The war on terror primed America for autocracy | Hacker News Reader

The war on terror primed America for autocracy

economist.com

292 pointsandsoitis287 comments

Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed and renewed repeatedly.

America permanently traded away basic freedoms for the bogus promise of safety in the shadow of fear. And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it despite its obvious constitutional problems. Crying eagle photos in chain-emails were sufficient propaganda to keep it in place.

> And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it

Too scared? They may have been on board...

It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward. Each step led to further centralization of government, a larger and larger security apparatus, and more and more foreign entanglements. We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.

> We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.

The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.

Rome took some unexpected Ls against the barbarians too. Didn’t change the trajectory of the empire.

The failure to integrate the barbarian Goth refugees is generally marked as the beginning of the fall - and absolutely changed the trajectory of the empire.

“Failure to integrate” is one way to describe the Goths sacking Rome. But I agree the barbarians did them in at the end. My point was that the Iran fiasco is more like the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Rome backed off after taking a beating. That didn’t mark a transition away from Empire, simply a retreat after a military loss.

And my point, is the current administration is closer to Caligula and Nero, than they are to Varus. You see this as nothing more than another blip in a long history. I see unstable and dangerous individuals getting standing ovations for failure.

"I don't care if they respect me so long as they fear me." - Caligula.

The Iran fiasco is Suez Canal 2.0

Did you mean the 1956 Suez Crisis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

>is one way to describe the Goths sacking Rome

To be fair they had been in the empire for a good amount of years at that time if i remember well. ...so when comparing to other previous influxes that did get integrated and/or assimilated it does seem apt.

Teutoburg wasn't a battle but an ambush, and Rome killed almost everyone involved in the next years. This didn't represent a retreat: Germans weren't conquered because they had nothing to conquer.

Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium.

> Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium

The Turks conquered Byzantium (and India, etc)?

> Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium.

An invading force that settles within it and ultimately destroys it before launching expansionist invasions to all of its neighbors?

Haha I was only thinking on the level of "the people who ended the empire", but agree that the analogy is not perfect.

Today's world is different. US just lost a lot of credibility in a very important region of the world. They were not able to keep the strait of hormuz open unilateral, nullifying most of their leverage in that region.

Gulf States will now strategically look out for other partners. Just like Europe / EU and Canada.

Trump tried to leverage a lot of influence in the most stupid way and failed over and over. Does the US even have relevant allies left at that point? Pretty sure they took notes.

The "trajectory of the empire" is that it became the Roman Catholic Church. Rome still rules a sizable portion of the world's population.

I wonder if the USA is going the same way. Democratic Church of America?

Homelander approves.

Rules? Membership of an organisation is nothing like being a subject of an empire. Its purely voluntary. It has less power over its members than employers do. It cannot tax, only ask for donations. Its not even Rome - its run by people from all over the world. It controls only a tiny bit of territory.

question - do the representatives and elected members of a democracy rule?

Rule, under the definition of control or dominion, is "The exercise of authority over a region or people, or the duration of a monarch's reign (e.g., colonial rule)", the word rule is often applied to mean what the leaders of a democracy do, but in most cases rule seems too strict if taking the normative definition, thus there is an informal usage that applies to democratic leadership.

The President is often referred to as a ruler, corporate elites are often referred to as rulers; in these informal groups of rulers I think it is reasonable to place the Catholic Church.

I am agreeable to say they do not rule, but then we must admit they exert a great influence, in many places and ways greater than the governments that officially hold power.

Every single human living in Europe for around a thousand years went to a priest once a week and told them their innermost darkest secrets.

There has been no more totalitarian rule ever implemented, anywhere. The North Koreans aspire to what the Catholic Church had.

Not to wade too far into weeds, but the spiritual and temporal authority of Rome (ie what is now called Church and State) were considered separate entities. When the temporal authority collapsed, the spiritual authority preserved its content and form and then simply waited for conditions to improve.

Τhus the various attempts to re-manifest a Holy Roman Empire in Europe across the subsequent centuries.

American Jesus is a thing, and there are a lot of homegrown flavors that do a ton of work proselyting elsewhere, the largest being LDS

The best part is that the show you’re referencing is on Jeff Bezos’ TV network.

Who were the barbarians, really? Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was basically a massive human trafficking organization that functioned as a pyramid scheme, and Rome only went downhill (in terms of basic human decency) from there.

this is a dense comment (there's a lot here to unpack). it sounds like you're saying:

once it became clear that conquest with an explicit intended return of large numbers of enslaved people would allow caesar to pay debts and fund further expansion, the pyramid was capped and required exponential expansion to perpetuate its economic aims. and this was the beginning of the end. a model which required autocratic steering to operate.

Either way, I'd just caution that the empire-ness of a country's military or diplomatic reach doesn't necessarily tell us what to expect in terms of its internal hellhole-ness of authoritarianism.

The two things are related because maintenance of the empire imposes demands on the domestic political and economic structure. Look at the domestic politics during Vietnam and the GWOT.

The poster above seems to promote the secession of Texas and other states - what is the next step of the russian propaganda playbook to ruin USA

Would secession ruin the USA? Hard to know. Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok.

Of course seccession would be bad for USA. Worse for Texas than the states that remained.

Note that we heard before Brexit that it would not cause problems, yet it in fact bring benefits as expected by anyone with any idea how economy works.

UK has a 6% decline of the economy due to Brexit

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg75npqkq4o

> Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok

The UK might have paid the biggest price due to Brexit, but the EU also lost a significant trading partner for it's goods and services. Arguably it was a lose-lose outcome.

The empire is not defined merely as "a big state with deep foreign influence". In this context it is about the style of governance rather than strength

On the contrary, the goal is energy dominance and it seems to be working. To be clear, I do not support how this is being achieved. In its endeavor the US has made a lot of people furious against it.

A Pax Romana would be a considerable upgrade

No it wouldn’t. The empire sapped Rome and destroyed its democracy.

> It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward.

If you're looking for the seeds of imperialism, you'll find them all the way back to US independence.

The point the article is making is that 2001 was a tipping point in that evolution.

Do you mean GWOT? Global war on terror?

If GOTW, actually means GWOT and Global War on Terror, please have courtesy of reading your posts beforehand, and perhaps also not assuming a US audience.

For all the editorial hay to be made from the "The Victory of Capital" or the purported "Inevitable Self-Destruction of Communism (with Russians In It)", the process of nations transforming into "security state zombies" is probably less a model of economics/ideology and more a normal lifecycle stage for nuclear powers. It's mistaking metabolic stage for victory.

Once a major power has credible nuclear deterrent, the functions of the Westphalian state focuses on that singular threat of destruction - it's a cannon that ends the state. Having it be a single cannon is antithetical to an open society or democratic patterns in government. Hence, Security State Zombie, unable to perform anything other than its duties of destruction.

Russia started the game in a depleted state and hit the lifecycle stage first - less open society to burn down. We teetered for a long time, but the 9/11 attacks, combined with a reactionary wing that no longer had to run a moral race with the Communists, sent the balance over the edge.

I suspect, right now, we are seeing the "Yeltsin Era", where people finally lose their last patience with the established system, and during which the nomenklatura/technocrats/security state solidify their holdings in communications and media. Terminating this period in an orderly fashion will require some organizational energy and talent. Increased direct cooperation between national security "black" assets and local law enforcement like Texas Marshalls (hey like in Sicario, except not in Mexico), or between black assets and federal groups not operating under legislative or judicial oversight (which I leave to you to name). It will not be a modest effort - the local assets will need to be linked up with aggressively, as they are less numerous than the law enforcement under direct local jurisdiction. I do wonder who our Putin will be, or if we will even see his face without a thermonuclear bonfire.

>Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed

I've been seeing plenty of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty since then, and I can't even provide examples without getting [flagged].

> I can't even provide examples [of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty]

I've seen other people critiquing it over the years, perhaps it has something to do with other aspects of the delivery or message?

[flagged]

The longer things stay vague, the more I become concerned that this may be a scenario that is so common that it has an enduring meme [0], where:

1. The person claims that a broad swathe of facially reasonable and views are being rejected or forbidden in a way that is an unfair overreaction.

2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.

3. They are actually facing difficulty from a much much narrower--or entirely disjoint--set of view.

In this case, OP has claimed the average HN commenter is hostile to a general class in the form of "our liberty has been improperly infringed by a false appeal to security", especially national security.

I don't think that claim is credible, and I'm offering to demonstrate it by rattling off a bunch of counterexamples... However, that won't mean much if it turns out OP real grievance has some important details they are trying to keep secret.

[0] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

I think not in this particular case, and downvoting more than flagging, but I see perfectly reasonable things downvoted. In fact I often upvote things I disagree with because I think the downvotes were unfair. I have been downvoted for reasons that are not obvious to me, and sometimes for posting verifiable facts. Its hard to guess what a particular person's experiences might have been.

This is a pattern that exists but there's also another pattern where people downvote things they disagree with, on platforms that have downvotes. It's seen on HN and Reddit and it's thought to be the reason YouTube removed downvotes.

> 2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.

And yet we all know why that is. We have decided that certain ideologies that are ... let's call it "easy to criticize" (because they deserve some damn serious criticism and have done enormous damage. Oh and not just one such ideology). To make things worse, in many places such discussions have been legally banned. And some of these ideologies are very visible in politics or even on the street. And discussion of such ideologies immediately devolves into pinning the blame for all that went wrong in history on a particular segment of the population.

We have collectively decided such ideologies are to be considered above criticism, and you're quite right, it's not working.

It used to be commonplace to bring the horrors of certain ideologies and expose them everywhere. In movies, on the TV, exposing the blatant failures and aggression of ideologies was commonplace.

Depicting communist dissident prisons happened in children cartoons. Associating islam with slavery, including depicting how commonplace rape and open commercial exploitation of female slaves was in islamic nations was normal. The reality hasn't changed: IS/Daesh reintroduced slavery, as one of their first acts, but it is utterly forbidden to discuss why they might have done so. Frankly, islamophobia is just a word meant to shut down criticism of the very bad parts of that ideology, as well as the supremacism built into that faith, something that has no place in America, or anywhere on the planet. And on the other hand communist and ex-communist nations are still full of dissident prisons, but it can't be discussed anymore. What communism has to do with socialism also can't be discussed, or even that socialism has evolved over time (e.g. why socialism, was rabidly anti-immigration not 30 years ago, and the reasoning behind it)

And the problem is that any suggestion of going back immediately and directly runs headfirst into extreme aggression.

