don’t know if what rises from the ashes (if anything) will necessarily be better. No one has that kind of ability to predict the future and anything else is just wishful thinking. You should want society to change and improve, not collapse entirely. Most people will die in any kind of true collapse scenario so it isn’t something you should yearn for. I doubt society will avoid collapse or dystopia and I hope there’s a benevolent afterlife to make up for how awful the mortal world is.
“Collapse” is a relative term. Does this only refer to total breakdown of society, Walking Dead type end of the world? Does it mean the break up of the current federal government? Does it include the transformation of our government from a civil democracy to an autocratic regime that pays lip service to our Constitution while violating it with impunity? Where elections are shams or rigged to where one side is essentially unbeatable?
I hope for a reversal of course, some amount of the masses to see the things that are happening and act against it. In effect, enough people to rethink their votes that got us here and vote for something different.
However, if that doesn’t happen in the next two years, I hope for a fast collapse of some sort. As terrible as that would be to live through (or die in), I fear that a long degredation of society will be harder to overcome in the long run. The erosion of liberties and equality until it becomes the expected norm and not a wild deviation from the ideals of country has strived for.
As for what will replace what we have, assuming we have some sort of revolution or conflict to overthrow the current crop of fascists and enablers, I works hope we could start with the ideals of the Constitution as transformed by liberal society, but not a return to the current system that is broken .
I’m not sure if a Parliamentary system would be better, but I like the idea that elections are quick and the government changes hands overnight. I like that more distinct party identities can emerge and compete, and that the government has to be a coalition.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to prevent the situation where the groups who should be overseeing the administration and keeping it in check are complicit.
Thing is, within the next couple decades, the “U” in USA will be a memory. The country is going to fragment in ways that we cannot realistically predict, forming into a loose coalition of groups of “balkan states”, with boundaries that we would not recognize today.
The reality is that we are on the cusp of a huge ecosystem reconfiguration that will leave a very large number of humans behind. It has already started (count the flying insects if you go outside tomorrow) but will take most of the next ten years to play out, and the survivors will find themselves doing things very differently.
When it comes to government, one of the biggest problems I see (have seen for a long time) is the swap and flush mechanism of the executive. We need to spread control out across the cabinet instead of top-down and use some mechanism that allows individual cabinet members to be replaced by some body like a properly formed EC, with the central figure serving as a mediator between the secretaries, but with no authority of their own. A “demarch” who acts as a liason between the people and the cabinet.
There are two ways to fight corruption. One is to replace laws with broader principles, the central principle being that a person is treat others with more respect than they deserve and to use proper care and diligence in their actions and enterprises. Laws create strictures that are leveraged by the wealthy, powerful and cunning to take advantage of regular people through their arcane passages, whereas principles, crafted for balance, are more difficult to manipulate.
But, in order for a system of principles to work, we would need to replace the legislative body with panels of citizens drawn randomly from the equivalent of a jury pool, to interpret the principles according to specific situations. If you intend to do a thing, you CYA by presenting a proposal to a panel, which determines what your acceptable course should be. If you decide to just go ahead and do a thing without consulting a panel, you can but you run the risk of litigation that would likely go against you when you lack the CYA document.
The biggest advantage to random panels of citizens is that they present a moving target that is not per se immune to corruption but still much harder to graft upon.
This is my vision of a fair and resilient society. Of course, my ideas are silly and fucked up, but I also live in a pretty fucked up world that looks deeply dysfunctional to me, and we seriously need some other way of doing things.
The disadvantage is that they have no idea what they are doing. At best, they might as well be replaced by a random number generator; at worst they’re Nazis and are trying to kill the rest of us. In fact random chance pretty much guarantees that’ll happen eventually. In the middle they end up collectively the enthusiasts of some popular irrational belief and throw everything into disaster without intending to.
It would function in a manner similar to a jury trial, with lawyer-like advocates illuminating the issues for them and probably some sort of judge-like person or persons providing guidance/limitations. I believe it could be done in a way that would work.
I don’t disagree with the observation that the US system seems to expect micromanagement by legislation, by comparison with our (UK) practice, whereby legislation sets out general principles whose application to circumstances is guided by (guess what) guidelines (e.g., on guns) or by cases in the courts (e g., the public order laws your VP and other right-wingers are making such a fuss about), and/or specialist tribunals (employment, housing, and asylum/immigration), which may involve lay people who undergo specialist training.
However, the best known form of wider citizen participation is by “citizen assemblies” on a particular issue, which take a lot of time to explore the issue with expert advisors (NOT an adversarial legal-type proceeding), to try and arrive at a consensus on general principles as well as applications.
One thing the Greeks got right with their democracy was not having modern-style elections. Sortition with term limits removes a lot of corruption incentives (not all, of course)
As if the current crop of politicians, in just about every assembly around the world, knwo what they do. Depending on country, they vote what the whip says, what “experts” put in briefs, according some ideological bias or whatever other reason. The idea that they have any kind of idea what they’re doing is laughable.
n.b. It is virtually impossible for any elected official to any assembly to have full knowledge about everything that is put to the vote. So sortition is as good a model, maybe even better, than the current systems.
I’m under no illusions that something better will take its place quickly.
The reasoning is more that the US is the tip of the spear right now for ignorance and intolerance, and the new wave of fascism. Maybe not the worst offender, yet, but the most visible and consequential.
And this could not be at a more critical time. If you look at something like, say, climate change, humans could tackle it. We have all the tools and information that we need. It is only disinformation stopping us. And the tools of disinformation are much more powerful than ever. We either beat it now, or we’re done for.
So I want the MAGA brand of ignorance to flame out, quickly and comprehensively, and the same for the MAGA brand of fascism. Anything else is the “we’re done for” timeline.
I certainly want the power of disinformation to end. Which is turn opens the door to a common reality commonly understood. Which in turn opens the door to education and intelligence over ignorance and faith. Which in turn opens the door to human progress on all fronts, including combatting AGW & general environmental degradation. And rampant infectious diseases. And …
But …
How does killing a few (tens of?) million people, in an environment where by and large the most stupid, hate-filled, and violent are the ones who thrive, advance that agenda?
I want MAGA enablers and MAGA itself to collapse. Not US society. Nor Western society in the most general and timeless sense of the term.
More than that, given how much of the misinformation is funded and influenced if not directly controlled by malicious actors like Russia and China - see Tenet Media, or the algorithm meddling in TikTok - why on Earth would we expect the collapse of the United States to make this any better?
We are under continuous assault by the Rupert Murdochs and Putins of the world. And have been for ~40 years. Their steady efforts have finally reached a critical mass of people who grew up living on disinformation, know nothing else, and cannot be reformed.
The rest of the non-totalitarian world will be that much more helpless as the US turns into something resembling Russia or China; Economically and physically large, suspicious, inherently hostile, and above all persuaded of their own legitimate right to Rule Ze Vorld!