“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.
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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.
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Other times it’s glee:
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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.