Hence, no discussion.

Everything you said about Islam has direct correlations in Christianity in fairly recent history. But, as you say, things evolve over time. Christians for the most part are now against slavery, as I would bet most Muslims are too. Countries that are no longer communist still have dissidents in prison, which would suggest that is not the fault of communism, but other ideologies still rampant in those countries.

I'm not sure what exactly you are saying about socialism, it has lots of proponents and implementations in different countries, it's not just one thing that I can see.

While you claim there are correlations, there is a massive difference in trajectory. Christianity has a very long and documented history of driving the movement against slavery. The abolitionist movements were rooted deeply in Christian theology and the belief that all people are created in the image of God. There are Christian abolitionist movements from the age of the Byzantine empire. In contrast, we see an ideology in Islam that not only permitted slavery but based it's economy on slavery for 1200 years, and has seen it reintroduced in various forms in modern times. As a general rule, the more religious the movement, the more it is pro-slavery. And ... where do you see any islamic movements for removing slavery out of the religion as we have seen for 1500+ years in Christianity? You know, where do you see these muslims countering the "extremist" pro-slavery camp in islam?

I wear glasses, so perhaps that's the reason I have so much trouble finding them?

(btw: yes, I know that such movements exist, like the Ahmadiyya sect. The majority sect of muslims is attempting to eliminate them, which is even worse, imho, than them not existing at all)

And given the values of liberty and human rights that Americans have, I would expect people to have a significant problem with any ideology that continues to leave the door open for slavery.

yep, the very first response tweet had confirmed my immediate assumption about the kind of people that 'meme' would be 'enduring' with.

This is nonsense. HN is very lightly, and fairly, moderated.

Lightly and fairly as in: removing anything that gets 4 flags no matter what it is

What gets 4 flags? Certain things. Such as inconvenient facts

Just say the facts bro

You won't get flagged if you state facts without insults. Just spit it out. Even if it did get flagged because you broke the guidelines, we'd still be able to see it. Id vouch for it even if you broke the rules so you can understand better and we can see the facts

HN will flag you for being stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories; you can introduce facts provided you back them up with non-insane sources.

In two of these posts, people might take issue with some of the sources. The rest should all be considered trustworthy by anyone. All flagged:

Posts flagged for showing how politics has meddled in science (unfortunately one of those facts was overstated, as a commenter kindly alerted me to. Including the correction did not prevent flagging):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434589

Demonstration of NYTimes bias, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242

Showing how an article omitted any links to Israel in its discussion of the Iran war, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076950

Citing a Dutch study on economic impact of immigrants, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070799

Showing how a study omitted data that interfered with its conclusion, only revealed due to FOIA'd emails, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281899

Elucidating on the nature of social media censorship, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016171

Providing relevant context to UK's complaints about officials being banned from the US, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615611

Showing the racial bias of a hacktivist, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509295

Citing a Pew survey about the expressed importance of racial identity, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575489

Correcting a misleading statement in an article, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44932696

people flag things that are obvious and boring, or that are very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued (and thus it's not the place and time to discuss it) topics. eg. migration politics and economics (and crime and so on)

and some of those comments are just incorrect (like the last one about Loomer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National... )

So now the goalposts have moved from "stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories" to the vague "obvious and boring, very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued" (flagging purely factual statements as "very incendiary" is, of course, the original complaint!).

But I'm genuinely confused - you say my last comment was incorrect. Can you explain how saying that someone would have tried to stop Jews from fleeing Nazis, doesn't create the impression in the average reader that that someone isn't Jewish?

The claim isn't even grounded in any kind of reality - Loomer frequently advocates for Jewish and Israeli interests - i.e. for her own people:

According to Loomer, she was banned for a tweet about Omar in which Loomer called her "anti-Jewish," [..] According to Media Matters, Loomer has said that "if you don't vote for Donald Trump, then you just hate this country." Loomer claims that the Democratic Party is supportive of Jews "getting wiped off the face of the Earth" and that Jews who vote for Democrats "might as well just go put yourself in a gas chamber yourself if this is how you're gonna behave." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and Zionist Islamophobe, denies Israel's genocide in Gaza, spreads dehumanizing narratives that frame Palestinians as inherent terrorists, and calls for their ethnic cleansing to bolster Israel's settler-colonial project and genocide. - https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/laura-loomer

Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/politics/israel-maga-r...

Why would we think she'd switch sides in 1940? Nor do I see how the existence of an extremely niche ("Contemporary estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 members.") organization changes any of this - can you walk me through your logic?

I did a sampling, and in my opinion all of those were correctly flagged (or at least, I can understand why).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344 is being deliberately obtuse; it's not engaging with the parent's statement at all, just claiming false equivalence and expecting other people to know what you actually mean.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242 is like a powerpoint slide with too many bullet points. It's a list of article titles without making any effort to explain how they show bias and in what direction. Again, you are expecting other people to fill the gaps in your own story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049 already opens with a childish and illegitimate claim. I didn't even bother to read the rest, if you open with such a bad assertion you are just asking to be flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615611 is yet again not an argument. There is a hollow claim and a link. Why are you expecting others to make the effort to read an article and make your argument for you when you can't even be bothered to articulate your own thoughts on the matter?

1. There's no "false equivalence", just dispelling the false impression that attacks on science are remotely new. The parent's statement claimed this was a change, so yes it does engage with it.

2. Only someone actively trying not to understand, can't spot the double-standards. If reading 1-2 sentence titles and comparing them is too much, then I simply can't help you.

3. If by "a childish and illegitimate claim", you're referring to the part about trying to claim credit for destroying science, that's just a (very obvious) rhetorical flourish. If you mean the part about academia destroying science itself, the rest, that you didn't bother to read, are all sources showing how exactly it's doing that.

4. I'm not expecting them to read the whole article - the title and subtitle would suffice. What makes the claim hollow? And yes, I did articulate my own thoughts - that's what the "hollow claim" was.

In essence, you're demanding that my posts should do the thinking for the reader. Not just lead them to water, but force them to drink too. Since you're clearly being deliberately obtuse, I'll spare you from further replies.

Nothing you're claiming seems worthy of being flagged, sounds more like you're personally bothered by the content of those comments.

This isn't a specifically American phenomenon. Humans have fear buttons. If you press the right ones, a sizable portion of any population would trade in significant amount of freedom to feel safer. Those for whom it's almost pathological spend considerable effort trying to pass on their worries to others, or chasing opportunities to exert some satisfactory control. If they succeed in either goals, you get less freedom.

> Crying eagle photos in chain-emails

Can someone elaborate? Whwre is this reference comming from? A simple web search did not yield much

Eh, I think they meant the general colour of "not quite social media" that was present at the time: chain emails and blogs. But the patriotic fervor was nuts. While there were substantial anti-war protests, that was very much not the majority opinion, and people were "cancelled" over opposing the war.

It was inevitable. I remember, in the UK mid-afternoon after we'd found out about the first plane hitting the first tower, saying that would be the end of the Palestinians. Then the second plane hit. America would have to have reprisals, and Iraq was the target.

Mind you, the PNAC (Project for a New American Century; that era's version of project 2025, now quite hard to find on the Internet) always did want to go to war with Iran, and Iraq was a convenient vector for that.

Even though I'm American, I was living and working in Montreal at the time of 9/11 and it was weird how even there in the weeks after there were American flags displayed "in solidarity" with the US.

Yep, a lot of people saw this coming. It was so obvious - new powers are always abused in the end. Same for the UK. Perhaps the politicians knew that and didn’t care. Not sure how deep their cynicism / malice goes. More power to us, they said.

In the UK there is a big element of sheer incompetence. Politicians who have not experience of life outside politics are really will-equipped to understand the consequences of what they do, and defer overly to expert opinion. Of course the police or intelligence services say they need more powers, it takes judgement to balance this against other considerations.

> and defer overly to expert opinion

That... doesn't sound so bad?

its also not true, if we listened to expert opinion more often we wouldnt have had numerous extreme economic and policy failures in my rather short life. Austerity, Brexit, Covid, Public Order Act 2023, every moment of those last Tory years.

I agree with you on Brexit, austerity. But you can always find an expert briefing in yr direction cf Walters, Lawsom, Thatcher

The politicians did defer to expert and business opinion over Brexit. The referendum was only called because they thought they would win it. I personally think it was a good thing, but the politicians definitely did not - the point was a referendum win would fatally weaken the leave movement. An interesting irony is that polls before the referendum in the 70s suggested people did not want to remain, the ones before 2016 suggested they did.

Lots of experts favour austerity. The trick with economics (and many other things) is to find the experts who agree with out.

The government did listen to experts over covid. Whose idea was lockdown? Who advised them that a rapid vaccine rollout was required. The government did get confused by experts having different opinions (as one would expect with a novel disease) but once convinced which experts they listened to they did follow them. The main fault was not balancing advice from experts in different areas (e.g. balancing physical health, mental health and economic impacts of lockdown correctly) which is exactly what I was complaining politicians fail to do

it is bad because experts are narrow. Consider my example, The police will (correctly) tell you that giving them more powers will reduce crime. The problem is that reducing crime is not the only considering in what powers the police should have.

> and defer overly to expert opinion

The term 'expert' here actually means well-funded lobbyists who pay to have access to the politicians. They are able to present decision-makers with convincing arguments to pass laws that are favorable to the ones funding the lobbyists. They are smart and they are experts, but they are also laser focused on using that expertise to get what the funders want. This is almost always an outcome that is bad for regular people.

incompetence is everpresent in large hierarchical power structures.

just as the UK the US is also full of career politicians sitting in very powerful (sub)committees

they are absolutely capable -- BoJo knew exactly wtf he was doing most of the time -- they just don't give a shit.

The UK however had pre-existing authoritarianism due to the Troubles. Acceding to ECHR in Northern Ireland and rolling back the authoritarianism there in favor of an external human rights court was a critical part of ending the cycle of violence there.

Yes. History will record that bin Laden won. There's a pre-9/11 book about bin Laden, "The Man Who Declared War on America". Bin Laden was interviewed.

