July 4th Vertigo

Due to the stresses at the end of the school year and my resolution to NOT do any writing on my vacation I think this blog has had its longest ever hiatus (not that anyone noticed.) Appropriately enough, I caught COVID on that vacation (still worth it) and am sitting on my screened-in back porch, my children remarkably sanguine about our 4th plans being canceled. 

In the past two weeks I have felt intense, literal physical vertigo on multiple occasions, an unsettling sensation that applies to my mental state whenever I contemplate the state of the nation. For example, my school's end of year teacher gathering was held on a boat docked in the Hudson. I was on it for five minutes before getting puking sick and having to go home (I suffer pretty badly from motion sickness.) At Disney with my family I made the mistake of taking "non-drowsy" Dramamine, which should be called "non-working." I managed to recover and get back on the rides but I spent a couple of hours feeling like absolute garbage. 

I got spiritual vertigo from the Supreme Court's decisions destroying reproductive rights, erasing church/state boundaries, and promoting gun proliferation, along with the revelations of the 1/6 hearings. The "non-drowsy" medication failing to fix this vertigo happened to be the tepid response from the gerontocratic Democratic Party leadership and general apathy in the population apart from those already politically committed.

I'm sitting here now in COVID quarantine, anxious and tired and without anything to distract me from contemplating the reality of what faces the nation on this July 4th. Reading about a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, only makes my anxiety worse. For the past seven years of my life I feel like I have been watching the chickens of the past four decades coming home to roost. Ever since I was able to consume and understand the news in the 80s I have been hearing about increasing econommic inequality, racist policing, Christian nationalists forcing their vision on the country, mass shootings, and a general loss of faith in the future. Back in the 80s one could look back 20 years to the 60s to contemplate the possibilities of radical change, but for people of my generation, we never experienced such a time our lives. For younger people the rot was already obvious decades before they were born. My entire life we have been confronted by the same same structural problems and nothing has been done to fix them.

I have been contemplating the collapse of the American Empire for just as long, but I always assumed it would be like Britain's: a long, managed deflation. Now I forsee something like the Soviet Union's fate. I am sure the average Soviet citizen in 1988, even in the midst of perestroika and glasnost, had no thought that the USSR would cease to exist at all in three years' time. January 6th proved that the Right is willing to use force to seize power. The rigging of the Supreme Court and the rigging of state elections through gerrymandering and suppression mean that minoritarian rule is already here. We are basically seeing a return to the post-Reconstruction American political order, complete with white supremacist militias. 

Driving South to Florida I could not help but notice the gun store billboard with an assault weapon proclaiming one could but "Guns Ammo Freedom" there. I could not fail to notice the trucks that had both blue line flag decals and "don't tread on me" logos. Their drivers see no contradiction between praising the state's wielders of violence while proclaiming their independence. Freedom is for them, state violence is for other people. That is the folk fascism that dominates large swathes of this country, including much of the military and law enforcement. If push comes to shove I have no doubt which side those institutions will take, and how eagerly they will deputize those truck owners. 

And even without the horrific prospect of open civil conflict, I still live in a country where in many areas ten year old rape victims are forced to carry their pregnancies to term and where Black suspects are shot 50 times by the police and their corpses handcuffed. (Both of these incidents took place in Ohio last week.) Mass bloodshed still takes place even if there aren't battle flags in places like Buffalo, Highland Park, and Uvalde. So many progressive minded people, including myself, don't really see a way forward. If we maintain a democracy in this country I imagine it will be by dumb luck. I'm planning on taking some mental Dramanine in quaratine this week so I can shake this vertigo and figure out what the hell needs doing. 

The 75 Year Ride Is Over

Ironically, given the low state of American right now, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the United States' ascendance to the status of the world's most powerful nation. Even during the Cold War battle with the Soviet Union, this was the case. On this diamond anniversary in 2020, we are marking the end of that status.

The United States has become a laughing stock to the world with its Covid response. The election of Donald Trump was already a sign that this country was no longer fit for world leadership, now we are only seeing greater confirmation of that fact. The Dubya years had already killed this nation's credibility, which Obama managed to resurrect. Now that the world has been twice bitten, there's no way to fix the damage.

One of the great paradoxes of my life is that the United States in the past thirty years has gone from the uncontested victor of the Cold War to this lowly state. The only real explanation is that the Cold War win was more about surviving a war of attrition than a vindication of the American system. The Cold War also managed to paper over some political differences that now threaten to disintegrate the nation.

The 9/11 attacks could have been another such point of unity, but by 2001 conservatives had given up on consensus. Instead, the attacks were used as the pretext to launch a Foreverwar, one we are still waging all these years later. The conservative imperitive to hold onto power by any means necessary has necessitated the abrogation of democracy. Bush and Trump, the presidents who have done so much damage to the nation's international standing, both came into power with a minority of the votes due to the electoral college. Conservatives have used the Senate and the courts to stop reform, and gerrymandering and voter suppression to keep their opponents from winning elections.

