Amerika

A book named The Age of Menace described the state of the world from a financial perspective instead of an ideological or peer pressure one:

The period of decline in liberal democratic ideology can be traced back to prolonged fracturing of meaning in culture, language, and politics, which has been fuelled by capitalism run amok.

Should this trend continue, as academics such as Thomas Piketty have predicted, it seems an enormous social crisis, likely on global scale, would be inevitable.

They are looking for an excuse to blame capitalism for the organizational failure of democracy. They want more of the liberal order instead: double-down on international multilateral coordination and upholding of financial structures such as taxation to not so much avoid disaster as avoid a perpetual conflict and stand-off scenario.

In other words, they want diplomacy to return because it will be good for global wealth. They must first contend with political instability in America, which as unipolar leader, forces all other nations to adjust to its power. This has become a cultural attribute of the American political system.

John Mearsheimer described power as a function of wealth and demographics; powerful countries exhibit powerful politics. The first goal of such power politics is to preserve itself by maintaining the unipolar world, which was created when the Soviet Union failed and American WW1/WW2 strategy of world war for democracy won out over all competitors.

According to Mearsheimer, America lost its unipolar hegemonic initiative in 2017. This occurred because America lost the political culture that made it powerful initially. Donald Trump wants to restore that political culture but he faces resistance from the entrenched contemporary political culture that fears change and will sabotage it.

Consider that there are no DINOs (Democrat in Name Only) but we have plenty of RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). This shows how the Overton widow has permanently shifted: all Leftism is acceptable, but actual conservatism is not tolerated by our contemporary political culture.

Even if Trump wins, the American culture he will want to resurrect, does not exist presently. Some argue, in books such as Culture’s Consequences, that American political culture became feminized or unisexed somewhere approximately around 1997. Others would say this was the consequence of the Clinton regime.

This suggests that the loss of American unipolar hegeomonic initiative in 2017 was merely a realization of the conquest of the masculine dimension by the feminine dimension in 1997, which means that we now wage a war of symbols based on Francis Fukuyama’s assumption that history has ended and liberal democracy is our future permanent state.

This type of scenario where nobody talks or everybody talks past each other, can also be described from a Dark Organization perspective, where the future is limited to perpetual small types of conflicts, almost like one would expect in a bankrupt company before it declares its bankruptcy.

Some describe the failure of the American political system, such as Jim Collins in How the Mighty Fall, through the following stages that are typical of collapsing democracies:

• 1950 — Hubris: post-WW2 “winners” established the United Nations.
• 1990 — Pursuit for more: came after the Berlin Wall fell.
• 2010 — Denial of Risk: caused Americans to elect Obama.
• 2020 — Grasping for straws: caused Americans to elect Trump.
• 2025 — Capitulation: will come through collapse expected after Trump exits office.

The original 2018 article assumed that Trump would have a second term and did not expect his political opponents to manipulate him out of office. However, the decline was accelerated because of the response to his first term, meaning that the actual capitulation occurred in 2020.

This pattern suggests that American revenue will fall to less than 20% of its top performance. While it is true that a war economy has revived its wealth prospects in the WW1/2 era, things may be different in the current era; Biden’s apparent desire to become a war-time President reflects desperation not planning.

A war economy as follows:

• Philippe Le Billon describes a war economy as a “system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain the violence.”
• War economy is the organization of a country’s production capacity and distribution during a time of conflict. A war economy must make substantial adjustments to its consumer production to accommodate defense production needs.

Practically it simply means that products are manufactured for war purposes, rather than demographic consumption, which in turn means that the profit model for the economy is production of weapons and soldiers. Both Soviet Communism and Revolutionary France reverted to war economies when they could not produce a functional economy otherwise.

The key here is manufacturing, where Chinese manufacturing dwarfs that of America (which was encouraged intentionally by previous American Presidents starting with Clinton). This lack of manufacturing strength means that a war economy will no longer work for America.

Countries with manufacturing ability can now establish war economies on their own, and hundreds of countries have been developing their own military manufacturing, even Uganda. The war economy has gone global because our old way of producing economies was savaged by the limited socialism of mixed economies (also called “neoliberalism”).

For those of us caught in the middle, this means that we are entering a new dark age formed of not capitalism, but the sabotage of capitalism by our ideological political culture, which means that all of humanity is now following the Soviets and Jacobins into the dustbin of history.

Tags: dark age, geert hofstede, hegemony, jim collins, war economy