“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”
This statement is—wrong-ish.
For decades various people have been predicting what is happening now: the end of the American empire, the late Imperial wars, the despair and poverty of late-imperial rentier capitalism, and the rise of China.
Indeed a lot of people (your host included) were screaming about this 30 years ago. I read my first book on the way that America was turning to Gilded Age plus inequality in 1986. Everyone who wasn’t stupid, bought or ideologically captured could see what neoliberalism would lead to. From the late 90s we yelled about sending the West’s industry to the West, but hey, it was the “End of History” and capitalism and democracy had won and it didn’t matter where industry was because “comparative advantage” was, and still is, completely misunderstood, as were the constituents of state power.
So—it’s all happening now, along with massive wildfires from climate change and it seems like for decades nothing happened, but really, it was all happening: without deliberate policy choices, these weeks wouldn’t be possible.
The key to making accurate predictions is simply asking “what must happen if the current course continues, and will the course continue.” In 2009, when Obama decided he’d rather have a couple mansions and Hollywood friends than be the next FDR, and massively increase fracking to top it off, it became clear that the course would continue and all this became inevitable. Realistically, the rise of China was locked in when they were allowed to join the WTO and climate change was locked in when Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House roof.
So it’s been a very easy time to make accurate long term predictions, much as Keynes, upon seeing the post-WWI peace deal was able to predict WWII and the end of the British Empire. It still had to play out, but everyone with sense knew it was inevitable.
Most of the time I’m sanguine about all this, but every once in a while despair and anger at all the harm which was so easily predicted and which could have been avoided wells up. Other times it’s glee: the fall of the American Empire will occasion a lot of horrid events, but unless you’re American or perhaps European, it’s hard to be sad, especially as we witness genocide in both Gaza and Syria, and witness huge homeless camps.
I was sent this video to watch, and it’s so typical of America these days:
American citizen breaks down in tears because she is now living in her car “for the foreseeable future”
She has a job but rent prices are so out of control in America and you need 2.5x the rent to qualify for an apartment, she has to live in her car
Rent is out of control pic.twitter.com/zpJ68fEvF5
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 13, 2025
Kind of hard to feel sorrow at the end of an Empire which treats even its own citizens this way. Meanwhile China deliberately crashed its own over-inflated housing market when the CCP noticed that too many people couldn’t afford their own homes any more, and is moving to mostly state-built housing. Tell me more about how awful “Communism” is. Nor are they shipping Israel arms and supporting genocide. (No, the Ughuirs are not being genocided, though they are discriminated against.)
If you’re feeling similar emotions, well, that’s understandable and no big deal. Just remember, the world is always and has always been shit for a lot of people, all that’s changing is who, and in a couple decades, how many. But there’s still delicious food, beautiful scenery, and love is just as sweet. All the good still exists, and your sorrow and pain does not help other people, and hurts you.
Live, enjoy, and perhaps allow yourself some happiness at the good amidst all the evil.
Jefferson Hamilton
>But there’s still delicious food, beautiful scenery, and love is just as sweet.
Both difficult to take solace from when you’re living out of your car. I, too, have been predicting America’s failed state status for a long time, although in my case only about twenty years or a bit more, but it’s hard to take any real joy in being right when the reality is so sordid.
someofparts
Brian Berletic has a good podcast episode out there breaking down the real back story on the Ughuirs. I will try to find it later today and come back with the link. The jist of it is that they have been destabilized US proxies but China has rehabilitated them.
One of my least favorite things about being poor is not being able to help people. I don’t think there has ever been a time when there wasn’t someone I wanted to help but couldn’t, be it an elderly relation, a broke friend, or even the occasional cat.
Even after Germany lost the war, the propaganda had been so encompassing that ordinary (as in not rich or powerful) citizens did not snap out of it’s thrall until they held local trials for war crimes and people could see for themselves what had happened to their own neighbors. Newsmax looks set to be just as successful as their German predecessors. It is also a good example of your point that none of the things we suffer happened overnight, because it has taken decades of sustained lies to create the baseline of gullibility that the outlet exploits today.
I’m glad you’re in Canada Ian. It has crossed my mind many times that if it had been your misfortune to have been born a US citizen, our savage parody of a health care system would have done you in a decade ago.
Oakchair
every once in a while despair and anger at all the harm… wells up.
—–
Even the obnoxious teens in media who have to agonize over their unwillingness to kill the big bad —to show how moral and good they are— exhibit large amounts of anger.
Frankly, someone who isn’t angry at the uncountable mass graves is psychopathic or a monk who would sit in silence while setting themselves aflame.
—-
Other times it’s glee:
—-
How could you not feel some sense of glee in the destruction of an empire that has spent the last 75 years destroying country after country, and mass murdering people after people?
We live in a marketing society that absconds at real emotion because like children scared of the dark it’s too caught up in appearances to care about substance. It’s too frightened of it’s own shadow to look in the mirror. A mass of people not only unable to think for themselves or stand but who get outraged at those who do because denial is their bliss. I wonder, are they happy yet?
