Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 9 of 11

The Current Trendline Is Full-fledged American Social Collapse

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On July 17, 2020

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… or a full fascist turn.

Jared Diamond wrote a long book on why societies collapse.

Let me summarize his findings.

Societies collapse when elites are isolated from the consequences of their decisions as experienced by the rest of the population.

Here’s America:

Imagine that. The numbers nationally are worse. There is NO reason for the people who run America to change their Covid-19 strategy. None. Less than zero; the strategy is working brilliantly for them. Your suffering and deaths make them richer. Understand this. Understand it.

So, what does that mean?

It doesn’t mean that the US is likely to have 550K more deaths. Why not? Because the number one rule for understanding the US in the age of neoliberal greed is this:

No matter how bad you think something is in the US, it’s worse, even if you take this rule into account.

So, 550K is now the “good case scenario.” The case against it is based only on “lot of the old people have already died, and we’re better at keeping people alive now than at the start.” It’s not based on numbers of infections, which are already past the initial peak and nowhere near the top.

Then there’s those 32 percent of people who couldn’t make their housing payments in July, 22 percent of small businesses going bankrupt, etc.

So, I’ve been pounding this issue but today, looking at all this, it became utterly clear that the perceived self-interest of American elites is now so completely detached from the rest of American society and everyone else that there is no recovery without a revolution, peaceful or otherwise (and a non-peaceful revolution could trigger the collapse all by itself, while peaceful revolution is… unlikely).

Nonetheless, ordinary Americans are being pushed to the wall: broke, homeless and hungry will become normal for some number of Americans in the tens of millions. The actual economy will contract, but the rich will be richer.

Complete and absolute disconnect. This was visible in 2008, when the rich were bailed out despite being bankrupt and not just allowed, but encouraged, to set up an assembly line to steal ordinary Americans’ houses.

This is not recoverable.

It is not sustainable.

The Age of America is nearly done. Empires do not die cleanly. Russians died like flies when the USSR collapsed, and Russians were in far better shape to handle collapse than Americans are because they had garden plots and housing that wasn’t going to be taken from them.

Biden will probably win this election. He will not stop this. He will delay it somewhat, while furthering the conditions that made it happen.

Once Biden’s done, another right-wing “populist” will win the election, because the center would rather elect a fascist than even a 50s-style left-winger.

That President is likely to either turn the US full fascist or cause its collapse, or both.

When US passports start working again after Covid burns through the country, get out if you can. If you can’t, prepare as best you are able.

The time to get out or start preparing was 2008/9. But if you leave it too late, your life is on the line, or much worse.

Do not discount this, please. The numbers are staggering, but worse, those numbers are seen as good by the people who run US society. They want the displacement, because it is an opportunity for them to increase their wealth and power.

They will wind up ruling over rubble, but you will live in the rubble.

Do not discount this if you are American.

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Cycle of Civilization and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

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On June 11, 2020

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Many mainstream pundits now admit that the rise of the right-wing populism is due to the neglect, over the last 40 years or so, of many people, leaving them to rot, as the rich got richer. Four decades of stagnant wages, soaring housing prices, shitty jobs, and so on, have left people willing to vote against the status quo, no matter what they’re voting for.

This is all very nice. It is even a good thing.

But the warnings were given for decades. I remember very well warnings about rising inequality as early as the mid-eighties, and doubtless some were warning sooner, and I missed it due to my youth. The people doing the warning often said, “This is bad because it will lead to the rise of very bad people, like in the 30s.”

Yeah.

Learning after reality hits you in the face with a shovel, repeatedly, is good, but it’s not as good as avoiding getting hit in the face with a shovel.

Of course, the problem is that elites, and their “pundits,” only got hit in the face with a shovel recently. The last 40 years may have been a terrible time to be a peon, but they were the best time to be rich, or a retainer of the rich, in modern history. Maybe in all of history. Yeah, Babylonian kingdoms and Roman emperors were richer, but what they could buy with their riches was limited (though sex, food, and the ability to push other people around are the basics, and have always been available).