Consider the situation at the end of the Clinton administration. The US was at peace. The Soviet Union was gone. The US got along with China and Russia. No major enemies remained. The federal budget was balanced. Bin Laden looked at that, and realized that America had to be weakened before it could be defeated. That was his plan.

Mission accomplished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden:_The_Man_Who_Declare...

> bin Laden won

are his people better off or are they worse off?

Al-Qaeda is larger and their allies in Afghanistan have further consolidated their rule. I might not call that "better off" but it's certainly in the direction bin Laden wanted things to go.

Most of the funding for the campaign came via Saudi Arabian citizens [0], and they have absolutely benefited from the change in political power in the Middle East.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060311045338/http://news.bbc.c...

> Saudi Arabian citizens

"Saudi Arabian citizens" == literally the House of Saud, and their direct associates.

Bin Ladin came from a wealthy family of construction magnates with ties to the royals. It's like if Barron Trump decided to move to rural Ontario and start a Christian Identity movement.

Was his goal to provide for his people? I thought his goal was to bring down the Great Satan.

As mentioned above his main beef was American troops in the holy Land in Saudi Arabia.

No Bin Laden's beef was the flow of history. The Islamic world has lost its power and influence to control events.

What really hurt Bin Laden was the knowledge that the Saudi elite WANTED American troops in the holy land. His real enemy was never America, the West or crusaders it was his fellow Muslims- who have for the large part rejected his insane ramblings.

Bin Laden’s ultimate objective was to evict US military forces from the Middle East. In response to 9/11, we massively expanded our footprint in the region and formed even deeper relationships with the Saudi government (whom Bin Laden hated for in his view, “[suspending] Islamic laws, and replacing it with statuary laws”). You can read it all in his original, late 90s declaration of jihad against the United States[1] and decide for yourself if you think he ultimately achieved what he wanted, but for my money, he lost basically everything. In the strictest sense, we did stop “occupying” (stationing troops) in Saudi Arabia itself after we kicked off the Iraq war and concentrated our forces in Iraq and at Al Udeid airbase, but I don’t think that was really the spirit of the thing.

[1] https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declara...

> Bin Laden’s ultimate objective was to evict US military forces from the Middle East

Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” photo op was, ironically, on the same day US troops complied with bin Laden’s demand for them to leave Saudi Arabian soil.

Ironic? Or timed specifically to overshadow it in the news?

But the US troops are still there.

Yes, sixteen years later troops returned.

Stay tuned to see if it incites another massive terrorist attack leading to permanently diminished civil rights.

I think there's a reasonable case to make that 9/11 broke American politics in a fundamental way, by fully unlocking and granting a permission structure for politicians to reach for nativism and xenophobia to justify basically everything.

It's clear that Bin Laden did not "win" in any immediate sense, but America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.

The truly erratic and unstable nature of the US regime in this moment unlocks strange possibilities that would otherwise have been unthinkable - for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.

> America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.

Might have??

America has spent - at the lowest possible estimate - at least 8 trillion dollars on the "war on terror". Probably more like 20-something. Trillion.

That's enough money to have transitioned to entirely clean energy, housed every homeless American, and solved world hunger. With change.

The DOW is over 50 thousand though, I guess, and the Epstein class are richer than ever.

> for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.

Uh, what?

Israel threw themselves to the wolves, if 'wolves' are what we're calling the consequences of doing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

America have been the single greatest force by far holding the 'wolves' at bay. If they stop because the 'wolves' are threatening their own stability, that's not really "throwing Israel" anywhere.

9/11 was just a bloody blip compared to the decades of spiraling indoctrination with varying focal points.

the same way that now "progressive leftists" are completely working themselves into an anticapitalist frenzy, and before them the (performative) woke and the reactive antiwoke mania spread like wildfire, before that it was the homophobia and islamophobia (triggered by 9/11), and before that the red scare, and the reefer madness, and whatnot.

https://www.npr.org/2004/12/15/4229442/from-direct-mail-to-a...

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con (2012 by Rick Perlstein)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_the_Un... (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-682x.... (Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter, 1991 by Daniel Rigney)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2018.1... (Anti-intellectualism is a virus, 2018 by Michael A. Peters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI (Conspiracy, 2025 by ContraPoints)

All this due to US want to be hegemon, based all around the world. Why cannot live in harmony with others in a multi-polar world?

> Yes. History will record that bin Laden won

Or as The Onion has put it:

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

Whilst I think there’s some truth to this, America’s elite would have brought us to this point anyway. Trump is a symptom of unfettered neoliberalism exporting jobs and destroying communities rather than a cause. Bin Laden drew America into forever wars and solidified their enemies in some dimensions. But America’s great downfall has been the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by its elite. They smashed the social compact and destroyed its institutions in the pursuit of profit.

I think Bin Laden will get a chapter in the book on the fall of America, but Reagan will be on the front cover.

Oh come on. You’re trying to be edgy without any understanding of reality.

It’s like saying History will record Gavrilo Princip as having won WW1. Huh?

America’s current troubles are political polarization and ballooning deficits. Both of which are happening in every developed country, having nothing to do with 9/11. The foreign interventionism is a 100 year tradition in the US, nothing new under the sun.

The only thing Bin Laden accomplished is making air travel annoying, making some military contractors filthy rich, and getting hundreds of thousands of his Muslim brothers killed over values that are slowly eroding in the Middle East anyways.

The American global military empire was always going to decline over time, if anything, his actions reversed that decline and led to more American intervention. He got the opposite of what he wanted.

I do think spending a trillion dollars on Iraq might have something to do with the deficit.

Did France, Germany, the UK, etc. spend a trillion dollars in Iraq? How did they get themselves in the same ballooning deficit death spiral?

The US did spend a Trillion on Iraq. But during Covid they spent nearly $5T...in 1/4th the time they spent 1 in Iraq. They also spent $9T on QE.

Iraq is a drop in the bucket. The real problem is a structural one with modern democracies. Turns out when you can legally take your citizens money at gunpoint and also tax the entire world via inflationary money printing with few short term consequences, this power gets abused.

Germany dont have the same ballooning debt problem: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/germany/usa?sc=...

Their economies have problems, but USA leads in debt.

They do have the same problem.

You're not adjusting for growth rates.

Also, Germany's debt isn't in the global reserve currency, so their problem is arguably worse. The actually have to pay for it using their 0 growth economy.

The US will just tax the entire world to pay for its debts by printing more of the global reserve currency and inflating it away.

If the problem is booming deficits, then the cause isn't taking citizens money at gunpoint, because that doesn't cause a deficit. The cause is the voters, they want the benefits now but they don't want to pay for them, so they pass the bills onto their children and grandchildren. The government is doing exactly what the voters are asking for.

This is very true. However, institutions being granted this power in the first place (unlimited taxation via threat of violence, unlimited deficit spending power, unlimited money printer access on the global currency) is what enables the abuse by the politicians and voters all acting in their short term self interest.

If the US didn't have the world's reserve currency like Germany/France/UK/etc, the bill would come due via the bond markets. The demand for Euro-denominated debt is not near-infinite in the same way the demand for USD-denominated debt has been (at least up until now).

> America’s current troubles are political polarization and ballooning deficits.

American problem is one sided right wing radicalization, not polarization. If left of center moved the the right even more, the issues would remain.

I will call this Exhibit A in proving my point about polarization, thank you left-leaning person lacking in self-awareness.

Now we just need a right-leaning person who lacks self awareness to offer a rebuttal to you and we can complete the picture.

Are Americans really more polarized? I guess it depends on when you choose your baseline.

It's certainly true that the political parties are more polarized, didn't used to be as ideological as they are now. To a large extent, the southern Democrats all left to join the Republican party, and the "compassionate conservatives" have mostly abandoned the Republican party. I expect with the split between MAGA and the America first people we are beginning to see another realignment.

It’s an interesting question if we are more polarized now than at some point in the past. Hard to say, I wonder if there is some way to measure this? Maybe you could compare the amount of “undecided” voters over time.

You always here people say one half of the country is red and the other half is blue, but in reality is probably more like 1/3 each red/blue and another 3rd who don’t subscribe to the dogma of either side and are fed up with the endless bickering between the two teams.

One thing that’s for certain is the tech giants tech giants and news companies are attempting to manipulate us more than ever. It might feel like we’re more polarized that ever, but I think much of that is because it’s good for business, and they are shoving division in our faces on a daily basis.

There is real evidence of this by an awesome project called “Tech Watch Project” (https://techwatchproject.org/). They have a data dashboard with real time charts at https://americasdigitalshield.com/.

The idea is that tech giants are purposely trying to manipulate voters in the middle by feeding them more biased search results, notifications, et cetera. The thing about this, is that on close election they can literally swing elections the way they want them to go by manipulating undecided voters algorithms.

In elections with wider margins it’s not going to have an effect, but in close races it only takes a point or two to get the desired result. This is a power they should not have and it needs to be talked about more.

The U.S. is simply one of the developed countries where right wing populism has grown in response to mass immigration. If center-left folks flipped on immigration, the current right wing populism would collapse, just like happened in Denmark: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo

> If center-left folks flipped on immigration, the current right wing populism would collapse,

This theory is false, it does not work. It was tested to destruction in the UK this year and tl;dr: it's how to annoy everyone. When the centre-left party chases the right-wing, they disillusion their base and lose votes there, without gaining any significant number or right-wingers, who still prefer what they see as the "real thing". And the right-wingers are emboldened, not collapsed - they take one step back for every step taken towards them.

The long version is here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/zbmp3_v2

It does work. It’s exactly what happened in Denmark: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4y. But you have to actually mean it and follow through on it. People need to believe the party has genuinely changed its position on the issue, instead of merely changing its messaging. Every thing Starmer said indicated he was soft on immigration and he took no meaningful steps to stop it and send refugees back.

Your article is 404 not found. Thank you for your opinion that "centre-left parties should actually be right-wing, it works, trust me". However, I do not share it and nor did the UK. Nor does the linked study, whose analysis and methods I find more persuasive than yours.

> Every thing Starmer said indicated he was soft on immigration and he took no meaningful steps to stop it and send refugees back.

Immigration into the UK is steeply down (1), the "took no meaningful steps" is just not true. But this is not how the topic is reported. I do believe that Home Secretary Mahmood truly does believe the hard-line things that she says (2) and that it is in no way winning any votes for Labour. Again, actual Labour voters are repulsed, and Reform voters are not attracted.

