I’ve always believed that we were living through the collapse of the American Hegemony, but I could never describe the system until I read about the Imperial Boomerang and the Five Phase Lifecycle which captures the US’ expansionist policies post WW2. Except we never needed war, we had the petrodollar.
The problem when you have a system that centralized, you have one major factor, and then the inability to grow leads to the empire turning within with its expansionist policies towards its people. Its the perfect system to have an incompetent boob turn cruel. And once that happens, everyone senses something wicked on the horizon. And the most defensive behavior is to protect your own interests – which accelerate the inevitable collapse.
The US is a very big country, and any future shape will have it more like a confederation – either officially in its successor states, or more likely by Balkanization. Whether or not its the New America we want, well, I’m not that clairvoyant.
I hope this makes sense, i’m not a political expert. All I am certain of, in my gut, is that Trump is the final manifestation of the decline phase, and that’s ultimately the ending. We aren’t coming back from this.
Are you willing to due first? There’s a big problem that the last few generations of people don’t know war and are to willing to get into it.
Nope. I am not prescribing a solution here. I am asking if people believe there is any other solution, and if there is hope to avoid it.
The not-Republicans seem less hell-bent on destroying everything for some accelerationist ideology. That’s about all I see. I think if we can get a progressive, perhaps AOC in office, and it’s possible to save us, she’ll not hold back, having seen how Trump used the office. That’s my only hope of not having a violent revolution someday, but I think there will be many years, probably decades of disasters to live through first.
Democrats have no intention of changing anything meaningful. We learned that when Obama had a supermajority and became a black Dubya, despite his extravagant progressive promises.
Our only power is local now, and they know this, which is why they swift-boated Mamdani and ran a Democratic partisan against him.
Yes, it will take a major disruption to necessitate any meaningful change at the national level.
Correct to answer OP, yes you can’t vote your way out of fascism. So we will need a war to get out of this mess.
Then to the Democrats the current Democratic Party is already right of Regan. It’s that racket effect. Fuck up part if things keep going as business as usual. Then your next major Democratic candidates will be no different then Trump.
But all that moot. Again we can’t vote our way out of this nightmare. And before 2030 we will all be living in hell run by oligarchy tecno bros. With all the AI data center sucking up all our water and they rounded up as much of the population that they can. Then it over.
You think North Korea is bad wait until we are living in just that type of world in America were statues of Trump liter the country and anybody that doesn’t worship him is locked in a work camp.
Small nit-pick it is “ratchet” effect
nah
I think the people in power will make sure they do everything they can to spin the narrative to make sure that we are divided and more so that Trump’s supporters continue believing he has their interests in mind.
More ranting...
They (the rich and complicit) will always make us (working people) out to be the enemy just as how media has continued to make China and Russia the enemy of the world–when clearly, and how it’s been made so evidently clear, the US is just as bad. Committing war crimes in Venezuela? Supporting Isreal-led genocide? Really, it’s the people in power at each of these “super powers” that are corrupt and deserve to be removed.
Why the hell did the guy from El Salvador kiss Trump’s ass for the mega prison? Obviously corrupt/collusion happening there. They’re so stuck up their own ass that they can’t see beyond their fantasy. They literally have a god complex and actively believe they can rule the world.
It’s these people that should be removed, not us. We did nothing wrong, but they insist that we should be deported? Put in jail? Killed by pawns like I.C.E.? Killed on a boat? Killed by racist shitheads?
All we have to do is march across DC and force them to resign. Why can we waste so much time “going on vacation” and doing other mundane things like joining competitions but we can’t all just in one fell swoop march at the capitol? The news and politicians painted a bad picture about it but at least the misguided Trump supporters had the balls to DO something about it. Even though they were doing so in bad faith and on the wrong basis, they WENT there.
Based on Trump’s actions in his term and the meek inaction of the supposed only other party (that don’t want to support ppl like Mamdani), I have no faith that anything significant will change even if somehow Trump is removed. Everything happening now is because people don’t want to make change happen. The corrupt 1% like Trump want to keep us enslaved and to keep inequality alive.
Instead of playing chicken, waiting for some miracle to save us from this occupation of corrupt leaders, we the people should be taking action to remove them. Fuck the constitution and the state. History has shown the only real way to take out dumbasses in power but we’re all afraid to do anything about it. Even a soft revolt like leaking company secrets, trade secrets, and anything that would actually cause a stir is asking for too much apparently. Can’t even fucking hack the US to get Epstein files? Seriously? FFS
the US is just as bad.