So, the people with power saw no reason to stop, because the policies were making them filthy rich and impoverishing people they didn’t know or care about. Heck, impoverishing ordinary people was good; it made services (and servants) cheaper.

For quite some time, I pursued a two-pronged (worthless) strategy. I told the people being fucked that they needed to fight back and scare the shit out of the elities, or the elites would keep hurting them. Then I told the elites that, as much as the peons seemed to be willing to take it and take it, eventually they would rebel.

Neither strategy worked, and even though the peons are now in revolt, they are backing policies which may help them somewhat in the short run, but which will be bad for them in the middle term–at least so far. (I have some hope that the left will win some in Europe. Spain’s leftists and Corbyn are the most promising signs so far.)

This is, really, just the normal cycle of history. There are bad times, and people eventually learn from them, and create good times, and the people who grow up in good times are weak and don’t really believe the bad times can return, so the bad times return, and the bad times at least make people tough and sometimes get them to pull together, and then they create good times.

Sometimes that cycle breaks down–usually because the bad times make people meaner and more desperate and break them down rather than bring them together, and then you get dark ages. Other times, the good times last for a few generations, not completely destroying the virtue of the people and their leaders immediately, for reasons I’ve touched on in the past and will discuss more in the future (you can read Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy if you need a fix now).

While this is the normal cycle of history, and it may be usually yawn-inducing, if tragic to those caught in it, we are unfortunately also at a point where we’ve done so much damage to our ecosystem that we’re in the middle of a great die-off. We also have climate change which, I suspect, is now not just beyond stopping, but which has reached an exponential, self-reinforcing period of its growth.

On the bright side (sort of), the technology which let us dig this hole gives us a better chance of digging ourselves out, but only a chance.

This is where we are at, and the hysterical reaction of many to Trump and to Brexit is a bad sign, because it hasn’t even begun to get really bad yet. It is going to get so much worse than this that people will look back to the reign of Trump as good times.

This is what we sowed, it is what we are going to reap, and it is what we are going to have to eat. It’s just that simple.

None of this means there is no hope. Some stuff will work out startlingly well, as was the case with the US and FDR in the 30s. Some stuff will be far worse than any but the most realistic thinkers are willing to contemplate, and in the middle of this it will still be possible for many to be happy, to find love, and to live satisfying lives, just as it was during the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s a weird metaphysical question, “Could this have been stopped?” and I’ll leave it aside for now. If we believe in free will, and if we want to have some hope that the future won’t follow the same pattern until we drive ourselves extinct, let us hope that it could have been stopped, not for what it says about the past, but what it says about the future, and about humans.

I’ll write more soon about our current period, best called The Twilight of Neoliberalism. For now, gird your loins. There will be ups and downs, but basically, it’s going to get worse. Find the happiness you can in the middle of it, and don’t let your happiness or well-being rest on geopolitical events you cannot control as an individual.

Originally published Nov 29, 2016.

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A Long, Hot Summer

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On June 3, 2020

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Back when Obama was elected, I was still an A-list blogger, and had some access. We advised Obama and the Senators creating the new financial laws that the correct action was to take over the banks and break them up, while bailing out Main Street. Criminal charges should be laid against bankers under RICO statutes for fraud, to ensure nothing like this happened again.

If they did not follow our advice, we warned that it would eventually lead both a strengthening of the populist right and to civil unrest.

Of course, they didn’t take that advice, and given who Obama chose to run his administration that should hardly have been a surprise. Indeed, it was Obama who pushed TARP through after it failed the first time–Pelosi was not going to pass it if Republicans would not vote for it in equal percentages, and they wouldn’t. Obama twisted arms, and the reports I received were that the threats were absolutely savage. TARP was, though most Democrats will not admit it, ultimately Obama’s bill, whether it was originally Bush’s or not.

It is after the 2008 financial crisis that American pathology starts going off the charts: We start seeing declining life expectancy among the working class, the opiate crisis spreads to poor and many middle class whites, and so on. It takes years for jobs to return, and inequality soars; it was worse under Obama than any other previous president. Yes, this is a continuation of trend, but Obama could have stopped it, simply by enforcing laws as written.