This underscores my point that ceding this issue is not how centre-left parties win. I refer you to the study linked above as to how this backfired due to these perceptions.

1) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyp1ekd584o

2) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/21/shabana-mah...

Try this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo

What i’m describing is literally how the Danish left got back in power. In the UK you’d need someone in Labour at least as aggressive as Fredrickson: https://theconversation.com/denmarks-prime-minister-has-led-.... Immigration isn’t “left wing” or “right wing.” It’s just neoliberalism. It’s based on viewing people as fungible units of labor output.

> Immigration isn’t “left wing” or “right wing.”

I do not agree. This is obviously an issue that the far right continually talk about. In racist terms.

In academic language from the linked study:

> Thus, accommodating the radical right on immigration could benefit the radical right by increasing the salience of an issue on which it has long been perceived as having a comparative advantage

> This is obviously an issue that the far right continually talk about.

That’s labeling. Neoliberals coined the term “far right” to refer to a group that to the left of the conventional right on economic issues.

> increasing the salience of an issue on which it has long been perceived as having a comparative advantage

The Danish left predicted (imo, correctly) that the issue would remain and get more salient due to external factors. Then they got on the right side of it.

The alternative approach is to hope the issue will reduce in salience. The problem is that the unruly coalitions that you need to stop far right parties can’t meaningfully give their constituents anything else they want. This is the problem in Germany, France, and the UK.

Yes, describing political groups is literally "labelling". The idea that the UK's anti-immigrant far right aren't actually far right is just laughable.

Definitions must be consistent with each other. Conventionally, “right” means more capitalist and “left” means more socialist. To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade, etc. It would refer to libertarians, not anti-immigration populists.

> To be consistent with that existing definition, the “far right” would be the folks trying to privatize social security, eliminate banking regulations, eliminate barriers to free trade,

Yes, the far right parties in the UK are trying to do most of that (1) as well as inciting race riots against immigrants. I don't think that you have a point here.

1) not so much on the free trade, they talk a good fight on potential global trade deals, but their record is not so great - spurning actual EU free trade, going along with the USA's attempted trade wars.

On that last point, the USA now is a counterexample to your criteria.

The U.S. isn’t a counter example, it proves my point. People call the Trump GOP “far right.” But Trump abandoned the Bush GOP’s project of privatizing social security and promised not to touch Medicare. And Trump eliminated taxation of social security benefits. It hasn’t tried to repeal Obama’s additional regulation of banks. And it has destroyed the Reagan/Bush free trade framework. In all of those areas, the Trump GOP is to the left of the Bush/Reagan GOP.

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left vs right was never a good framework. there are traditional fascists who believe in a state controlled economy and nazi style race laws. libertarians who want gay rights and no social security. socialists can be progressive or conservative on issues like abortion. if you want to collapse it all into one axis you lose all the differences.

Of course, collapsing to one axis can only be reductive. Reducing means losing information, simplifications simplify; and the question is if you are losing a meaningful signal, or losing mostly noise.

It is true that "there are ... libertarians who want gay rights and no social security" - they do exist. But are they a significant percentage of the voters, compared to the more regular right wing (e.g. UK Reform / Restore) who get double-digit percentages of the vote? No, they are not.

> The Danish left predicted (imo, correctly) that the issue would remain and get more salient due to external factors. Then they got on the right side of it.

I see that you added this. There's a lot going on. "External factors" sounds like fixed facts of the world. But as I pointed out above, Immigration into the UK is steeply down (1), but this is not your perception or many other perception of the topic. It's not driven by facts.

Would you describe a mega-rich person in the USA using their social platform to stoke racial hatred in the UK and promote conspiracy theories as "external factors", fixed facts of the world? (1)

The far right engages in endless grievances and stoking of culture wars. It's what they do, they are not going to be satisfied with a minor concession, they will just be emboldened instead. And win or lose, if they have to abandon the current grievance, they will find something else to turn into the next grievance. Facts are secondary to this.

The idea that a rational centre-left party can meaningfully "get on the right side" of this escalation - and do so by agreeing with the hate-mongers - is not just wrong, it's nonsensical. Again, Mr Starmer tried it and got nothing.

If you think that's the "right side" then what you want is a right-wing party, no centre-left party is ever going to be the one for you - and this is in common with most voters as I said above.

> The alternative approach is to hope the issue will reduce in salience.

Nope. As they say, "Hope is not a strategy". The right is not going to stop stoking culture wars, as as it works for them, it's their main weapon. This is not a thing that will "naturally" reduce in salience by itself, as it was a political choice in the first place.

1) https://www.trtworld.com/article/18192985

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elon...

If you think radicalization is only a problem on the side of Team Red and not so for Team Blue, I would urge you to reevaluate your opinion.

whatabout the other side!?!?!?!1

The problem started way before Bin Laden; in a large part due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb and his brother Mohammed who taught Osama Bin Laden.

Many Muslims weren't political before the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood got enough influence.

What surprised me, was the indifference of people when all this was happening. Saying that the American response to the terrorist attacks was essentially the aim of the terrorist at first place and that they won just went unregistered - no counter arguments or rage or anything, no one cared about this claim.

This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.

It was obvious to many. It was even a sort of not-funny joke: "The terrorists have already won."

The OK-ing of torture was a clear step into the totalitarian camp and a clear breach with justice, liberalism, and decency.

I'm gonna be that guy and say that the concern about torture is orthogonal to authoritarianism. There were very much "less authoritarian/less centralized" eras in the US when it was general course of action was to do torturous things far worse than many of the things that got labelled 'torture' in the post 1990s era.

My first reaction is that the step to torture was a step backwards, a disregard for what we've learned about the efficacy of torture in getting reliable information, and an embrace of sadistic revenge as an end in itself as state policy.

It's the state policy part that I find the worst. Individual acts of senseless violence you can blame on the individual; state acts that in retrospect are senseless violence you can - in some cases - blame on what was known at the time.

To purposefully do that when you now it's useless is a rare evil; to declare it's useful when you know it's useless is an Orwellian, totalitarian turn.

And it was torture, not 'labelled' 'torture'. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, high-volume constant music, others I'm glad I don't know about. It was torture.

There's even a big book on my shelf "The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture" which catalogues extensive examples where US intelligence tortured people or was instrumental in their torture, insisted this had unlocked important information and then eventually walked that back as investigators started to dig in.

The US still more or less remembers how to improve and that book is an example of how such improvement could start, what changed in the last decades is that more and more Americans don't want to. The word "Again" is crucial, MAGA don't want to make America great, they want the America from their nostalgia. It's hollow, that's not what they wanted but it could never have been otherwise.

Don't we still have a bunch of people in gitmo that can't be tried because we tortured them, and can't be released because they are "too dangerous"? Jesus fucking Christ. Even though the wars are long over.

History should record that for a brief moment of time, the US government tortured at least one person to death.

How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and 9/11 was the third major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in a 4 year span. It's easy now to say that it was a crazy worst-case scenario, but that was not at all obvious then; for all we knew, securing cockpits might have been impractical, and we'd just have to prepare the Air Force to shoot down a couple hijacked flights every decade.

There were real excesses, and I ultimately agree with you that many of them were predictable in advance, but there was no feasible version of a response that did not go at least a little into crazyland. It was a crazy time.

"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crises in Europe can be traced back to the War on Terror. The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

I would point to the TSA as a key example of what I'm talking about. You say "security theater", but which of the things they do are security theater, and which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? We can make reasonable guesses, but does another major skyscraper get blown up if we guess wrong? It's not so easy, and it was hard to the point of impossibility in the aftermath of 9/11.

> The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

Yes, this I agree with. The Iraq War in particular was clearly not justified.

My guess world be that the TSA had exactly nothing to do with any decline in hijackings. That is most likely due to new security protocols around cockpit access, as hijackings haven’t stopped but are committed mostly by pilots now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero?

How many plane hijackings have occurred in other countries, which don't have the TSA?

Every country in the world responded to 9/11 with enhanced airport security. After the end of "shoes off" last year, I don't think the US is stricter in any meaningful way than the global norm.

Not all of them have the same kind of enhanced security, actually. For example, if you transfer from a flight from Africa to Europe to one from Europe to the USA you sometimes have to go through security again, as the African security didn't meet American standards.

I’m struggling to read your comment in good faith but I’m going to get there by saying that you don’t travel and are repeating hearsay as fact. If you have an international inbound flight which includes a transfer in Europe, it doesn’t matter where you embarked or what the security regime was like. Whether you have to recheck your bag depends exclusively on whether your transfer is at the same airport and your airline’s policy (eg Ryanair make you pay extra not to have to recheck). In general in Europe you only clear customs at your final destination and at tge airport you transfer to leave Europe but this wouldn’t apply if you need to transfer at a different airport or between two airlines that don’t have an agreement. It certainly never depends on the European transfer countries opinion of security at your country of embarkation.

https://www.trip.com/guide/info/check-through-baggage.html

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero

9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.

The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.

Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.

With any luck the latest debacle is so clearly a fail, that future presidents may be reluctant to get involved again (at least for a while).

In the aftermath of Vietnam, the US was reluctant to get involved militarily (at least overtly.) That seemed to last until Kuwait. The success there seemed to embolden US hawks, and there were a couple long-term excursions after that.

The current dude apparently fell for the ever-present hawks, without the savy to ask the right questions. His total capitulation, after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the military, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare, will (perhaps, hopefully) be an educational moment for future presidents.

Certainly it is a valuable educational moment to other defendents. You don't need to fight back. You just need to affect something else the world cares about. And, it turns out, global shipping is especially vulnerable.

> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).

There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.

https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...

https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...

These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.

Having lived through the 70s, part of the issue was the amount of media coverage hijackings received.

The Entebbe raid was the canonical example, playing out as it did over a full week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid

And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one.

You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change.

A lot of the plane hijackers were either funded or trained by the Communist bloc, particularly Libya... Such incidents declined a lot with the end of the Cold War.