Soredemos
That girl is going on about how she hopes this will just be a phase that will help her build ‘character’. This is just another form of delusion. Not every experience helps you build resilience; sometimes it just breaks you.
This seems to be a somewhat uniquely American delusion where we believe manifestly unjust arrangements are just trials that make us better, and the underlying problem is never addressed. Closely related is the obsession with some mysterious thing called ‘work ethic’, which I’ve never seen satisfactorily defined. In practice it just seems to be employer propaganda for ‘you show up and work more than I pay you for, and we pretend this is character building somehow and that you’re getting more out of it than actual wages’.
There was another recent viral video of a woman working her first job, and heaving a breakdown because she can’t afford rent close to the job, so her entire life now consists of either going to or from the job, or working the job, and she has no time left to actually live.
Liberals have nothing to offer in terms of solutions, because fundamentally they see no problem. This is how life should be; a series of ‘character building challenges’. At most they’ll offer up token reforms to slightly take the edge off certain things. As said word for word in an episode of The West Wing, in the context of a man struggling to send his kid to college, “life shouldn’t be easy…it just shouldn’t be quite so hard”.
That’s the extent of the American Liberal imagination. It stands in sharp contrast to European, or Canadian, or Japanese, etc, Liberalism, which have their own limitations, but even in heavily degraded neiliberal forms can still deliver elements that are downright utopian by American (American’t) standards.
The American right is of course now openly hostile to American institutions, and by extension the American people, and attempting to shred whatever was left of civil services, but it was able to get into power by simply voicing populist rhetoric. ‘Make America Great Again’ resonates because the country openly sucks, much worse than it did fifty years ago, and everyone knows it, except Liberals, who can only offer up that either ‘no it doesn’t, look at these fake numbers’, or ‘saying it does is just code for wanting to go back to racism’.
Jan Wiklund
A non-committed viewer would have been able to detect it in the late 60s, when the industrial corporations turned to the rentiers to get money, and had to sacrifice productive investments to fast profits.
But the marxisizing critics of the time thought that this was the normal capitalist behaviour, common since god knows when. They didn’t know the capitalism they were born in, when everything was about market shares, and dividends were modest because rentiers weren’t influential.
ven
As with others, I also can empathise with feelings of anger, sorrow and glee.
I was railing to my wife this morning how it is not just the politicians that are corrupt, but so are all the mainstream media that facilitates their lies. And also it’s the corporate heads. But then again, there are the legions of middle managers who keep their heads down and only care about their career progression and enjoying themselves (“play hard, work hard” crap). And whilst they sanctimoniously preach about DEI and supporting local charities, it’s all a respectable veneer, for you never hear genocide discussed over a lunch meeting or evening drinks.
I came across a quote from Primo Levi which seems to aptly describe the situation and the inevitability of the horrors to come:
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions”
Eric F
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the essay. Especially the “Tango” in the title.
Which, if you’ll indulge me in a little diversion here, is the perfect metaphor.
Tango, as I know it, is filled with sadness and longing and tragedy. Usually about lost love or drunkenness or horse racing, but still the pathos comes through in the music even if you ignore the lyrics.
But that sadness, or sense of loss isn’t left to fester. It is picked up and expressed with a partner in an intimate embrace. An embrace fueled by music and celebrating the physical connection between two living human beings. This. This is a perfect microcosm of what makes living as a human tolerable – enjoyable even.
And fortunately, there is Tango available to teh public in every major city in the world. Many minor cities too. A little social media search will find it.
Purple Library Guy
That poor kid. There definitely is something very American about her reaction–I mean, she’s trying to keep her spirits up, of course she is, but still I kept flashing on that quote about “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
different clue
@Purple Library Guy,
Actually , socialism took quite a bit of root in parts of America starting in the 1880s or so. Especially in high-percent ethnically German areas. America had a number of medium-city Socialist Mayors.
The first major up-rootment of that socialism happened during WWI, when President Wilson unleashed a wave of antiGermanitic persecution all over America and also a wave of anti-socialist repression. We had a Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs who was fake-convicted on fake-charges by the Wilson regime.
Of course John Steinbeck’s quote was also true for many non-socialist Americans. But not for large parts of the big city Industrial proletariat, who were only repressed by force.
Separately, here is a funny picture of the red carpet which Canadian greeters rolled out for Secretary of State little marco’s arrival in Canada. It’s as small as he is.
” The tiny red carpet Canada rolled out for Marco Rubio ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jay8s8/the_tiny_red_carpet_canada_rolled_out_for_marco/
Mark Level
Great post by Sorodemos, yes, ‘Muricans well-trained to revert to psychobabble to explain all the shit being poured on their heads by TPTB, rather than simply “look up”. That post trended a couple of weeks, maybe a month ago, & Due Dissidence shared it. She does (off topic) speak for 1,000s of others, tens of thousands, plus she is a white woman and someone who tried to “obey all the rules, work hard” which under Obama they were telling us was all you needed for protection. Not!! I’ll be charitable and assume that at some point she may realize it’s NOT her fault, there are Agents and a System that sacrificed her quality of life, eventually perhaps her life itself.