The response to the financial crisis set the standard: Bail out the rich, fuck the poor people–they receive some crumbs. This was repeated when Covid-19 hit, with multi-trillion dollar bailouts for the rich, and a single $1,200 check for everyone else, with some technocratic fixes around the edges. Billionaires gained control over more of the economy, small businesses were and are being gutted, and crisis capitalists are waiting to snap up billions in distressed businesses and properties.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile the neoliberal playbook, which was always about making the rich richer and everyone else poorer and about gutting the middle class the New Deal order built, kept the poors down by locking them up and with routing police brutality. Incarceration soared under neoliberal rulership, and Joe Biden was one of the architects, though you can see the trend starts under Reagan.

And so here we are, with protests and riots throughout the US. This was a long time coming, and it came because the lords and masters in the US refuse to throw anybody but the rich more than scraps. They funnel gold and caviar to the already wealthy at every opportunity; cat food to everyone else. They beat down anyone who acts uppity, giving cops massive license to be brutal, arming them with military weapons, and having them taught by Israelis whose experience is in beating down Palestinians in the occupied territories: people with no rights, regarded by Israelis as subhuman (no, don’t even pretend otherwise).

The cops see violence and brutality as their right. Any challenge to their authority is met with cruelty and abuse of power. They are fundamentally cowards, because they don’t believe their victims have any right to fight or even talk back. (Their essential cowardice has been proven when they are threatened, and is a weakness which could easily be exploited.)

Right now there is no reason to believe than any of the new Covid-19 bills will do more than give crumbs out. Food stamps are under threat of further restriction and, in New York, Governor Cuomo (whose popularity has increased despite his complete malign incompetence in handling Covid-19) used the crisis as part of his excuse to cut Medicaid, while keeping non violent offenders locked up in prison so that Covid could kill them.

Long and short, neoliberal elites don’t know how to give. They don’t have the instinct that New Deal elites, for all their flaws, had, that the job of government is prosperity for the masses. They know it is prosperity for the few, they feel in their bones that anyone who is poor doesn’t deserve more than a little bit of pity charity, and their instinct is punitive; the poor and middle class are undeserving and if they get uppity, what they need is a good smack.

Covid is not going to go away this summer. Multiple states have reopened without getting it even remotely under control. Testing has been reduced, but even so numbers show only minor decreases.

So we have a pandemic, a population nearing 30 percent unemployment, people who can’t pay the rent, and 40 years of impoverishment and brutality.

This summer has been a long time coming, and it’s only starting. Even if this wave of protests is crushed, or dies down, the smart money is that it isn’t the last wave.

And that’s a good thing.

Because as long as your lords and masters know they can only give you scraps and feed themselves at gold plated troughs, that’s how it’ll be.

If you are reading this, understand that this dynamic means that there can be no peace while the current ideology rules. The only possible peace is the peace of impoverished serfdom, of people beaten so far into the ground that they simply accept that everything will keep getting worse for them while the rich feast.

There is no good future for the US if neoliberalism, and neoliberal elites, continue to rule.

Take that into account in your planning.

And get ready for that long, hot summer.

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Why Read or Write About the Grand Affairs of Humanity?

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On May 27, 2020

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I’ve been thinking hard about why I write. It started as an attempt to fix the big things, by explaining what was wrong and how to fix them.

That didn’t work.

Really didn’t work. Almost 100 percent failure.

Unfortunately, much of my writing has continued in this mode: Explain the big wrong things. Didn’t work in the 00’s. Didn’t work in the 10’s. Unlikely to work in the 20s.

I’ve lost a lot of my heart for it. Explaining the world to people makes very little difference to the world, at least when I do it. Predicting trends and events years in advance, same.