It was a crazy time, not in the danger from hijackings but the enormous amount of fear and cowardice America built up within itself. It was crazy because of the mass hysteria not the violence. Take this example: 1.2 million Americans died from Covid. 3000 americans died in the twin towers attack. That's 0.25% of the number that died from covid. However we gave up considerably more liberty to defend against the hijackers than we did the virus. It was a very unusual incident but the response wasn't warranted. I mean like 1/3 of the people who died in the twin towers, about 1000 people a year, die from being hit by trains, but you don't see anyone demanding we give up constitutional rights, or do literally anything at all to change that.

1.2M Americans died with Covid, maybe.

Christ, I thought we were through with this tin foil hattery...

Even Trump's CDC admits it was 1.2 million deaths FROM covid.

Or guns. I find it crazy that the US gave up a ton of freedoms to stop the terrorists, but refuse to give up their guns. The guns clearly and obviously kill more people every year than the terrorists.

Make it make sense.

Oh yeah, good point. Gun deaths each year amount to like 15 x the twin towers attacks deaths. I'm sure deaths from our terrible unaffordable healthcare system are way higher, but we spent our healthcare money on invading the middle east and paying for a bunch of obsolete fighter jets, so at least terrorism isn't a problem anymore.

Not to mention automobile "accidents".

What do you think distinguishes the post-9/11 craziness from the Cold War/Red Scare craziness?

My reason for asking is because I believe that "that's unconstitutional!" has been a failed protest message for more like 100 years than 25 years (and there's threads of state violence at the local and state levels that go back far longer). And IMO that is even stronger evidence that words on an ~240-year-old-doc—and the way some interpret the second amendment in relation to those words—is a completely powerless measure against state violence. The United States is not exceptional in that regard. We'll only have a better country if we constantly, actively, choose to vote it that way.

Probably the fact that most of the readership of the article and this site were alive for the former but not the latter. One could equally pin the rise of Joe McCarthy as the moment America started its move to "autocracy". Or when Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans. Or the civil war. Or the Mexican-American war. In fact, the struggle is constant (as mentioned downthread).

I am still amazed by the typical internet American's (Yours also I presume) love for voting, despite having long degraded into a two-party charade.

Your sentiment starts out fierce: "constantly, actively..." and is immediately cut short "... choose to (only?) vote it that way."

You point out that voicing one's interpretations of the 2nd amendment is powerless - but voting, reduced to such a miniscule gesture, is also. The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top. You can't vote it out.

How (and if) you vote is really the one and only thing politicians care about.

They care about appearing to care about it. In reality if they don't think you'll vote the right way they just prevent you from voting, like with a vaccine passport or an ID card. (See? Both sides covered)

There has never been a vaccine requirement for voting. It has never been voted on. It has never gone to committee. It has never been proposed.

If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.

This is why it is important to vote in primary elections as well.

Voting the way you really want in primary elections might be counterproductive.

Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle.

If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y candidate, leading to a strong Y victory. But if side X votes for a moderate-X candidate during the primaries, the main election will be moderate-X vs moderate-Y, and they have a pretty good chance of securing the slightly-more-than-half of the middle they need for an X victory.

Of course you now end up with a lukewarm moderate X victor who isn't going to represent your far-X views, but at least you're not dealing with an even worse Y-side victor.

The real solution is to get rid of the winner-takes-all system inherently resulting in a two-party election, but Good Luck doing that kind of overhaul!

Quibble: I think you're conflating "remove winner-takes-all" with "less spoiler effect". The first implies (some of) the second, but not vice-versa.

For example, ranked-choice voting would reduce the spoiler effect and allow you vote for your real choice, however it would not (on its own) change that races have a single winner, who eventually "takes all."

This matters because even if it's preferable to have both, ranked-choice is easier to introduce incrementally and with fewer amendments to various constitutions.

It does not stop far X candidates becoming president though, does it? Your current president is surely not moderate?

The UK has winner takes all parliamentary elections but still has multiple parties represented in it. There seem to be a lot of other barriers to other parties in the US doing the same.

The UK is more geographically diverse than USA, so Scotland votes for their party and so on. USA doesn't have that, every part of the country votes very similarly, even the most extreme states still votes very similarly to each other.

That all makes sense if things are one dimensional, but they aren't. There are tons of issues, and people don't break down into just X vs Y. It's multidimensional. Find the candidate who most represents your views, and vote for them. You may find, even if you consider yourself an X, that a lot of people who consider themselves a Y will also like your candidate.

> The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top.

This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.

All democracy is a "two party charade" then. Countries that have a dozen parties still have them form a left-wing and right-wing coalition in order to actually get enough seats to form a majority. I'd call those coalitions the real parties.

>What do you think distinguishes the post-9/11 craziness from the Cold War/Red Scare craziness?

State capacity. USA prior to the internet and the surveillance state was too big, too populous and too sparse to be effectively administered.

Trump is doing what every other president since WWII wanted to do ... but they didn't have the technology. Just for a moment imagine what USA will look like if you didn't get someone incompetent like Trump right now but Nixon or Johnson. With the modern security state - it would be their dream.

In the same way it is obvious that internet age gating, digital ID and abolition of physical cash will lead to much worse. But who's standing in their way?

https://eff.org and https://edri.org do.

If you weren't for the Patriot act you were pro terrorist. If you suggested that the terrorists might be motivated by us involvement in the middle east rather than pure evil then you were probably also evil. Mob mentality has been around since forever. And yet the current situation is making Bush seem like a statesman by comparison

>in 1776 the American colonists rebelled against what they saw as the arbitrary and tyrannical British monarchy.

although they didn't just do that, the American founders also articulated the point that the article seems to present as some new insight. That permanent foreign military involvements and the state it requires will eventually diminish freedom at home, that was why many of them wanted to avoid emulating the British empire.

Given that papers like the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that.

I seem to recall the Economist wholeheartedly supporting the Iraq War. Am I wrong?

Yes, they ran a leading editorial titled "Why war would be justified", arguing that confronting Saddam Hussein was "the least bad of the limited range of available options".

However, they reversed position in 2007, calling the invasion a debacle.

It would've been more surprising if they hadn't reversed their position, well after it became painfully clear to everyone that the war had been a terrible idea.

The idea of overthrowing a vicious dictator can't really be wrong in any moral sense.

In terms of realpolitik or execution it can be.

> the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that

Can you link a couple of examples? Presumably those articles should be easy to find on economist.com

The economist was a strong supporter of the Iraq War, and reiterated that in a retrospective 2003 article citing its earlier articles: https://home.uncg.edu/~jwjones/world/readings/economist.html

“The threat posed by Saddam

The Economist certainly said it was. We did so most strongly and clearly in a survey (Present at the creation, June 29th 2002) on America's world role; and in leaders on August 3rd that year (The case for war), February 22nd 2003 (Why war would be justified) and March 15th 2003 (Saddam's last victory).”

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#1750s

It's time to reconsider some of what we bought.

The elevation of the Executive branch the last and this century has led to this primordial autocracy. Say no to the royal perogative, and accept the more limited powers of Execution of Law.

https://jach.law.wisc.edu/exec-power-royal-prerogative-found...

It would help if Congress wasn't sabotaged to enable this; and to have a major political party that effectively wants a king.

We were rightfully warned on the dangers of political parties and it's well demonstrated that that warning was correct in its assessment.

The fact that millions of Americans declare themselves to be loyal to their party first and foremost is terrifying. Evil people have weaponized the tribal stupidity of humans to trick them to vote against their own best interests.

I take no satisfaction in saying this, and would love to be proven wrong.

You are right. So many parts of are system were designed for minority rule and haven't been changed in 250 years. The senate, fptp voting, no voting holidays, the electoral college and more. the wealthyvhave always and will always try to by pass democracy.

I left "my" party a long, long time ago. I wish everyone would, but people really, really want to tribe up even if doing so fractures their own nation. (And sometimes especially if it does.)

Before I got banned from redstate.com 20 years ago for sharing an unflattering fact about a particular Congress, I remember one person there being genuinely uncomfortable with the fact that I wouldn't declare myself to be in one camp or the other. They really wanted me to be in a certain bucket so they'd know how to treat me. It was unnerving to them.

Well, more Americans are declaring themselves politically independent, so we may be moving in a better direction, at least nominally:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

That exists in every single country, your political system not being able to handle that is the main issue. The voters are never the issue, the system is.

Systematic thinking may be associated with autism. Explains why they're showing up in the crosshairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising–systemising_theory

I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan. It’s an attempt to show world’s history as a continuous movement of center of civilizational gravity. It’s not without flaws, but interesting nonetheless.

Frankopan describes most of modern US history as a series of blunders. This approach is maybe a bit harsh, but it shows how difficult it is for a dominant power to stay on top.

I would summarise the book with a sentence „When you reach the top, the seeds of your decline are already planted”. In fact you can look at China or India - future dominant powers, and guess which of their flaws will make them fall.

> I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan.

Thank you for the recommendation!

> In fact you can look at China or India - future dominant powers, and guess which of their flaws will make them fall.

Are these flaws talked about in the book or are they something you've worked out since after you read the book?

I was referring to some factual errors and omissions that make other historians angry. But the narrative is captivating.

we're at the stage of the cycle where we know things are wrong but we don't care enough to do anything about them. unfortunately, it might not be until we live through the consequences that we can muster the energy to care enough again.

Cycle suggest this will revert. Think with current technology it’s possibly to build a silt sustaining autocracy

Any policy/weapon/tech used against an outgroup (e.g. brown people across the ocean) can and will eventually be used against the ingroup (citizens voting for it) by an inner ingroup.

Sooner or later any ingroup will itself be divided into an inner ingroup in power and a powerless outer ingroup who'll be treated just like the old outgroup.

A nation willfully ruled by war criminals will always become their final victim.

Americans need to start prosecuting their war criminals. This is the only way out of the quagmire.

A bunch of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were recently sentenced to 50-100 year prison sentences. It is one of the more egregious things I've read.

The long and short of it is: A bunch of people organized (over group chat) a protest in Texas, where their plan was to conduct noise protest with fireworks. Some of the people knew each others, some did not.

When they met up, some of the protesters broke off from the group and started vandalizing gov. property, like slashing up car tires.

This all culminated with a gov. guard approaching the people, guns drawn. One protestor fired at the guard from distance with a AR-15, and the guard was struck in the shoulder. The shooter argued that he believed the guard would fire at the group - he was handed a 100 year sentence due to attempted murder.

