America Is Headed Toward Collapse
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
* Energy independent
* Democratic
* Highly educated
* Has the best demographics in the developed world
* Militarily untouchable
* Innovation central
Culture wars are a sideshow. For US to be on the brink of any real crisis there would need to be a super power alternative. There is none and it does not look like any is going to be in the next 30 years.
The US can only destroy itself. It is far from any such thing.
- The US is, on average, highly anti-intellectual and proud of it.
- Spends an unsustainable amount on the military-industrial complex more than the rest of the world combined.
- Lacks health insurance, healthcare, and mental healthcare for all as a human right.
- Is far more dangerous than any Western European country. The city I live in doesn't have police response for nonviolent crimes until 36-48 hours later, if at all.
- Millions of homeless people live on the street. (The true number is far higher than the official estimate.)
- A hundred million Americans are furious, barely surviving, and frequently quick to anger over anything.
- Politically divided.
- 30-40% of the country would rather the whole thing burn down than for things to get better.
- Routine acts of mass murder don't happen in a functional society again, and again, and again.
- Suicide by habits of despair.
- Doddering and corrupt politicians who lack a vision and ambitious project milestones.
- Already had one dumb insurrection and can't elect a SOTH.
America is on the path to another Civil War, but it will take 0-35 years to come to a head in such a fashion. It won't be invaded or replaced, but it may dissolve into 2-3 alliances of states. There is unlikely to be violence necessarily because leftists lack the arsenal the far-right has, and the state has a far greater capabilities than any private party.* Decline is a slow-boiling frog that goes from reliable postal mail and public park water fountains to haphazard, inconsistency and privatized commons HOAs. The bullshit just piles higher and deeper.
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* The edge-cases are individuals in 2 a.-friendly states with privately-owned M114 155mm towed artillery, privately-owned Gatling guns (antique and modern), and surprisingly privately-owned 40 mm Bofors L/60 anti-aircraft autocannon with power traverse pre-treaty (each explosive or incendiary shell has to have an DD NFA tax stamp [and usually the permission of the local sheriff] while regular rounds do not). There is a semi-yearly gathering in Arizona to shoot NFA arms. I doubt there are any privately-owned LAWs, Hellfires, hypersonic missiles, Longbow Apaches, or counterbattery radars.
All of them were the norm throughout human history up until very recently, and political structures were relatively stable for most of it. The problems might suck but they aren't signs of imminent political instability.
I do think political instability is imminent, but not for any of these reasons. I think there's a weak point, social cohesion, and a pry bar is being used efficiently and cheaply to destroy it. We are being propagandized to hate each other by groups of people who don't have our best interest in mind. All the social programs and military spending in the world can't help when a society no longer views itself as one entity. And calls for unity aren't the answer, they're more of the same propaganda. Those calling for unity do so with an implied qualifier that "unity" happen entirely under their ideological control. There's no desire to compromise, because we don't view those that we would be compromising with as belonging to the same nation.
The US has a lot going for it, but it's got one thing, the only thing that leads to polticial upheaval, that's bad: the population does not view itself as one people, or even as disparate allied peoples. We have been propagandized to hate each other. Check all the boxes you like, this fact alone has one outcome.
China would like a word. A developing country with a highly educated population with a military that has achieved nuclear capacity....that also has developed trade relations with practically every other major economy on the planet. While their style of governance might be somewhat blunt and brutalist, it's also lifted a billion people out of destitute poverty. That builds tremendous trust internally.
The USA, on the other hand is trying to recover from having a perpetually bankrupt illiterate spray-tanned wannabe mafia Don pedophile fraudster as their previous president, who very well could get another chance at the Presidency. That president lost the popular vote by several million votes yet still got power. He's been elevated to the status of God by his followers and political party, and is untouchable to the point where he admits serious crimes and walks away a free man to this very day. Oh yeah, 70+ million people want him back in power.
We're not in crisis? Yeah, no. This is real.
The Chinese people have ZERO problems overall with a dictatorship. You can't manage to take a billion people out of poverty without one, sadly. The Chinese that I've worked with not only like what the Party has done to their families and communities, but also their local economies.
Your view is that it's a brutal dictatorship. Their view is that The Party has put a roof over their heads, put food in their stomachs, developed an economy, modernized their country, educated them (and paid for them to study overseas), and has given them a good life - a much better one than their grandparents ever got a chance at.
Historically, famine has been a very common precursor of dynastic change in China. Famines are often interpreted as the current regime having lost what Mencius (孟子) called the "Mandate of Heaven" (天命).
I really doubt that you're right on this point. It plays badly with "put food in their stomachs".
The great leap forward killed up to 55 million people.
Please elaborate and defend.
You could argue that more countries have rapidly emerged from poverty while controlled by a dictatorship than controlled by a democracy. (Even South Korea would qualify for that.) But your "a billion people" threshold makes it look like you want to shut down debate, rather than actually look at data.
Not so - the threshold is there for a reason. It's inherently harder to corral more people than fewer people. At the time that South Korea became a fully fledged democracy, their population was between 37 and 45 million people. That's roughly the size of the urban area of China's 3rd largest city.
You cannot control a country of 1.3 billion people (with a landmass larger than the continental USA) that has regional cultural differences such as diet and language as easily as you can a homogeneous population of ~40 million in an area the size of Indiana.