*Much worse.
Really, it’s the people in power at each of these “super powers” that are corrupt and deserve to be removed.
Lol, westerners will only every criticize their own governments with the caveat that obviously nobody could possibly be better than them.
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the blood and sweat of our ancestors who struggled for
genocide. They struggled for genocide. And the enslavement of millions. And mass rape. And overwhelming control of women’s bodies. They did not make us thrive. They drowned us in blood.
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The story of abolition or the civil rights movement is not the story of America, even though the bourgeois establishment may have tried to tame MLK Jr. posthumously. All concessions given to labor were for the bourgeoisie to maintain its power, not out of any change of heart. If they thought they could get away with maintaining slavery they would - oh wait, they do, it’s called the prison system.
The civil rights movement of the 60s you mean? Those aren’t our ancestors. They are our oldest contemporaries. Some of them are still alive today. Our ancestors are the the 500 years of European settlers that brought genocide and chattel slavery and systematized rape to this land. The people who fought against those things are the ultra minority. John Brown was hung for treason while the Confederate leaders were given statues and their names were given to university buildings and streets.
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Read the history of the bill of rights. Many thought it was a bad idea to enumerate rights because they thought the constitution already protected all of those rights. These same people were raping their slaves and selling the babies
The union did not defeat the slave owners, it defeated the plantation owners. Lincoln famously did not care if slavery was legal or not. The 11 states that seceded from the union were not the only states that had slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was not intended to free the slaves, it only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the 11 states IF those enslaved people took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment tool, pure and simple.
Women got the right to vote because women fought for it and women were an oppressed group, rather proving my point than refuting it. Further, even though they got the right to vote they were still disallowed by law to own property, open bank accounts, etc. In the 1950s doctors were providing husbands with ice pick lobotomies for their wives, literally jamming an ice pick behind the eyeball to destroy specific nerves in the frontal lobe, making the women docile robots without harming their “pretty faces”. Literally. This is not an exaggeration.
The US has the resources to invest in r&d because it stole vast amounts of wealth from the rest of the world, including right here from the original inhabitants of the land. The US made native Americans mine radioactive uranium without any safety equipment, literally barefoot in the mud, so they could research the atomic bomb and then drop it on two major population centers of an enemy they already defeated and were negotiating a surrender with. The vast majority of R&D the US invested in was through the military in their ever burning passion to kill more people and dominate more of the world. That’s why the Nazi Verner Von Braun was rescued from Germany before he could stand trial and made into a prominent NASA scientist.
The fascists lost WW2 because the Soviets defeated 80% of their forces and marched into and straight through Berlin. There’s a reason why West Berlin was inside East Germany. But you didn’t realize that either. In East Germany the fascists really did lose, as the Soviets imprisoned or executed anyone that was supportive of the fascists. Meanwhile in West Germany former openly Nazi politicians were elected into office all over the country. It made some people so upset they resisted and the West branded them as terrorists and even invented a whole new psychological disease to explain why hostages would side with the anti-fascist “terrorists” - Stockholm Syndrome.
Jim Crow laws were put in place after the Black Codes. The Black Codes were put in place to imprison the recently freed black slaves. The US prison system went from 90% white to 90% black in under 10 years. The Black folks they imprisoned were leased back to the plantation owners where they lived their lives as slaves AGAIN. The 13th amendment didn’t end slavery. It only ended private slavery. Prison slaves are fine. That’s why prison slaves make over $11B in profits for the government and private corporations just through the labor, to say nothing of being one of the only countries that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison. The Clintons, when Bill was Governor of Arkansas had black house slaves because the Governor’s Mansion was staffed by prisoners who were given labor jobs without pay. The Clinton’s did not change this.
And since the 1970s the US has had the largest housed-prison population in the world by percentage of population, worse than the Soviet GULAGs at their peak and always worse by multiples than anything the Chinese have done to their own people. But that’s JUST prison population. The parole system, where people are surveilled daily, is twice as large as the prison population. There is nothing in the world like it. The US abolished Jim Crow but didn’t stop the imprisonment, enslavement, surveillance, and cold-blooded murder and rape of black people.
Not to mention that we have public records indicating that the end of Jim Crow was accompanied by a deliberate and explicit strategy by US politicians to mask the system behind softer language. The results are the same.
Your definition of “winning out in the end” leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly. Native Americans today are still undergoing a slow motion genocide where their cultures, knowledge, land, and people are all disappearing. Black people are still being murdered by vigilantes. The prison system has only gotten worse, never better.
