"Your best teacher is your last mistake"-Ralph Nader
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It began as a conversation...
It’s genuinely scary to be an American these days. And a baffled world is looking on confused, shuddering and wondering: “What the? What have Americans let happen to their society? What if that happens here?”
What is “that,” exactly?
America is having is the Mother of All Social Collapses. It’s hard to put into words because it really is something strange, new, unprecedented, shocking, gruesome. It’s like a major earthquake — it’s going to redefine the world’s fault lines for generations to come.
I say that because of Trump’s America, you see it trending on Twitter; in response, people had written all kinds of funny, depressing, angry rejoinders.
But it seemed impossible, maybe, to encapsulate it all. The scale and scope of what America’s become, the bottomless depth, and towering height of the failure of a society like this.
Trump’s America is many things. Even I struggle to express the extent of the calamity in words by now. It’s a place where mass death is an everyday affair. Trump’s America is a plague state, wracked by illness and disease. Trump’s America is an economic trainwreck. It’s a society whose social bonds have been blown apart by hate and brutality and selfishness. It’s a budding police state — those “federal agents” are coming to your streets. It’s a collapsing nation — one imploding into authoritarianism, poverty, disease, and death.
Like I said, even I struggle to put it into words.
However, the cynic in me can express it much more succinctly and precisely.
When I say “The Mother of All Social Collapses,” I mean it. Trump’s America is a society that combines all the strands of social collapse that we know if — and then some. Yes, really.
Economically, Trump’s America is Soviet. Politically and socially, it resembles Nazi Germany (yeah I said it). And culturally, it’s Taliban-esque (said that too), aggressively retrograde. That’s a lot of ruin for one country, which is why it’s so hard to put into words. It really is breathtaking and staggering when you think about it.
Let me begin with the economy — how Trump’s America is Soviet.
Its intellectual class seems incapable of processing much, or even any, of the above. As long as billionaires are getting richer, and the stock market’s rising — what’s the problem? Like the Soviet Union, America has a strange set of measures for the health and prosperity of a society, which don’t seem to account for anything that actually matters, whether happiness, wealth, stability, safety, or sanity. And like the Soviet Union, only paying attention to those self-created indicators of a kind of ideologically self-defined success has made America incapable of grasping the tiniest shreds of truth, like the fact that American life is shit for most people now.
Like the Soviet Union, Trump’s America is a place that can’t provide the basics for people anymore. Like decent jobs — 50% of Americans now work “low wage service jobs,” which is today’s jargon for the menial work of servants to the rich. Like the basic good of public health — America has the world’s worst Coronavirus outbreak in a very long way, and it’s probably not going away…ever. Like decent food or water, which, if you’ve lived in Europe or Canada, are of a whole different league. Like public safety — think of about the rise in crime (by civilians and police), or how many women and minorities continuously are shafted. Like money — many Americans (Including myself) live paycheck to paycheck. Like hope and optimism for the future, which keeps a society confident, buoyant, gentle, working together — Americans now expect life to get steadily worse. They’re probably right. America can’t provide the most basic of basics for people anymore, from medicine to money to jobs to public health to safety. There’s no deeper way in which a society can fail.
Wait, let me correct that. There is one deeper way. The lights can go out. A society can turn dark.
That brings me to the next thing Trump’s America is. It’s also pretty, well, Nazi. Yes, Nazis. Look, before you react angrily to that, sputtering into denial let me say one thing: many around the world think this. I’m only sharing with you what every single person who’s not American says to me every single goddamned day. From my friends in London copper to my friends in Sweden, Hong Kong to all my friends in Canada. Americans are the only ones who are still in denial about it.
Trump’s America is pretty Nazi. Come on — it’s not exactly hard to see. Concentration camps, family separations, raids, bans, purges, hate, dehumanization, and so on. Who else does that?
We’re all taught about Nazism, but while the entire world is now like “Wow, America turned kind of Nazi, huh?” by and large, within America, that’s still somehow a controversial proposition. You get the blank look from Americans when you say the word fascism — the one that everyone who’s not American knows when the mind shuts down when a truth too dangerous to utter has been spoken. Of course, that’s also fascism.
Trump’s America is a place where the denial of good people runs rampant. Nazis? What Nazis? Where? Denial is a crucial element is a society turning politically Nazi. When I say “America resembles Nazi Germany politically and socially,” I don’t just mean the Trumpists — I also mean the regular old American who’s the only person left on planet earth who’s still in denial about it, like the good German of the 1930s.
What happened in Nazi Germany was what political scientists politely call a “silent majority.” Today, America has one. And for some baffling reason, Americans seem to think a silent majority is a good thing. That a polite majority who say nothing is proof of some kind of civilized nature. Nothing could be more wrong. “Silent majority” is not a compliment. It’s an insult! It’s a disappointment, a condemnation. You don’t want a silent majority in a society. A silent majority paves the way for every kind of authoritarian implosion under the sun, from fascist to theocratic to kleptocratic to all of them put together.
In the Islamic World, the silent majority is what let the fundamentalists and fanatics take over, and wreck societies that were once democracies. In Nazi Germany, the silent majority is what allowed the Nazis to seize power, and then abuse it. In the Soviet Union, the silent majority is what let the communist machine wreck everyday life and society.