The rest of the group were found guilty in planning and aiding a violent terrorist attack, and handed 50 year and up sentences. If you look into the actual details of what they were charged with, and the things actually done, it gets even more wild.

This was possible due to "antifa" being designated a terrorist organization.

What this means in practice, at least in Texas, is that if you're part of a organized protest, and something goes wrong, you can and probably will be charged as a terrorist, or aiding a terrorist, and face life behind bars.

I have no doubt that if / when dems dethrone Trump and MAGA GOP, all but the shooter will be pardoned, and the terrorist designation of antifa will be removed - but we now see that designated antifa works as they intended: To charge anyone protesting Trump or his controlled organizations as "antifa", and thus label them as domestic terrorists.

Here's a flagged discussion of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48653311

FTA:

"In 1776 the American colonists rebelled against what they saw as the arbitrary and tyrannical British monarchy."

I like the sly use of "what they saw" - typical British snark.

There's plenty of American historiography that questions the motivations of the American revolution and how tyrannical the British monarchy was actually.

I would guess that average folks living under the "tyrannical British monarchy" had as much or more freedom than Americans do now.

Probably more. The digital world has made us unwitting prisoners.

Rosa Brooks, the author of the piece, is American.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Brooks

It arguably polarized the public, paving the way to today's sharp ideological divisions, because political differences suddenly were treated as matters of life and death compared to the laid-back '90s.

After 9/11 is when the country I loved began its descent into this mutated form, a country I don’t recognize today.

In democracy, there is a distinction between peacetime power and wartime power, and in a wartime power state, there is an inherent affinity with authoritarianism. After 9/11, the political language in the United States saw a revival of terms like 'state of emergency' and 'enemy within.' The moment the government is granted the authority to define who the 'enemy' is, the gun inevitably turns toward the citizens. The reason is simple: those in power come to see the state as an extension of themselves, and anyone who speaks against them becomes labeled as the 'enemy.'

On top of this, the limitations of the petrodollar system are becoming increasingly apparent. When it worked well in the past, economic distribution could be used to suppress dissatisfaction — the American middle class generation is a case in point. But as dollar hegemony weakens and resource allocation becomes more difficult, the ruling class typically begins to replace economic rewards with emotional rewards like fear and hostility. They point fingers and say, 'Your enemy is these people.' When the system cannot grow the pie, the most efficient resource allocation for authoritarianism is to forcefully suppress internal divisions through coercion. Perhaps the dollar system itself might be a fundamentally flawed system.

I agree that 9/11 primed America for totalitarianism, but as someone who was tear gassed protesting our invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act, I don't think we're living in an autocracy. I've lived in too many autocratic countries now to think that that's anywhere close to the truth..America cannot possibly be compared to China or Russia in terms of the freedom living in the country to say (and do!) what you want, protected by a fairly rigorous rule of law that is still not subject to the whim of the ruling party. America more closely resembles an anarchic zone between a failed or wannabe autocratic regime and two anti-government movements, one right-wing and one left-wing. It's a nutty situation, but it definitely prevents either party from implementing anything even remotely resembling autocratic rule, to the extent that term has meaning in any other part of the world. Any sort of objective look at American political debate makes this patently obvious.

The closest parallel to America right now is Argentina prior to the dictatorship. If or when the real dictatorship comes, you'll know it, because just as in Russia you won't be publishing articles about it.

The Military Industrial Complex is the autocracy - the revolving door between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR - which are the entities really running the country (for the purposes of massively profitable military mis-adventures).

https://www.transparency.org/en/corruptionary/revolving-door

From a certain angle, it actually looks less like an autocracy and more like a military junta which has captured both 'sides' and puppet-masters either one depending on the mood of the masses, according to the needs of the MIC - which gets everything it wants without interference by "The People".

That's nonsense, clearly, because we've just elected two - no, make that four Presidents in a row who used the Military Industrial Complex in radically divergent ways to different ends.

If we test the theory that American Presidents are beholden to the military industrial complex and not vice versa, compared to actually authoritarian countries in which the military basically is the government, we can see all sorts of civilian controls which restrain our government versus the others.

When I said it was like Argentina in the 60s, I meant that it definitely could become a quasi-mitary autocratic regime, but at the present moment it is not. It's just in the throes of populist movements which might ultimately lead to such a thing. Any objective glance at actual military regimes, any knowledge whatsoever of the rest of the world's history, proves immediately to a casual observer that the United States is not currently comparable to a military dictatorship.

The attempt to frame it as one, however, is blatantly ignorant of the current state of the world, to the degree that the motivation behind doing so is suspect. Really, only a shill for a dictatorship is interested in trying to prove that America is analogous to an autocratic state. An objective observer who wasn't being paid or hadn't bought into authoritarian propaganda would at least compare and contrast our legal system with the true, terrible, and numerous actual dictatorships all around the world.

"The world needs American war crimes", said nobody ever. Your Presidents changed flavor according to the whims of the superficial pretend-democracy culture, such that it is - the very real victims of their crimes however, didn't.

>An objective observer who wasn't being paid or hadn't bought into authoritarian propaganda would at least compare and contrast our legal system with the true, terrible, and numerous actual dictatorships all around the world.

A superficial argument to make given the million dead Iraqi's, the countless ruined states in the middle east, the funding of terror around the world by the American people and the ongoing genocide which wouldn't be happening if America's military might was truly bound to morality.

>United States is not currently comparable to a military dictatorship

Perhaps this is true from the perspective that the military dictatorship isn't directly oppressing its citizenry as you would expect from a 'traditional military dictatorship' (except of course, in reality it really is oppressing American citizens' lives), but if you are a non-American, the evil effect of the US' oppressive military organ is very, very evident...

Is the murder of 30,000 Iranians in a few days six months ago by their government America's fault? Were Assad's mass murder of civilians an American war crime? Is the mass killing in Sudan by a paramilitary America's fault? What about the 500,000+ Yemenis starved by Saudi Arabia fighting Iran's religious proxies there? Which is the genocide you're referring to?

You can't blame the state of the Middle East on America, or on the one non-Muslim country there, as much as you wish to. The Middle East has been a basket case since one branch of Islam went to war with another branch over succession, and it will continue to be a basket case until that religious feud stops, which is probably never. American intervention, as much damage as it caused, is a late arrival.

Also, lets note that prior to American intervention, Iraqis were being gassed by their dictator, as well as thrown into a war against Iran which killed half a million people. America's crime there was that it didn't care whatsoever until the same dictator made the mistake of invading Kuwait.

>Is the murder of 30,000 Iranians in a few days six months ago by their government America's fault?

Is it true that 30,000 Iranians were murdered by their own government. Got evidence that will hold up in a court of law? No?

>You can't blame the state of the Middle East on America

Two million dead Iraqis' would like a word. See also: American bombs used in genocide.

It's not a war on terror. It's just a war on civil rights.

The war on terror was a great example of doublethink. First there's the name, which is redundant (war is already terrible/terrorizing). Then there's the fact that we inspired 9/11 to begin with. We trained and funded Al Qaeda in their fight with the Russians. Then we inserted ourselves into Middle East politics for financial reasons (we invaded Iraq the first time after Saddam threatened to take over the global supply of oil, which we were heavily dependent on with a secret deal with Saudi Arabia propping up the petrodollar). Finally we committed terrorism by razing Iraq and Afghanistan, destabilizing the entire region, illegally renditioning/torturing people and keeping them indefinitely in prison without a trial, growing the world-wide heroin trade, and giving birth to more radical militant groups (we directly caused the creation of ISIS and helped strengthen the Taliban). Our War on Terror birthed more terror in the Middle East at one time than has ever happened in history.

The War on Terror was also an early sign of kleptocracy in the US Executive by conservatives. There was massive waste, fraud and abuse, in the billions of dollars. People working in the executive directly profited by making sure their corporations won bids, and dollars sent overseas just vanished. The people who decided to wage war got rich off it. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/opinion/afghanistan-war-e...)

> Less than a month after 9/11 President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan, starting a war that would last for 20 years and kill more than 6,000 American military personnel and contractors before its ignominious end.

...and again (despite the Economist being British), the US-centric view that led to Trump declaring that NATO has never done anything for the US. In fact, after the US was the first (and so far only) country to invoke NATO article 5 after the 9/11 attacks, NATO troops were also sent to Afghanistan, and Wikipedia lists the following military casualty numbers:

USA: 2420

UK: 457

Canada: 159

France: 90

Germany: 62

Italy: 53

Others: 338

more details, including deaths per million population, where Georgia and Denmark are before the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...

I just don't buy this narrative. What primed the USA for decline was it's new allergy to manufacturing, addiction to social media, and Trump taking his spot as POTUS twice. If anything, these wars were something for everyone to worry about, which involved actual critical thinking. They were nowhere near the root cause.

Social media addiction didn't come around until about 2008 - and even then it took a few years to become widespread. Trump being elected twice isn't the cause of the decline, it's a symptom of it. The GWOT is one cause among many, but probably the one that pushed things over the edge. It led to both Iraq and Afghanistan wars which cost $Trillions that we borrowed and still haven't paid off. Not to mention the lost lives on all sides and further destabilization of the ME. Our over-reaction to 9/11 was the terrorists' dream. It's hard to imagine an outcome that would've been better from their perspective if their aim was to weaken and destabilize the US.

I think the War on Drugs was the gateway drug to this insanity. It helped to create a more militarized police, and to condition us to surrender our rights because "think of the children!".

Before conservatives hurled TDS at democrats they called them unpatriotic when they said the war on terror would undermine civil liberties. Its rather annoying to see a title like this.

There are people walking around today who voted Bush twice and regretted it and now voted Trump three times and regretted it.

I wonder what war they'll regret next?

I have regretted everyone that I ever voted for. Every candidate will ultimately be regrettable, because it’s not the candidate that’s bad - it is the system itself that has become irredeemably corrupt.

A friend went to an Obama rally in '08 when he came to town. Later he said, I'm sure I'll regret voting for him, but I'm also pretty sure I'll regret it less than most votes I've taken.

Sadly a lot of vote-conversations have boiled down to:

"Well, I picked the one I hated most and put that at the bottom of the list. Then worked up from there."

The big problem is that if the USA doesn't start wars, other countries are certainly more than willing to start them against us.

Which? Why?

Peddling the same old "might makes right" ideology I see.

We won in 1945.