Stop looking at the lipstick and saying that we have won hard fought victories when the pig is fatter and more bloated than ever.
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Stop looking at the lipstick and saying that we have won hard fought victories when the pig is fatter and more bloated than ever.
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You should really rethink the American Revolution. The crown was a restraining force on the colonists’ genocidal drive Westward, and legal cases were proceeding that were lying the groundwork to end chattel slavery. Both of these things, coupled with the massive economic potential of North America that was being subordinated to London’s financiers and the crowns taxation all led to the American Revolution. It was first and foremost a drive for unfettered greed and unfettered dominance.
The Civil War was not about ideals. It was about economics. The North saw much larger profits in industrializing compared the cash cropping of the South. Cash cropping meant remaining subordinated to London, primarily. The cotton from the plantations were raw materials. It was London that turned them into high fashion. Essentially, what we see today in overexploited nations where the people are employed in the lowest rung of the value chain like cobalt mines and what not, that’s what the American South was economically. The Northern financiers wanted to move to industrializatoon and that would require a different labor configuration. You can’t use illiterate chattel slaves in factories, you need a different mode of labor. That would inevitably mean changing the nature of ownership of human beings from private property to wage slaves. And that meant the South would lose their investments both in cash cropping and in humans. So the South seceded in order to create a separate nation with a separate economy from the industrializing North. And the war was fought under the command of Lincoln who not only didn’t care whether slavery persisted or not but believed that black people should leave the US and go back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the rebelling states and only if they took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment gambit, not an expression of ideals.
As for war, we have consistently seen how guerilla warfare always beats the empire. Hell, the American Revolution was won primarily as a guerilla war and not a direct confrontation. Vietnam. Korea. Afghanistan. It’s imminently plausible for the US military to lose to a domestic uprising. And even more important, war is primarily a destruction of economies first, people second. The US is struggling desperately to manage its own economic output and can barely produce war machines and munitions at this point. A civil war would further destroy the economy here, cementing China permanently and the UD elites would have nowhere to go except back to Europe which is also floundering.
This is related to why I’m so nervous about teaching social studies next year. Can anyone help me think about how to teach US history without shoving a bunch of propaganda down middle school throats?
Give out copies of Larry Gonick’s textbook?
Last time US suffered the pains of war in their land was late 1860’s. I believe American politics are stuck in that era.
I agree with you, the Democrats aren’t going to reform anything, even if they wanted to (and they don’t).
A financial collapse seems inevitable at this point, Balkanization may be a very good thing. There’s no need for a civil war, we’re nicely divided already and have functioning state governments that will quickly replace the Federals. That’s best case scenario.
Worst case scenario? Civil War II, but really, “The South” has even less of a chance of winning now. This seems unlikely. Best to just cut them off and stop propping up their miserable states, within a generation or two they will learn that they need us (coastal cities) far more than we need them.
Jesus isn’t going to come save the day, no matter what The Christian Broadcasting Network says.
No.
No.
Elections were meant to be bloodless revolution. What about “You are forced to vote for someone who doesn’t represent you” screams bloodless revolution?
Usually this is where I would make a long winded comment about replacing First-past-the-post voting with a voting system that allows more then two parties to exist without a spoiler effect… but that time has long since passed us by.
Democrats refused to implement the change Obama promised, Republicans eventually won. GG no RE. Good luck out there yall.
Fix what exactly? Hard to answer, when the question isn’t clearly defined.
Not denying, that there’s a lot to be fixed. But regarding the means, that depends on what exactly you’re talking about.
It’ll take a few more
assassinationsLuigi-like incidents before any oligarchs start taking us serfs seriously.Adventurism doesn’t generally bring about change, it just justifies further repressions. Organizing is what brings change and enables actual conquest of political power.
How do you organise when the billionaires own the media and the social media platforms? Further, if you’re in the US, how do you organise when the sitting pedophile declares anti-fascism as terrorism and you can be locked up or killed for the association?
Walk around your neighbourhood inviting strangers to a Signal chat?
For starters, begin with adopting good OPSEC principles. Privacy is a valuable shield.
Secondly, learn from successful revolutionaries. I made a basic Marxist-Leninist reading list as a helpful introduction, study how revolutionary parties work and function.
Finally, get organized. Join a party like the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Some of your org work may in fact involve walking around your neighborhood and inviting strangers to chats! The primary focus at the present moment is to build a revolutionary party capable of directing the working classes in the case of crisis.
No, they’d first lock us down hard. They don’t have any humanity in them to take us seriously.