Let me say it again because I think it’s important. Americans seem to have been taught that a silent majority is a wonderful and noble thing, like some kind of sleeping dragon, who’ll suddenly awaken, and defend the land from the barbarians. It’s not. A silent majority is not a good thing for a society to have. It’s a terrible one. It’s a patient on life support having a stroke.
It’s what we call that part of a society who is too scared, frightened, weary, or willfully ignorant to live up to their responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.
A silent majority is a bad thing, not a good one. It’s negative. It’s not a sleeping dragon, it’s more like one that’s passed out, drunk, while the barbarians set fire to the citadel. It’s a sign that a society has one of the final elements necessary to implode, which is…acquiescence, cowardice, or indifference, or maybe all three.
That brings me to the next thing Trump’s America is. Fanatical. While the good people are a silent majority — and again, that’s not a good thing — the American Idiot apparently wants to make America look, ironically, a lot like the Islamic world he purportedly hates. The American Idiot has flourished into a kind of weird Taliban of its own, demanding everything from control over women’s bodies to refusing vaccinations to not teaching kids science.
Nowhere else in the civilized world can you go and find the kinds of bizarre “debates” you do in America — over things for which there really is no debate. Should people wear masks? Does evolution exist? Should women not be objects and possessions? Are minorities human beings? Is it OK for a society to be a place of constant abuse, cruelty, aggression, and violence? Should people have no healthcare? How about kids — should we teach them superstition, not science, and then arm their teachers, in case a mass murderer shows up?
What the?
Americans don’t quite get it, but nowhere else in the world is like this. The closest comparison I have is the Islamic world, where people also tend to debate poppycock and superstition intensely and seriously, as though teaching a kid that human beings evolved was somehow going to seal their fate in the afterlife. But even in the Islamic world, America’s levels of everyday cruelty and aggression are hard to find — kids there aren’t getting shot at schools, they’re just getting turned into idiots.
The American Idiot has turned America into a society where idiocy of every kind flourishes. That’s how the Islamic World imploded, too, by the way. It wasn’t always like this — despite what you’ve heard. It used to be a literate, civilized, artistic, learned place. Then the mullahs arrived, the majorities fell silent — and the rest is history.
The American Idiot’s story is much the same. He’s pushed a kind of line of incredible cultural idiocy that rotted and broke the American Mind. Science was replaced with superstition, human decency with aggression, the thoughtfulness with unthinking cruelty, knowledge with the ignorances of racism, misogyny, hate, and greed. Trump’s election was the triumph of the American Idiot, and since then, stunning leaps in idiocy have been made.
Because the American Idiot has successfully made every kind of superstition and regression into a “debate,” the result is that Americans can’t…go anywhere. It’s so busy trying to debate the American Idiot that it doesn’t have time or energy left to learn. From a world that is now far more successful. Why is it that Europeans enjoy such vastly higher standards of living? Why don’t they have to choose between their lives and their life savings? Why is it that Canadians have good healthcare and decent pensions? But when you’re busy “debating” whether, say, teachers should be armed or whether that secret police abducting moms and gassing mayors really is one…where can you go? Not forwards — only less backward.
It feels frightening and surreal to live in Trump’s America these days for a good reason. Because it is. America is having the Mother of All Social Collapses; Call it the MASC if you want an (unintentionally ironic) acronym.
The social collapse of Trump’s America is having is a super collapse. It combines the worst elements of all the social collapses that we know of. Hence, the Mother of All Social Collapses.
Economically, America is a weird mirror image of the Soviet Union — a society that’s unable to provide basics for its citizens anymore, leaving them to battle each other for whatever morsels of a decent life they can, in a perpetual, daily, desperate, bitter battle for survival. Just like in the Soviet Union, negligence and irresponsibility have led to economic stagnation, the implosion of the middle and working classes into mass poverty and mass hopelessness…and now, finally, to mass death.
Politically, America resembles Nazi Germany — right down to the silent majority, not just the silence of that majority baffles the world — while Americans seem to think a silent majority is a good thing.
Culturally, America is a cousin of the Islamic World, where crackpots and theocrats want to organize a nation as a crusade for salvation, not as a modern, functioning society, where an Army of Idiots that’s an overly powerful minority has rendered any kind of social progress flatly impossible.
America’s collapse is a real one and a special one. It isn’t just a Nazi collapse. It isn’t just an authoritarian collapse. It isn’t just economic collapse. It isn’t even just a cultural collapse into hate and backwardness and superstition. It’s all those things put together.
The world hasn’t really seen all that put together before. The Soviet Union didn’t want to be a theocracy, and neither did the Nazis. The mullahs of the Islamic World wanted to provide basics for all — they weren’t capitalists — mistaken as they were as to how to go about it. And so on. America combines all the strands of social collapse that we know of, and then adds some of its own — like the idiocy of the non-mask-wearer or the anti-vaxxer or the Fox News addict.
It’s honestly embarrassing to be American these days. The world is closing its doors to us. The bodies are piling up. You can’t have a decent life, it seems, no matter how hard you work — you’ll never pay off those “debts.” There’s an Army of Idiots, led by a Psychopath-in-Chief, who thinks being able to carry a gun to Starbucks is a basic human right — but healthcare isn’t. Where will you go? What will you do?
Welcome to Trump’s America.
You’re living through the Mother of All Social Collapses. It might just last another four years —but if you don’t do something, it might last for much longer still.
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