Wasn't Japan the last country to attack the US, almost 85 years ago? Nobody does it because there is no profit in it.

Do you not remember 9/11?

That's just not looking back far enough. The war on terror was a continuation. I'd say we're seeing the results of not stringing up all the slave owners after the Civil War.

American industrialists going back to the robber baron era and beyond have always loved autocracy, specifically fascism. This was heightened by the fear of communism. When FDR was elected, there was an attempted coup (ie the business plot [1]). Hitler was a fan of Henry Ford and named him in Mein Kampf. The Nazi regime enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in the US. There was a rally by the German American Bund in Madison Square Gardens in 1939. But FDR gave concessions to the working class that we still enjoy today (eg Social Security).

After WW2, we decided to make an enemy of Stalin (again, because communism). Thousands of former Nazis emigrated to the US (and, no, not just Operation Paper Clip; they were also in the CIA and FBI). Former Nazis gained high positions in the West German military and ultimatly NATO (eg Adolf Heuzinger [2]).

The mere existence of the Soviet Union forced the US government to give more concessions to the working class. The 1950s were incredibly prosperous as a result, in an era when the top marginal tax rate was 91% and the ratio of CEO to median wage was a fraction of what it is now.

The Fall of the Soviet Union was about the worst thing that could happen for normal Americans because suddenly there was no counterbalance to US global hegemony. The 1990s saw the Democrats abandon the New Deal in favor of Reagan economics and policies despite ~60 years of almost unbroken control of Congress up until that point. They then sowed the seeds for the destruction of American manufacturing and having an economy completely focused on hoarding land and housing. The 1990s is really where that began to go out of control.

My point is that history didn't begin with the war on terror. 9/11 itself was blowback from American imperialism that had been around since the 19th century.

I'd say if anything primed America for autocracy it was the domino effect from desegregation. This led to the political activation of the evangelical movement (no, it wasn't abortion) and evagelicals are primed to be followers. Add to this that there's no effective opposition because the Democrats decided to be Republican Lite and here we are.

All of this came about because a handful of very wealthy people wanted to be even wealthier at the expense of everyone else.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger

I’d like to pick on a couple points here that I think are not just nits:

> more concessions to the working class. The 1950s were incredibly prosperous as a result

This is absolutely not a common read of the boom in the 1950s. The common read of the boom in the 1950s is that America leveraged its success in WW2 into a global imperial economy, exporting its goods everywhere in the world. The combination of massive manufacturing expansion at home during WW2, the brain drain into the US and the trade deals, power brokering and treaties that carved out the post war world order made America very wealthy. There is no world in which a “labor value” oriented economic order on its own would have resulted in an ‘incredibly prosperous’ 1950s without WW2.

The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in what I would consider more of a golden age, overseen by Clinton in the US, when we had a balanced budget, low global conflict and massively reduced inflation compared to Carter / Reagan early years. If you went back to 1994 and could have gotten 10% of working Americans to vote to return to 1980’s labor market, I’d be shocked. These were qualitatively different economic times. Post Iraq war, gas was at $0.99/gallon. In the earlier era you’re lionizing, there was rationing throughout the US.

I agree with your perspective on 9/11 being blowback, although I’d characterize it as blowback from our Middle East policy - I haven’t read a lot about Bin Laden, although I did read his manifesto — and I didn’t take away that he cared much about 18th century American imperialism (such as it was; we got much more effective at this in the 20th century in my opinion).

> The common read of the boom in the 1950s is that America leveraged its success in WW2 into a global imperial economy, exporting its goods everywhere in the world.

I absolutely agree that the US massively benefited from WW2. For one, no war was fought on the American mainland (as opposed to, say, Europe and Japan, which were levelled). We benefitted from being the arms dealer. The post-1945 world order was reconstructed or built to our benefit. All of this is true.

But where did this wealth land? Wealth and income inequality actually shrank from 1945 to the 1970s and has exploded since [1][2].

> The combination of massive manufacturing expansion at home during WW2 ...

And why was there manufacturing then but manufacturing has been hollowed out now? Where does the money go now? We had way more capital controls in the post-WW2 era. Now all the money just seems to speculate on real estate. And this is something Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed on: landlords are parasites on the economy.

> The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in what I would consider more of a golden age, overseen by Clinton in the US

Clinton was a disaster. I suspect you feel this way because you came of age in the 1990s maybe? The 1994 crime bill, financial deregulation (eg repealing Glass-Steagall), welfare "reforms", replacing federal programs with state block grants, effectively ending public housing (ie the Faircloth Amendment), NAFTA, three strikes rules, the list goes on. It was the Clinton administration where the so-called "New Democrats" divorced themselves from the labor movement and decided they wanted that sweet, sweet corporate PAC money.

If you opposed what the current Republican governments are doing and you're scratching your head wondering why there's no real opposition, you can point the finger directly at Bill Clinton as to why. Obama was also a generational missed opportunity here but I digress.

> In the earlier era you’re lionizing, there was rationing throughout the US.

... because of US imperialism, specifically the US support for Israel.

> I’d characterize it as blowback from our Middle East policy

No argument here. But our Middle East policy was US imperialism. Also, it's worth noting that we directly created bin Laden as one of the mujahadeen we used as a foil against the Soviets in Afghanistan as payback for Vietnam (basically).

[1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

[2]: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...

I’m sure from our takes on some of these we have pretty different ideological bents; hello my friend with different views! :) To get down my take over virtual beers with you,

The CBPP leads that page you linked with “The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.” So (household) wealth grew in the postwar boom in real dollar terms. But I think you meant to say that, and you made a small typo: wealth grew, inequality shrank?

The CEPR link also has what I think is the most important politically (and material to people) chart, which is the real wealth growth numbers. Real wealth of the bottom 90% grew until the early 70s, dipped until the early 80s, hitting its low point in the era I was picking on, and then turned and grew, with catchup growth compared to the 1% through the 90s (my proposed golden era), only reversing course in 2001 or so, post dotcom boom and staying low, never recovering through the two crashes.

I am not someone who believes raw inequality is a number to be super worried about — I’d much rather everyone was better off, even if some become much better off; inequality arguments that don’t think about the poorest constituency having more wealth leave me cold, so I see that era of 1980-2001 as good for the 90%.

Since 2008, the 90% in the US have had hard times, reduced wealth, no recovery, and seen the top 0.1% yield all of the benefits of compounding capital. I propose this lines up very well with the political shifts we see in the US voting populace and the demands for populism, and is more dispositive than the removal of capital controls in the mid 70s.

Manufacturing: I’d like more manufacturing on shore; it adds resilience to the economy. But hollowed out is not accurate. US Manufacturing has the highest dollar value added to the GDP ever this year, nearly $3 trillion. Inflation adjusted, I’d guess growing over the 1970s to now period. Percent of economy? That’s down. But it is not down because the economy has shrunk. It’s down because new areas of the economy have grown.

Real estate as a percent of GDP is relatively stable over the last decades, although the number is a little harder to source exactly, but it looks to be 12-13% of the economy now and historically. That said, wage-adjusted homes are vastly more expensive now than they have been possibly ever, another contributor to today’s political dynamics. The reasons for that are a combination of political decisions, monetary policy, capital markets and zoning laws in the places Americans mostly want to live (cities).

Anyway, fun discussing some history with you. I’ll propose in return my favorite terrible Clinton-era policy - making it impossible to clear student loans with bankruptcy - driving university costs out of control for Americans in the process. Sanders pushing for the US to pay these costs for all Americans is so, so dumb - adding guaranteed money to a system that already has become excellent at gouging. Better would be to allow bankruptcy, resetting the relationship between students and their hefty tuition bills.

This, and all other grand historical narratives, are completely contrived to support whatever bone the author has to pick. X happened before Y != X caused Y.

I'd like to expand on your comment, while the North/South lines drawn by the US Civil War are a common talking point, the influence of the west coast on how America has ended up as it has is not talked often enough, as an example Hebert Hoover was very influential in US policy as the last (living) American president after the death of FDR and a very connected indiviual who opposed New Deal policies, not mentioning his involvement in Japan and Germany, and that is before getting into the Hoover Institution or the Heritage Foundation

Your argument/timeline seems a bit confused in a couple of places. Our problem was "not stringing up all the slave owners after the Civil War," yet you then point out American industrialists (going back to the robber baron era) loved fascism. But the industrial parts of the US were the Northern states, not the South. Additionally you complain that the Democrats are no effective opposition but don't appear to consider that the Democratic Party would be even less effective if you had strung up all the slave owners after the Civil War given that it was that party which chose to secede from the Union in order to maintain slavery.

History indeed did not begin with the War on Terror, but I'm not sure you're entirely familiar with it.

Saying the Democrats were the Southern secessionists ignores the revolt against civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s and the Southern Strategy [1]. All the Dixiecrats simply became Republicans.

Also, the slave owners who got strung up should probably have included Andrew Johnson. Without Lincoln's unfortunately untimely demise or without Johnson we may well have avoided Confederate leaders regaining power and the whole Redeemer era of winding back rghts for the former enslaved.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

There are no Dixiecrats if you've hanged all the slave owners after the Civil War, and clearly Reconstruction is entirely different since you've purged most of the white population in the South (as well as some from the Union, since Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey still had slavery).

Actually, it was the acceptance of blatantly and provably wrong information used to justify attacking an unrelated country and then deciding it didn't warrant any further investigation, justification or consequences that proved American fascism

Bush did far more evil things and non-legal killings than Trump. He CREATED Ice, homeland security, etc.. So yeah, Bush was THE authoritarian, no need to jump forward 15 years, that's just TDS. Trump for the most part is just reinforcing existing laws, something that simply stopped happening during Biden's term. If you really think Trump is more authoritarian, then you forgot.

Never Forget.

He hasn't exactly been out there speaking up against Trump either.

I can't tell if he is just simple minded or what. He always appears to be well meaning, and it's tempting to blame his advisors for all the awful stuff that happened on his watch.

Maybe the real test of a leader is to see who he chooses as his advisors. Bush was terrible, and Trump is even worse.

There's always some kind of monocausal influence claimed, but really that was like the Boer War in the early 1900s. America was certainly at top power in the last twenty years, but its alliance was already fracturing. The Western NATO members were pushing more of their productive capacity into social services and forming strong dependencies on Russian fossil fuels. China's ascendance also meant that the encirclement that US's presence in Europe + Taiwan + Japan (and those governments themselves) kept was going to need to be extra tight.