So I’m going to change the emphasis of my writing. Oh, there’ll still be grand explainers, but I’m going to write them less with the hope that they’ll change the world, and more so that they help individuals and small groups navigate the world better. That way at least I’m more likely to help people

The big stuff is pretty much locked in now: We’ll see really bad climate change, we’re moving to a two-polar or multi-polar world, surveillance societies will be the norm until collapse, inequality will keep increasing in most countries, etc. Some is more locked in than other stuff; we could, in theory, reverse inequality (and we will, the question is when), but climate change is here to stay, and the international trade order is falling apart.

Back in 2000, when Bush v. Gore happened, my friend Stirling Newberry said, “We’re going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

He was right.

But, as I emphasized yesterday, even in very bad times, some people are doing well, and others are doing better than they might have. Perhaps we’re unlikely to change the big picture, but more of us can change our picture and those of smaller groups.

Knowing how the world works, how governments, large corporations, and billionaires work, and knowing how non-human systems like the environment work, will be useful to those people. You may not be able to change the world (though keep trying if you want, someone will), but you can adapt better or worse to it.

This doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing the bigger pieces. I’ve spent most of my adult life building a world model of which I’m proud. It’s different in some ways from anyone else’s (this doesn’t mean better, though I hope it is better than most), and I want to get it out into the wild. My book “The Construction of Reality” is part of that (and stuck at the editor who is overwhelmed thanks to Covid-19), and there will be other books, long essays, and so on.

Maybe that world view will find an audience in the future or be useful to the future, maybe it won’t, but I want to give it a try.

But on the blog, I’m going to shift the emphasis in articles to not just what’s going to happen but why and try and pull out more of the reasoning so that readers can learn to do the analysis themselves, and can use it plan for and react to the world’s changes over the next few decades.

Things are going to be bad–really bad–for a lot of people. The time is past where most of that can be stopped, and the odds of stopping that which can still be stopped are, in most cases, small, and beyond the reach of individuals.

What is not beyond our reach is helping ourselves, those we care about, and–hopefully–some people beyond that circle.

And it’s in hope of that, and of a future where people and their leaders are willing to do the right things, the good things, that I am going to reorient my writing.

Be well.

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Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

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On May 25, 2020

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One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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It’s Impossible to Overstate How Broken America Is

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On May 1, 2020

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I know I’ve been pounding this issue, but…

New: The Capitol physician told Republican staffers today the Senate lacks the capacity to test all 100 senators when it comes back Monday. Instead the Senate will test people who are sick. Test will take 2+ days.

Come on!!

They can’t even manage proper testing for 100 Senators!?

This is genuine failed state stuff.

As best I can see, the US has been coasting on institutions and infrastructure built primarily by the Lost, GI and Silent generations. Every generation after that has been drawing down the American patrimony. Almost nothing works properly that wasn’t built or at least started by those generations.

Modern elites, with a few exceptions, are simply rent extractors, financial elites competing to eat as much of the pie as possible.

Even most of the stuff that Boomers and later generations take credit for wasn’t actually created by them: Texas Instruments invented the modern GUI, not Gates or Jobs. The internet was invented by pre-Boomers, excepting Tim Berners-Lee (who created the world wide web which sits upon it.) Microchips were invented by the GI generation and improved by Silents.

But when the elites can’t even protect themselves? When they can’t even put together 100 tests for some of the most powerful people in the country? That’s insane. That’s straight failed state stuff.

The only reason the US merely a failing state, as opposed to a failed state, is because of the work put in by people who are mostly dead now. This is a straight “living off the principle” problem.

Meanwhile, the Covid crisis is being used as an opportunity to increase the top .1 percent’s control of the population, even at the cost of reducing the size of the economy (and not in smart ways, but in ad-hoc “fuck small business owners and workers” ways.)

More on that later.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Sheer Awe-inspiring American Clusterfuck

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On April 21, 2020

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This is not exaggeration for effect.

I am awed by the American handling of Coronavirus. Truly awed. I’ve been writing about the slow-motion American collapse for ages. Heck, last year I wrote an article about how the US is a failing state:

The US is a gold-flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.

Yee-hah!