Gerrymandering, judicial veto, the undemocratic Senate, and the electoral college are all baked into our Constitutional system. One of this country's most important but quietest failures until now has been its inability to update its political frame of government. No newly independent nation today could have something like the Senate filibuster -much less the Senate- as part of its system and be considered remotely democratic. Our Constitution, even with the amendments added in, is still Democracy 1.0. It is an operating system behind the times, prone to failures, and causing constant crashes.

The high standing of American power in the world after 1945 has a lot to do with the failure to make a truly democratic system. Generations of Americans since have thought of themselves as members of the world's most important nation, if not necessarily the best. That belief in American exceptionalism has made it difficult to change the fundamentals of our system, or even to get people to understand just how bad they have it compared to other countries in the world.

The Cold War and beyond trumpeting of "American freedom" meant totally ignoring reality. In the United States of 1945 a huge portion of the population wasn't even allowed to vote on account of race. The civil rights movement finally changed that in 1965, but the Shelby decision in 2013 effectively undermined it.

Ironically, the nations fostered by the United States would end up being better examples of democracy. When the Federal Republic of Germany was created in the late 1940s, it had the opportunity to build a democracy from scratch. Its system guarantees not only rights to free speech, but also to health care, housing, and education. Other democracies started expanding the rights of their people in this way after 1945, but the United States refused. Now we face a pandemic where the government is forcing people to work because it does not have a safety net in place to keep people at home without starving.

So what now? Even if Biden wins the election, the fundamentals are broken and won't be changed. The only possibilities for change can happen when Americans reject the self-image of the nation forged in 1945. The days of the "American Century" are over now and aren't coming back. I deeply hope for what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom." My prediction is a sclerotic, dying empire that much like the UK or Russia will be seen as a dysfunctional nation incapable of forgetting past glories that can never be relived.

The American Empire's Point of No Return

COVID is the British gunboat blasting America's junk fleet to pieces

For about twenty years now I have been saying that America has entered its Brezhnev period. The thing is, Brezhnev was in power for eighteen years. We are well past the Brezhnev years now.

Back in 2016 I felt that the election of Trump represented something far worse than the stasis and rot I had witnessed for so long. As I said at the time, we were all headed into the fire. Some of us would get burned, some would be consumed, none would be the same. And so, almost four years later, a pandemic is raging through the country enabled by incompetence and malice. I live near the epicenter, but because I live in a "Democrat state" the lives of my family and neighbors are not worth saving. There are armed mobs descending on state capitols, as in Michigan today. In states where the infection rate is going UP they are sending people back to work.

My day to day existence has become so completely frantic that I haven't had as much time to contemplate what it all means. However, right now I see clearly that the American empire is in its death spiral. Perhaps a Diocletian is on the way to pump in some blood to reanimate the corpse, but maybe that was who Obama was. I used to think that America was headed the way of the UK. In the early 2000s I figured the over-extension of the empire in the GWOT would soon be manifest, and the US would quietly move to the second rank, consoling itself with memories of past glories.

Now it is obvious that the United States has gone for the hard crash. Our gerontocracy resembles that of the Soviet Union. The president is in his 70s, Joe Biden is even older, and Bernie Sanders, the supposed breath of fresh air, is even older than him! The opposition party is paralyzed and stuck in the past, its leadership aged and incapable of adjusting. The "left" that fancies itself to be the future is also stuck in the past, wedded to the dead ideologies of the 20th century's failed revolutions. All the while the Republican Party is waging an all-out assault on the public sphere. There is no political force capable of stopping them. Even if Biden gets elected, they will not go away. As under Obama, they will use their state governments and the power of the filibuster to prevent any forward progress.

Of course, there's a good chance Trump still gets reelected, considering the fact that Biden is MIA and hasn't addressed the Tara Reade accusations, and that so many on the left want to throw a temper tantrum and undercut him because it's the only political power their failed movement has. If he is elected I do not see any kind of program capable of meeting the challenges of the current crisis or the tactical ruthlessness needed to combat conservatives.

I had once thought there would a slow decline and muddling through, but the coronavirus has been like an out of control ship slamming into a rotting dock. The rate of collapse has been drastically accelerated. We see that this nation's failure to provide health care, its failure to treat its workers with dignity, and its failure to be able to come together in times of crisis is completely toxic.

At this point I just pray for a managed decline, not an outright collapse. It might be fun for some folks to root for the end of the American Empire, but knowing what Russia was like in the 1990s, I take no pleasure in such a possibility. I also wish more people were willing to face up to this reality. Before the first Opium War, China saw itself on the pinnacle of the world. The same goes for the Soviet Union before Chernobyl, Britain before the Suez Crisis, and Napoleon before he invaded Russia.

In the meantime I will just try to put my shoulder to the wheel and to salvage what can be salvaged. That's really the best we can hope for.