But Europe couldn't keep herself together, Taiwan was constrained by circumstances to not defence-spend-up and Japan is just moribund despite attempts to rebuild. Realistically, the US kept everyone together for some 40 years after the Berlin Wall fell and that's a pretty good run. Two generations in "Whitey's on the Moon" is a resurgent and wide culture, and China outproduces any other nation while domestically and internationally repudiating that culture.

Perhaps we were doomed to this path by the inexorable nature of success. Two generations have been born and enough time has passed that people have forgotten what it is like to fear the "awesome Soviet threat". The modern empire was a loose confederation of US-Europe and the East-Asian satrapies with a capital in DC perhaps but other capitals in London and Paris as well. And just like that Boer War showed the old British Empire could bleed so will Iran have done the same this time.

Doubtless when the need arises we will sweep away environmental law and historical protection law in order to build our factories but already the appetite for war is gone from America. Why Europe couldn't keep herself together and why America couldn't retain the alliance and why the modern Not-Empire fell will probably be written about, but I think it's worth remembering Kipling at the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria who was then queen over an indomitable empire:

    Far-called, our navies melt away;
      On dune and headland sinks the fire:
    Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
      Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
    Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
    Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Or in the more elementary school warning manner: "This too shall pass". For my part, I certainly hope that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" and that means our mighty opponents should not prevail because that is not their way of life. And certainly I do not think that lashing out at our allies or attempting to take for ourselves land which is nonetheless in this larger Not Empire is the way to ensure that.

At best, I hope that the Iran War teaches us where we are weak and we are wise enough to learn this, and I hope that the Not-Empire heals and order is restored in this world.

make no mistake, the people behind this play the long game. the council for national policy has been working hard towards these goals since the 60s. the people who want to rule, do not want to deal with democracy. they do not want to ask permission.

https://archive.is/CBCZM

Juvenile ad hominem

I subscribed to the economist from ~2008 for 10+ years before I cancelled. I'm mostly a centrist but admit to leaning libertarian these days, I think both sides do not represent "democracy" anymore, I do not trust the Democrats any more than Republicans in this regard. One only has to look at how the Democrats have turned California into a single party state to stop taking serious their tropes about anyone endangering "Democracy" more than they have when they've got a chance. Reading this article reinforces that I've only saved money and had time for other things than reading these thought pieces from biased echo chamber academics.

Are there any sides other than democrats and republicans?

How did the Democrats turn California into a single party state? By giving the voters what they want? How do you think democracy works?

What do people really think about Mearsheimer's book? (John Mearsheimer, co-author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy") His analysis and interpretation of the Jewish lobby provide excellent answers to a lot of questions. Perhaps this is a topic that isn't easy to discuss openly?

I don't want to make a sweeping statement that the U.S. is Israel's lapdog, but it is true that regarding many policies—especially those concerning the Middle East—the U.S. is essentially swayed by Israel.

Of course, right now J.D. Vance might represent a kind of domestic counter-force in the U.S. that leans more toward 'America First' rather than prioritizing Israel. Rubio is also a more pragmatic individual, and Trump is not your traditional politician who just blindly follows Israel's orders. Unfortunately, Trump might lose the next election, and the Democratic Party will absolutely revert the country back to its past status as a vassal state to Israel."

It's actually incredible that you can share that bottom paragraph with a straight face after we just went to war with Iran.

Let's discuss it openly, as you prime: how do you contrast what you just shared with the war, and Israel's actions after the agreed to ceasefire and declaration of war's end?

In the last few DAYS the republican party has started putting on an anti-israel face to set up for the midterms, with JD Vance in particular giving a speech about how we need to separate from Israel. The democrat party, in its typical useless fashion, has not. So it looks at this point like the midterms will be another republican landslide.

I'm not sure if you meant to respond to me, but nothing you've said has addressed what I asked, which was very direct.

It explains why republican voters now think they're anti-israel

I'm sure some do. Can you point to any polls? The evangelical right is completely pro-israel, and they are a huge part of the MAGA base.

If you expect a Republican landslide in November I suspect you are completely out of touch.

> Perhaps this is a topic that isn't easy to discuss openly?

Give it a few years.

> J.D. Vance might represent a kind of domestic counter-force in the U.S. that leans more toward 'America First' rather than prioritizing Israel.

Do you mean like he’s going to drain the swamp?

> Do you mean like he’s going to drain the swamp?

I'm not entirely sure either; after all, perhaps only Americans themselves know best. In China, Vance is generally considered to belong to the nativist camp. He doesn't support the U.S. attacking Iran and has been surprisingly quiet on this matter, as it would primarily benefit Israel rather than the United States. Therefore, if he were elected as the next president, we might see the U.S. and Israel gradually drift apart. Of course, powerful lobbying groups might prevent him from getting elected. To be honest, I don't really think Vance can succeed. I'm not entirely sure how much actual power the MAGA movement holds, but it seems they rely far too heavily on Trump's personal appeal.

Vance worked for Thiel and Thiel bankrolled his political career. Thiel is also a Zionists. Ain't no way he will go against Israel.

Autocracy is part of American culture. The US parliament has always been weak and filled with people who's only purpose is to clap.

It's interesting that decades into this we are still calling the massmurder and pillaging of dozens of countries, turning entire geographic regions into war ridden wastelands with slave markets, a "war on terror". Meanwhile the leaders of those so-called terror groups are praised and invited to ALL the western capitals.

I mean JD Vance is in Pakistan saying he's as close to the military junta there as his own wife, stirring up unnecessary pain at a full on mass unplanned genocide (I'm referring to the partition of India).

People claim Israel has America by the balls and that's probably true.

The other country that has us by the other ball is Pakistan.

The partition of India feels close to when you burn food and instead of washing the pan properly you just throw it in the dishwasher hoping it will sort it out somehow.

It isn't exactly the inability of the dishwasher to dissolve crimes against cuisine where the problem is rooted.

Calling it the “partition of India” makes it seem like it was imposed on India rather than being a product of the 1940 Lahore Resolution where Jinnah led calls for a separate Pakistan.

And in retrospect, it was a huge boon to India and Bangladesh to separate themselves from Pakistan.

Two million dead Hindu; ten million forcible refugees; thousands of ancient villages burned to the ground — it ‘was a huge boon to India’

In 2026, it’s a huge boon to India to not have Pakistan within its body politic. It’s like having broken up with a finance who ended up becoming a self destructive addict. Same for Bangladesh, even with all the people who died in the independence war.

This is not about Indian nationalism (which I don't really care about) or whether they should be unified countries (which I don't care about). This is about the forced mass migration of people from their homes and the resulting millions of deaths due to what is basically religious extremism.

Would those ten million refugees have been better off if the people they were fleeing were their fellow voting citizens in a democracy instead?

Obviously yes, but it didn’t happen. The provinces were granted the right to genocide expel, ethnically cleanse and to destroy their history, by simple majority vote. And they exercised it with 2 million dead.

It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanitarian crisis in the last millennium.

And the partition of India is the well accepted term for the event. I'm not going to be drawn into some post colonial syntactic argument in a discussion about the very real deaths if very real people as well as the human tragedy of the subsequent forced displacement from land people had lived in for thousands of years.

Jinnahs argument with the Indian Congress was because someone sang a song once referencing a Hindu goddess from a novel. It's honestly bananas and difficult to understand especially when his own daughter lived in India after partition

The idea of a unified, secular India was an elite notion imported from the west that elides how much sectarian animosity there was and is among ordinary people. I’m a fan of this essay on India that addresses this disconnect: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

Sure we can argue about that as well but that doesn't change the mind numbing amount of bloodshed caused by the chosen solution and the resulting successor state that harbored and continues to harbor terrorists hell bent on destroying America.

Ideally India would have balkanized into ethnolinguistic nations with a common union like the EU. That would have probably been the best outcome but the religious partition has led to increased religious extremism on both sides, seemingly unsolvable instability for 1/4 of the world population, and again, millions of deaths.

What I meant is that British India didn't exactly spawn out of a handshake between Allah & Mahavishnu.

Yes, India is a rather artificial construct imposed by the British.

It's easy to control a country when all cybersecurity software used in that country reports to you.

It was just a simple spelling mistake. It was always meant to be 'The War on Terra'.

That isn’t what happened. You are inter alia combining the loony but causally inevitable ‘war on terror’ with … the Arab Spring (which Assadist - Putinist propaganda has linked in your mind to imaginary Libyan slave markets) Ask you preferred AI how many Kurdish language universities there are in the world and where they are and what their students think of your imaginary Putinist antiyankee brain slurry.

That my every movement is known to Google, Meta, Apple, et al, is much more disturbing than any autocratic effect of the dismal Patriot Act. The idea that ‘the state’ is the thing to fear, or even worth a moments’ thought, is basically childish and premodern. Witness eg the apotheosis of Snowden for revealing nugatory CIA corner cutting … in the same historical period when the above mentioned are completely hoovering up and relentlessly analyzing every datum about every American.

Those corporations are certainly to be feared, but they don't have the power to impose violence or prison on you. The state does. It was the state that forced Snowden into exile. It is the state that is detaining people for the crime of walking out of Home Depot while speaking with an accent. Both must be kept in check.

Google has the power to fire me from my job by deleting my Google account.

I don't know why that would be the case, but let's say it is.

An overzealous cop and prosecutor can, with a little luck, use the power of the state to get you executed or imprisoned for life for a crime you didn't commit.

If you had to choose one of those, which one would you prefer?

The cop and prosecutor. At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life, versus zero people at Google

> At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life

And that has happened many times. It is not as improbable as you seem to think.

I really can't understand the thought process of someone who thinks it would better to have their life taken than their job. You know you can just...get a new job, right?

It's happened fewer times than zero people at Google have agreed to ban an account and then it has been banned.

Okay, but one ENDS YOUR LIFE. The other is a temporary inconvenience. Maybe a big one, but temporary.

I was baffled by this conversation until I saw that you've rapid-fire posted 30 comments in the last 2 hours. Now I understand: you are not putting any thought into this conversation at all. So I will match your effort.

Even if they did delete it, why not just make another one?

Google Accounts aren't linked at birth, and many people don't even have one.

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