Until recently, I thought I’d insulated myself pretty well, at least economically. I have recently admitted to myself that while I did great during Covid– kept my friends network, the nature of my job was such that I was working less and getting paid while many colleagues got hit with more work, also I got the first jab and booster, never got Covid, then or since. I’m “a Unicorn” a friend told me.
However, I am now a pretty big “Medical Debt” victim. In 2018 when I was still covered by my Employer’s health care, I got an inguinal hernia, Kaiser Permanente was my HC provider (better than most!) I paid $2,200 out of pocket, presumably 60% to my employer’s 40%, no biggie. Last summer I had another one on the other side, did not want to wait 3 months to get it fixed under Medicare when I was eligible, so the shitty Corporate Monster that took over my local provider, “Aspirus”, billed me– over $9,000!! My Blue Cross paid $3,000, so that means (oversimplifying only a bit), the cost inflation for the same (ok, some new high tech “machines that go ping!”, to quote Monty Python’s the meaning of life from 42 years ago) equaled 410% inflation.
This kind of shit is unsustainable to the average person. I worked out a “plan”, I can pay $148 monthly for 8 years, no punitive additional fees added . . . I’m in a better than average place, this will not make me homeless. (Even if I succeed in emigrating.) But I think the estimate is something like over 70% of Americans can’t afford a sudden $500 out of pocket cost? (This is my recollection, likely mistaken; please feel free to correct me.) One more reason to get out of Dodge!!
So back to my main point– I handled Covid well, but the overt Biden-Harris-Trump genocide has really challenged my mental health a bit. And now we have the joint HTS-Izzy genocide of Alawites (called by the NYT and the other “responsible adults” “Assad loyalists”, oh that’s okay then, murder their children, film yourself dragging people behind cars, they deserved it!!) Not just them, but Shi’a generally (the only nations Shia are now safe in are Iran, Yemen, I know of no others), Christians, Assyrians, Chaldeans (lots of overlap I believe between the last 3 groups) & the formerly sacred (to the US NatSec state and the ShitLibs) Kurds . . .
When I first retired I’d spend at least a couple hours a day reading in a variety of fields that interest me, history, philosophy, anthropology, spirituality, the arts, fiction, etc. Hard to do now. I have become a news junkie (none from the MSM except to note HOW it’s lying to me). The Black Iron Prison that P.K. Dick warned about (which Wm. S. Burroughs simply called “Control”) seems to be here, trying to keep my own body out of its grasp, work with the few allies smart enough to see what’s right before their eyes.
The place I currently live in is environmentally sustainable, for the most part (& relative to other areas) but culturally, not so much.
The War the US has waged unremittingly since allying with the defeated Nazis (& mass-importing them to Canada, US, Latin America, etc.) is reaching a culmination. Yes, I feel anger, despair, and at times glee. I have a low (sustainable) level of shock, combined with free-floating anxiety. I feel no “awe” whatsoever, except in private moments of self-transcendence or reverie.
Biden-Harris were the greatest Evil I have seen in my lifetime (while at the same time just being a repeat/ hangover of the Bush Jr. Great War of Terror years, complete with the Cheneys), however Trump seems quite likely to surpass them. Biden-Harris were entirely predictable evil, however, no surprises, no discontinuity. The shit you saw was the shit they delivered. Trump’s chaos mixes it up. I tried to find what flora or fauna I could relate him to, settled on a Cephalopod. Not due to any innate intelligence, obviously (they are incredibly smart; there is a famous deceased one who called the results of the Football World Cup successfully.)
The joke back in the day for the Obama Cult was his playing “5-D chess”. Not hardly. Just selling the suckers to go onto the menu. (Which many like that poor woman in the video are.) Trump can’t play 2-D chess, he likely couldn’t even play checkers. He recently bragged that we are smarter than the Chinese and Russians because “we” think in Quarters, they think long-term! No he is in the octopoid class for just squirting ink everywhere, particularly in the Normies’ and CHUDs’ eyes.
When I had a strong spiritual practice, we were reminded to always act “without attachment.” As I watch all this shit come down, I have to internalize that lesson and just feel the glee that it is falling apart. Some of the Anti-Civilization folks used to promise, “Some day we will dance in the ruins of this garbage!” I am nowhere near that sanguine, it could happen, it likely won’t. Obama was a great teacher in one respect– Hope is a Lie, a Dodge, a Poisoned Chalice. Whether I go down to death quickly with most of it, or can extend my existence depends on my ingenuity in the coming months. It’s immaterial whether I do or not in the larger picture, however.