So, right now we have five states in the US that never bothered to self-isolate.

We have the Governor of Georgia announcing he will allow gyms, barbers, and fitness clubs, among others, to reopen on the 24th.

We have the Governor of Florida reopening Florida’s beaches. Good thing Florida doesn’t have a lot of old people!

There are astroturf protests asking for an end to isolation. “Let us die, let us die, let us DIE!” (Also, let us kill others.)

Virtually all the relief money has flowed to the top, not the bottom. Landlords and tenants are in crisis. Unemployment is going over 30 percent and in many places higher. A vast swathe of US small business will be destroyed, and they are unlikely to recover in a generation. Firms which borrowed money to do stock buy backs, or to give money to their private equity purchasers are slopping at the trough, but many of the actual businesses on the ground (like Neiman Marcus) will go under.

PPE can’t be found for hospital or logistics workers. Important pieces of the logistics hub, like meat packing plants, are shutting down. Warehouse workers are protesting, truckers are scared, etc.

The US is unable to make or procure an adequate number of masks or prioritize who gets them (though, really, everyone should be). The ventilators made by GM are inadequate, because Trump wanted to keep the price down.

Hospitals not only don’t have enough PPE, they’re going bankrupt because they haven’t been given enough money.

And so on.

Failing state. Cannot actually do really basic things. New Zealand did everything right, the US has done almost nothing right, and when it has, it is undone by some drooling, incompetent, ideological stooge or corrupt businessman or politician: “Get them back to work! I’m losing money!”

Here’s one simple issue: New York and other states are turning the corner. Stats are difficult, but it can be seen in the reduction of new cases in the hospitals. It will take some time to really get the curve down, but it’s being done.

Meanwhile, there are still accelerating pockets of infection in states that never shut down and other states are re-opening too soon.

How do you handle this? Well, what I would do if I were governor is get together with other governors who aren’t completely evil and corrupt and close the borders between states. Shipped goods from lunatic states gets put in depots on the border and is picked up by local shippers, everyone from a state which hasn’t isolated correctly doesn’t get in unless they go into quarantine.

To do this, the Governors will likely have to call up the National Guard. The US will be divided into groups of states which have shut off almost all travel between themselves.

All assuming Trump doesn’t get in the way and make it impossible, in which case, reinfection! More isolation, etc.

A complete clusterfuck.

Iceland, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things. Jane Jacobs, in her book “Dark Age Ahead,” said that the key sign of the oncoming Dark Age was old knowledge being lost; that things which we could once do, we no longer could. She actually used the CDC as an example, and that was decades ago.

This is genuinely awe-inspiring to watch. I am truly amazed. I imagine it’s like watching the late Roman Empire, muttering to oneself, “We were never as great as they say, but we we could get things done.”

But the American elite reaction to anything these days is to see it as a looting opportunity. Pump up the stock market, let the peons starve and run out of rent money, shovel money to the rich, and buy up distressed assets. That’s what both DC Republicans and Democrats are doing and okay with. Yes, yes, Democrats are okay with it. They could actually play hardball and have not, and instead have capitulated after token protests.

There are clusters of competence, of course, but they are overwhelmed by incompetence, corruption, and callous disregard for anyone who doesn’t make at least seven figures a year. The elites are inbred, out of touch with actual production and only capable of playing political games. They get money by manipulating politics, not by genuine production.

The masses are little better. If New York Governor Cuomo had put New York on isolation even two weeks earlier, he could have saved thousands of lives. He has been behind the ball on everything all the way down the line. Of course, his approval numbers are soaring. (He’s an inbred incompetent, but less incompetent than Trump, so I guess he’s graded on a scale.)

It’s impossible to keep up with this, but the bottom line is that the US is broken. You’ve off-shored too much production capacity, your elites are incompetent, out of touch, corrupt, and trained to make their money by hurting other people. Your population refuses to vote for anyone who does the right thing, and instead keeps choosing (with the aid of the media, yes) people who are evil and so impaired that a sensible person would be aghast at the thought of even hiring them to walk their dog or babysit their kids. (Tell me that you would tolerate either Biden or Trump doing either job. But those are the people you want to be the most important person in the country.)