If I wanted to increase the GDP of the city block I live on, it's a lot easier than if I wanted to increase the GDP of my entire city, let alone the county, state, or country. Things are harder at scale. That's where the efficiency of a dictatorship shines. Not that I'm a fan of The Party, or of dictatorships. Fuck them both. I've done business with The Party, and 10/10 would not recommend. But credit is due where credit is due, and The Party has managed to do some things that have been incredibly beneficial to China at large, on multiple fronts - economics, infrastructure, education, etc... Part of their ability to do so comes from having a centralized dictatorship.
Care to name me a massive country of 1 billion+ under democratic rule that manged that sort of economic growth in that same frame of time?
Maybe India could be a relative threat, but I don't think so. They're at the end of their demographic transition and they wasted a big part of it (from 2010 until covid) (basically, a country is most productive during a demographic transition, for multiple reasons). The issue is that they didn't build enough infrastructure. It's okay in immigration-positive country like the US (immigration is basically a demographic cheat code that bail you out of your mistakes). In India, where there is a lot of skilled emigration, it's a big disadvantage.
However, their government has the absolute trust of the populace at large, and the one benefit of a dictatorship is that things get done in government, rather than endless partisan bickering where the only real beneficiary is the stock market which relies on government's inability to do anything besides say words.
Compared to the US, where the US government is not at all trusted, and feared by many. Minority groups fear it as a tool of oppression; one of the two major political parties regularly claims that the government steals elections from it.
There is good reason to fear the Chinese government, and some Chinese do. It is not a democracy and does not pretend to be. But it's not the "Big Brother" situation it's often portrayed as. Most Chinese genuinely believe that the government is a benevolent dictatorship that is working well for them.
You sure about that? The current political climate has destroyed neighborhoods and families with how divisive each side has become.
The Civil War is still the conflict with the highest number of U.S. casualties, by far. Now that's divisive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
Besides that, have a look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...
We used to destroy neighborhoods with bulldozers, which is a bit more permanent.
Whether it's different enough to push the US over the edge is a different story.
Not really, not all countries fall due to external problems. Some crumble from within.
US has states with economies of diverging interest (e.g. carbon focused countries), diverging economies, and lots of civil unrest.
They siphon wealth from middle class, who has less and less wealth to sustain itself and prop up poor.
The finance sector is not helping either as it generally doesnt create anything either + markets and ever more abstracted tools that create usless 'middle man' that again siphon wealth without creating anything.
And on top of that you have corporate media that are doing everything to prevent class war, by creating cultural and propagating wars.
This is putting immense strain on middle class who are tasked with pushing the wheels of the system, with less and less each year.
Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.
Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.
Not seeing desirable things prevents confusion of the heart.
The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies,
by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire,
then intellectuals will not try to interfere.
If nothing is done, then all will be well.
- General impoverishment.
- Hide desirable things from the pesky impoverished.
- Emptying of hearts (they should be empty:)
- Destroy ambition.
- Remove education, promote ignorance.
- Intellectuals remain aloof, their natural supremacy is assured.
Obviously a good strategy for success and human flourishing.
I would like to see some citations for this because there are many things that make up quality of life, and many ways to measure them. The subsequent paragraphs talk about a decline in real wages for "Americans who didn’t have a four-year college degree", but QoL is not all about wages. Consider the example of European countries who typically appear high up in QoL rankings despite having lower median wages.
> I would like to see some citations for this because there are many things that make up quality of life, and many ways to measure them.
There's that famous graph that shows flat real wages from the 70s onward for most people, and very well-known problems with extremely important goods like healthcare access and housing.
Sure, most Americans (even poor ones) have gotten significantly larger and higher-resolution televisions and gizmos like cell phones during that time, but I think those things are actually pretty marginal (and perhaps even negative), from a quality of life perspective.
That's far from "marginal" or a "gizmo", IMO, and I don't think we've even begun to see the final outcome.
Come on. The internet is really a gizmo that in no way is a substitute for basic needs (like housing, healthcare, or security) when evaluating someone's quality of life.
That's pretty easy to show: if you were given a choice between:
1. being homeless but having access to "a good portion of the sum total of human knowledge" through "cheap cell phone plan."
2. having a home, but no internet access.
Which would you choose? Wikipedia won't keep the rain off your head.
IMHO, software engineers are often very poor judges of the true value of the tech-gizmos they spend so much time with.
Those have low inequality in personal income, plus a strong social security net. USA lacks both of these characteristics.
Maybe the "QoL rankings" don't accurately reflect what people really want?
If you're healthy and on your way to a Phd, you don't really need a safety net. If you're unhealthy and old, you won't pack and move to Denmark. Hence the migration stats.
Note that this doesn't take social programs administered by other departments and agencies into account (e.g., the Department of Education, the Veteran's Administration, the Social Security Administration...). Those also do a great deal of social spending (especially Social Security).
While this is probably not as high as the EU on a per-capita basis, it's quite unfair to characterize it as "no" safety net.
Also, I find Galloway's argument that older people are too unhealthy to move back to Denmark (or wherever)... unpersuasive. You can be pretty damned unhealthy and still get on a plane nowadays.
We are told here that QoL was better 50 years ago. I wonder how many people, given the choice, would choose to live in 1973 instead of today.
As we always have.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Air-Conditioned_Nightmar...
In particular, Turchin predicted in 2016, that 2020 would form the peak of social conflict in America. This strikes me as eerily close to what has actually happened…
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cy...
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-di...
Is the over-production of non-STEM graduates decreasing?
Is non-STEM unemployment going down?
[Here I assume STEM is productive, or increasing productivity, and non-STEM is the pool for BS jobs and the elites - feel free to disagree]
(tl;dr of the latter: the high are only ever overthrown by the middle, who —no matter what their ideology may claim as to the low— merely displace, becoming the new high)