The US sought unipolarity in 1989 and thirty years later it finds itself in grave danger, the dream lost, and US hegemony under threat. The American Establishment is desperate to re-engage the world and rekindle the kind of American dominance that the nation had in the decades after World War II. The vast wealth and power the US accumulated post-1945, is now under existential threat from foreign rivals.
And yet there's an even more desperate situation – the
domestic one. The US has been torn apart. The political factions tend to focus
on 'heart-string' issues, questions of individual rights, identity, and morality.
These issues are present but economics also plays a fundamental part in the
ongoing social tensions. Capitalism has broken American society and played a
significant role in its debt and the shattering of the American family. Wealth
has been concentrated as it was in the Nineteenth century and by other
estimations like never before. There are so many people that are (by any reasonable
estimation) rich – the still extant middle class looking very much like the
upper class of previous eras. Fed by discontent and avarice, and held captive
by the never-ending and ever-escalating inflation of life style, real estate
costs, and general expectation, many members of this class squander their wealth,
get caught in the rat race, and taken in by all the consumer pressures put on
them by Wall Street, they live at the limits of their means. They're rich but
living in golden cages. Others spend with abandon, and yet they also follow all
the investment and asset recommendations put to them by the financial class. As
long as the stock market is booming, they live well and have seemingly
inexhaustible assets at their disposal.
At the same time large swathes of American society have been downgraded,
with many young and middle aged adults living worse off than their parents and
with little hope or prospects before them. Growing numbers within the working
class face the potential for dire poverty, a reality only ameliorated and
mollified by the social safety net – a flood barrier being constantly
dismantled and undermined by the capitalist class which incessantly seeks a way
to extract more profit from workers both in the West and in the developing
world. When the barrier breaks, there will be chaos and (justified or not)
great anger.
Tens of thousands of working class and poor Americans are
being killed by drug overdoses – a testimony to social despair and the stress
they're under. Families are broken. Cheap goods are abundant but people can't
save money, buy homes, pay medical and utility bills, or fix their cars (which
are a necessity in most of the United States), and for many there's no road
forward. Many live in worlds of population decline, drug abuse, rusted out
factories and infrastructure in severe decay. They vent their frustration and
angst in the counterfeit community of social media and by starting addictively at
screens. The downgrade in basic knowledge and education is severe and it's
opened a large class of the public to easy manipulation especially at the hands
of those that would use them and channel their frustrations. It's a ticking time
bomb and some of the political leadership knows this. The Trump episode was
just a foretaste and it has by no means run its course.
But there are other crises. This state of affairs along with
other factors has produced anger across the spectrum and the spectre of
Right-wing violence and insurrection which once loomed only on the horizon is
now a reality – even a clear and present danger. There's the threat of race war
– which some elements of the Establishment promote as a means of dividing and
conquering the working class populace. But it risks getting out of hand and now
efforts are being made to rein in the anger. But with social media and the
twenty-four hour news cycle, there's little hope in that. Barely a week passes
without some new outrage, the fragmented elements of society become
increasingly alienated and hostile to one another.
Individuality and decadence have fragmented the society and
sinister players on all fronts have sought to manipulate disparate groups and
organise them into political blocs – as seen in identity politics which (in
seeking to appropriate the power and financial reins of the state) has nothing
to do with Leftist or genuine revolutionary thought. It's actually just as
present within the Right, but it's deliberately ignored by the movement's
leaders and intelligentsia. Trump poured fuel on these divisive fires and
Covid-19 has further fanned the flames causing them to spread and lead to
additional social and economic repercussions. And the Church, acculturated by
the Evangelical movement and increasingly radicalised by political dominionism
has been carried along these currents, its corrupt and blind leadership
facilitating this transformation and further defection from New Testament
Christianity.
It could be argued that the situation in American society was
much worse during the 1967-1974 period. The street violence was worse, and it
was evident to all at the time that the country was being torn apart. The US
seemed to be unraveling and some questioned its ability to hold together.
Thus in some respects the situation today doesn't seem as
dire. But there are differences. There were Leftist groups engaged in terrorism
during the 1960's and 1970's. Their violence was in terms of political
statements with the hope of shifting policy – a weak revolutionary doctrine if
it can even be called that. They would set bombs off in offices and government
buildings. The only real violence occurred when some of these groups would take
to crime in order to fund their movements. That's where you have bank robberies
gone wrong and the like, incidents in which people were actually killed.
And then of course there were groups like the Black Panthers
which were violent (mostly in terms of police confrontation) and yet were
effectively taken down by COINTELPRO and other law enforcement operations.
Under the leadership and guidance of FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, some of the
Panthers were basically executed – all due process and constitutionality set aside
and dispensed with.
On the contrary, today's Right-wing paramilitaries are cut
from a different cloth. They seem to view violence as not just a means but an
end and while some are pursued by elements of law enforcement, it's clear they
have their allies within the Trump movement, the mainstream GOP, and even among
some in the police and military.
