I go back and forth a lot between thinking people are losing faith in U.S. systems in record time, and thinking that I’m making up libidinal fantasies and overestimating the speed or extent of that loss of faith.
So what do you all think?
I spend too much of my time trying not to blow my own brains out that I can’t imagine anything besides everything getting worse until it’s far too late to do anything. Like how the ancient people of on Easter Island cut down every tree on the island and spent their last days fighting over which tribe got the honor of owning a giant carved boulder, except we are going to cook the planet to death and spend our last days making sure that Burger King stays open until the end.
Unfortunately history indicates that regardless of state, revolution will not occur in the imperial core.
on the other hand the USA does have the most developed productive forces in the world. Though now they are all weird service jobs instead of the traditional manufacturing communists thought would be the basis of the proletariat. The consequences of this for revolution are unknown, you might thick it means we are doomed but these jobs are also a lot more fragile to economic distruption. The wheel of history turns…
Oh I never really doubted that. At least not that revolution wouldn’t start in the core. I was more wondering if, when the U.S.’ ability to crush labor movements and revolutions abroad fully dissipates, and the American state’s international domination dissipates accodingly, if people will want to try and make something new, or limp along with whatever the U.S. becomes after its fall from hegemony.
The american government will attempt to destroy anything it can’t have, most likely. I really have a hard time believing that the us will finally be disentangled from the rest of the world before the rest of the world is knocking on our door.
I’d like to think it won’t take a hot war to dislodge the U.S. empire, but if it took WW1 and WW2 to kill the old European colonial empires… well, anyway, I’d like to think it won’t come to that.
Nah look at the home ownership rate. There are still too many little suburban white supremacist enclaves of the middle class.
Hell look at a country like brazil where things are much more worse for a large part of the people. Still chugging along.
Hell look at a country like brazil where things are much more worse for a large part of the people. Still chugging along.
That’s what scares me most. Things here will probably just sink to the same level as places like Brazil in my lifetime, and never get any better.
There’s already a legitimacy crisis. It’s gonna keep seeping in.
Right now it looks partisan, but it isn’t fully. Look at the vaccination rates. That’s not just partisanship. Hell, Trump told people to get vaccinated and they booed him. That’s a large swath of people who don’t trust a system on both ideological grounds and because they don’t see a system that actually helps their lives and can be trusted. And it includes a decent number of alt medicine boomers that are not particularly chuddy and a disproportionate fraction of black people who have very good reason not to trust the system. Plus, that the system continues to fail, as information about vaccination and its costs are just pushed to certain media apparatuses rather than actually creating a public health program to get everyone vaccinated through home visits and one-on-one conversations.
“Figure it out yourself” has been the name of the game with the pandemic response and it was not a surprise for many.