All empires and great nations end. With almost no exceptions, they rot from the inside, and any outside push is secondary–such as from threats they could easily have defeated in their prime (as Rome was able to keep the Germans on the other side of the Rhine for centuries).

America is a failing state. It can’t even handle problems for which the solution is well-defined. It can’t resist turning every crisis into an opportunity to make its elites richer. Its population prefers incompetent and depraved leaders who have spent their entire lives demonstrating contempt for the people who vote for them.

Failing state.

But awe inspiring to watch. Surreal. Amazing.

edit (April 23, 2020): Replaced “New Zealand” with Iceland for the quote about who they learned from. Both countries have handled Covid far better than the US to date.

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Geopolitics and the Economy After Covid-19

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On April 7, 2020

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Nope, not yet

First the good/bad news. Covid-19 isn’t going to bring down the “system.” It’s not a hard enough shock.

There are things we should learn from it, about what work is actually needed, about the fact that more people will not die because of reduced pollution during isolation periods than from the virus, and so on.

Mostly, we won’t learn those lessons.

One lesson which will be, not exactly learned, but used, is that if you don’t make it in your country, you can’t be sure of having it when it matters. Physical manufacturing matters: It can be designed in the US, but if it’s made in China, well…Trump almost stopped 3m from selling masks to Canada, be sure that the fact that he can has also been noticed.

There were already powerful forces, and not just in the Trump administration, who were unhappy with the current world trade and offshoring system. The more intelligent parts of the American permanent ruling class have noticed that the actual threat to American hegemony is China, and that when China makes things the US needs, China has the US by the balls.

They’ve been wanting to bring as much production back to the US as possible and they’ve been wanting to force the world into two trading blocs. These are the sort people who become livid when a European country chooses Huawei 5G, and start making threats about NATO.

They are, of course, right to be worried. The offshoring of production had catastrophic effects for Britain, when they off-shored to the US in the 19th century. They said the same sort of things Americans say now, “We still design, they just make the stuff.” That didn’t last: Manufacturing produces designers in time, there are things learned best when you’re right next to the plants. It took about three decades, but the design moved to the US, and Britain never recovered, eventually surviving through financialization, a weak shadow of itself, sustained on rents which the rest of the world can easily, one day, decide not to pay.

So Covid-19, which is putting shocks through the trade system anyway, is going to be used to justify bringing production back to various countries, to re-shoring. Trade will go down, not up, the supply chain will be less broken into pieces, and there will be a push towards a new cold war with two trade blocs. There may wind up being three depending on what Europe does, but the plan is to force Europeans into the US bloc.

In general economic terms in the US and UK, what will happen is just what happened after 2008—the big boys will be bailed out, those who have money (or are given trillions by the Fed and Treasury) will then buy up distressed assets. There will be fewer, bigger players again, the general economy will be worse for ordinary people, blah, blah. You know the play.

This won’t lead to revolution or revolutionary change yet, I suspect. I think it’ll take at least one more big shock before people become desperate enough. And, of course, the right play is to pick some part of the poor and have them oppress the other half of the poor in exchange for not-too-shitty a life. Poor white sharecroppers who get to call the equivalent of African Americans “boy.”

That play, given the weakness of the left in America and the UK, may well work. We shall see.

But be sure of this, there will be more shocks. This is a system which has no “give.” It has no surplus capacity to handle shocks, not at the real economy level: All our elites know is politics and printing digital money and giving it to their friends, without insisting on real production. Oh, they’ll try to re-shore production, but they are fundamentally incompetent and will run it badly. Be sure of that.

So this isn’t the big one. But climate change is rumbling, resource shortages are onrushing, and our sclerotic society and incompetent elites will turn what should be shocks that are easily handled into crisis after crisis.

The future is going to be interesting. Be prepared. The old world is dying, the new world has not yet been born, and there will be a great deal of pain and screaming in both the death and birth.

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