And so while the violence and turmoil of the late sixties and
early seventies was empirically worse than what we're witnessing at the moment,
the situation today is more volatile. Technology and social media have changed
the nature of the struggle, the way information moves and is processed, and the
rapidity of effect and change. The era of leaflets and underground newspapers
is gone, replaced by social media and podcasts which can reach vast audiences
and are far more effective in stirring people up – and in rapid fashion at that.
The radicals of the Vietnam-Watergate era had some support
from the general public, or rather over time the public came to question the
state and the official line especially when it came to Vietnam or civil rights,
but in reality there wasn't a great deal of support for the actual protestors
and their actions. There was still something of a social consensus in terms of
basic assumptions, values, and decency – something nearly gone today. There was
never any hint or possibility of the protest movement generally speaking, or a
group like SDS getting 'their man' into high office. The one figure who had a
chance of uniting the various Left-wing movements within the mainstream of the Democratic
Party was Robert Kennedy. Five months after his assassination, Richard Nixon
was elected. Four years later, even
after Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the protests that erupted in its wake,
the peace-candidate George McGovern was handed one of the worst defeats in US
electoral history.
Today however, the militant Far Right has a place in
electoral politics and has political support in the congress, within some state
governments, and they certainly have allies within police departments. With the
money, political, and social support behind them, they have made political
gains the 1960's Left could never have even dreamed of. And while the US
economy seriously declined in the 1970's, by then the Left's political momentum
had fizzled. In reaction to the Nixon-Ford period, they got Jimmy Carter
elected. His failed presidency resulted in the 'Reagan Revolution' and twelve
years of GOP presidential dominance and this despite the dire economy and the deindustrialisation
that took place at the beginning of Reagan's first term. The economy recovered
in terms of a bull market which later crashed, but the industrial jobs were
gone forever and the communities that were decimated by these losses have never
recovered. Sold out by Wall Street and the capitalist policies of the GOP,
these communities are today the most ardent supporters of Trump – the head of
the Republican Party and a creature of Wall Street.
Bill Clinton (the Boomer-Hippie candidate) was elected in
1992, but the Republicans captured control of the Congress in 1994, and by
Clinton's second term Clinton had effectively become an Eisenhower Republican.
Far from being the 'Leftist' he's made out to be by elements on the Right,
Clinton embraced Wall Street and the capitalist-imperial paradigm and did much
to decimate Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programmes of the 1960's. Clinton
stood for some social change to be sure, and was to the left of the
increasingly hard-Right GOP, but under the aegis of a system that was on a
rightward trajectory and still is.
Some have said the situation now is 'the worst it's ever
been'. They refer to the street violence, protests over police shootings and
the like. This attitude is fed in part by talk radio and FOX and their attempts
to upset and whip up the Right-wing base. The street situation will have to get
much worse before it approaches what was happening in the 1960's and 1970's.
Today, there is no anti-war movement and the street violence related to civil
rights has not yet approached what took place in that earlier generation – not even
close.
But the volatility of today exceeds that period. The
potential for rapid disintegration and large-scale violence is there. The
political situation is different and more dangerous and you have a party that
has allied itself with paramilitaries. It's a far cry from the 'Hard Hat Riot'
of 1970. The culture of propaganda and disinformation is operating at an
unprecedented level. And finally and perhaps most poignantly the economic
situation is different. More than ever the US economy is tied to the global
situation. At this point in time an episode like the gas shortages of the
1970's just might break the country apart. The shockwaves from such an episode
would have greater repercussions across the entire and already fragile economy.
Indeed, the Covid-19 episode has pushed society and the economy in many
respects to the breaking point and has exposed just how fragile the situation
really is. The working class has reached a point of intractable crisis and
there's a potential for radicalism and mass violence. It would only take one or
two things happening in conjunction to take it to that tipping point, or if the
GOP has its way – the removal of programmes and subsidies collectively known as
the social safety net. If that 'net' is reduced or removed it could produce a
socio-economic domino effect – a case of the proverbial sowing the wind and
reaping the whirlwind.*
An international war may unite the population, and evidence
suggests there are those planning for it. But at the same time, there are real
systemic and financial reasons for the US to avoid war at this time. And if the
war fails to unite the population, it could backfire, and if there's a mass
popular movement to oppose it, a movement wed to the other aforementioned
factors, it could lead to political collapse and chaos. And there are thousands
of radicalised angry men with guns who stand ready to act, and thousands more
in the public, military, and police who sympathize with them.
Thus far the 1960's and 1970's were worse in what they
produced, but in the 2020's the danger is greater.
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*There's often a great deal of inconsistency on these points.
There are some wealthy Republicans that want to see social programmes
dismantled. Although I've known more than a few who are actually quite keen on
subsidies, when it benefits their business.
I live in rural Pennsylvania and this working class area went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and 2020. They hate the 'liberals' and want to combat 'socialism' and yet a family member who works at the local grocery store assures me that half (or more) of the people who come in are on food stamps. At times it seems like a majority of the people receive some form of subsidies or other government money on a regular basis. Manipulated and misled, their voting patterns are actually self-destructive.