The US is declining (collapsing more likely) and justly so. The rest of the world(apart from the usual lickspittles) are at best unconcerned and more likely supportive of the collapse.
The collapse is essentially moral (it’s values are decadent and debased). Economic decline (or collapse) inevitably follows moral collapse.
The actual political minutiae of the process of decline/collapse is of no importance at all. Inevitably though , this is what the “experts” focus on as they have no real perspective on the process.
I mentioned that minority voters were upset about immigration. The issue here is the messaging around ICE, not that ICE is doing its job (which it appears to be doing very slowly with as much showmanship as possible). It's a missed opportunity to unify the base and bring more people into it, but instead the opportunity is squandered deploy some sort of neo-South Strategy. MAGA is clearly not taking on the International financier class, but instead supporting it with different prerogatives. Maybe this is all a distraction?
“MAGA is clearly not taking on the International financier class”
Which is the basic problem with Trump 2.0. He surrounds himself with all these neocons, and actually listens to a non-entity like Kellogg.
The establishment GOP can’t wait to stab Trump in the back, but until the time is ripe for that, they’re apparently happy to dress in MAGA colors and pretend that support for Israel is America First.
I think you will find that leftism was certainly not "unchecked" in the 1960s. The whole reason Nixon won his election was a growing backlash against the radical youth. My article is not blaming MAGA for this state of affairs either. There's plenty of blame to lay at the left of the Obama administration. My overall point is that MAGA lost an opportunity for something better than this. Trump received a clear mandate from the American people and has decided to seek more division instead of crafting a new vision for the American people.
From my perspective, Trump is not enacting his agenda, he’s just putting on a show. What are you blaming the left for when the only guy they had was Jimmy Carter, the one term president, —until the Clinton Admin — which even conservatives are nostalgic for. The GOP ruled the USA for the majority of this 60 year period you are referring to.
Look, the government expanded consistently from the 1960's through the 2010's and those agencies are effectively the real government. They are overwhelmingly democrat jobs programs, and multiple sets of laws (vra, cra, ect) effectively enshrined leftists positions as the law of the land.
Fundamentally, America is a leftist nation, as the result of leftist Enlightenment thought. The USA has been a key geopolitical player in dismantling the old order of tradition.
There are conservative approaches within this framework, but let's not pretend that VRA and CRA are not natural consequences of the philosophical principles that America is founded upon.
Also, what you are describing is the transition from one kind of liberalism to another: classical liberalism to social liberalism, a process that was already underway for sometime — as classical liberalism was failing as an ethos for an ascending America which needed social programs (e.g. Department of Education under Reagan) to train its citizens for the post-war era of American dominance.
Fundamentally, a nation doesn't seek to have violent racial conflict within its borders, nor for its population to devolve into two irreconcilable factions. It seeks a degree of unity for productivity and its partisan lines to be drawn to keep people believing in the dog and pony show of democratic politics — but not rioting in the streets.
This false left vs right dichotomy you offer me is what happens your reading of history starts in 1935 and hyperfixates on the American perspective. It fails to understand what America represents, her philosophical foundations, and the broader trends of political philosophy through the centuries.
CORRECT: "Fundamentally, America is a leftist nation, as the result of leftist Enlightenment thought."
So it follows that the hordes of Americans who claim to be conservative and antileft are clowish fools who do not know theirselves. The American conservative is desperate to preserve a system which leads to outcomes he loathes and which he refuses to understand, mostly because he despises the burden and discomfort of self-examination.
Lol bro i have not offered you a dicotomy i'm just observing the temperature of the country and basic friend-enemy. The right isn't an ideological category it's the official opposition collition. They are tied together by a shared persecution under the global order. Thats why i said it's everyone else vs race communism.
As for the bent of the united states, it's not a nation in any real sense it's an empire of sorts.
These observations are rooted in the realization that history did not in fact start post-ww2 and that, to steal a phrase, things have been fucked since the 17th century.
That said, in practical terms doing big things is easier than doing small things. It's much easier to sell retvrn to a dissaffected shitlib than some vague middle way conservatism that goes nowhere.
There is no gay race communism (that's just a meme). There was never anything communist about it and that was an export of the liberal world order, which the United States benefits in upholding as its a vehicle for their hegemony (as you corrected pointed out is an empire not a nation). It was the attempted Americanification of global culture.
Now, if you think MAGA is going to dismantle the liberal world order, then keep drinking the Kool Aid. Trump has been utilizing tariffs to desperately maintain American hegemony, not replace it with a new system.
The right is an ideological category with many subdivisions that has been more capable of working together because of being persecuted, but the very people who persecuted it have adopted some of its line and are compromising with it. We now see phenomenon, such as in the UK, where the right are adopting feminist talking points and the left have adopted anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Now that we see this is unfolding before our eyes: do we on the right believe that we are still in coalition with people like MAGA who undermine everything we've been building by appealing to low IQ chuds who will repel all respectable people from our movement?
I, for one, see no reason to parlay with people like this who are far more odious than middle way conservatism which at least they knew what they were doing with the economy. Nothing about MAGA is a return to a pre-enlightenment world, nor the beginnings of it.
Nor is that necessarily desirable. We can never RETVRN, and there were problems with those pre-enlightenment systems too. The question for the right is what do keep from the enlightenment, and what do we try to restore from the more distant past.
I don't see much of that happening in America, nor can it go back to a period that doesn't exist in its history. America is a product of the Enlightenment with no other alternatives to look back to. We on the right need to be suspicious of Americans and never make it locus of our movement.
Nigger every plank of the communist manifesto is in place and they were handing out subsidized mortgages and forgiven loans to anyone who wasn't white fuck off with "there is no gay race communism" FDR's wife was a card carrying member of the communist party USA.
Wake up and smell the ashes, you live in the slow motion collapse of the GAE and MAGA is just everyone trying to cobble together a lifeboat.
This author may not be emotionally and cognitively prepared to recognize root problems: The USA has been, all along, a civilizational wrong turn, as any major course change must be when directed and dominated by merchants, lawyers, financiers, imperialists, and egalitarian ideologues. The roots of this tragic mistake are buried in the past, of course, but esp. in the foolish Protestant rebellion against Rome's own foolishness; the experiment with republicanism under the Cromwells; and the English obsession with commerce and industrialism of the past 370 years or so.
The people of the so-called West lack plausible, widely believed explanations of existence, theirselves, and correct goals in life. So most of us don't know what to do with our time other than to satisfy base needs and desire. We are also, for the most part, rabidly averse to asking the right questions about existence and life. Instead most of us prefer the comfort of idolatrous superstition, the thrill of acquisition through commerce, gluttonous consumption, the brutality of war, sexual titillation, or amusement with gadgets and by spectacles such as sport and moving pictures. So, it's no coincidence, I think, that in Donald J. Trump many of the West's lost people have found an external reflection of their own vulgar selves to follow into the alley dumpster of history, perhaps in the holocaust of another nuclear war.
The prospects for a healthy major course correction are poor, but we do know that the solution we need won't involve Making America Great Again, much less servilely doing the bidding of Jewish supremacists. Instead, we must, at minimum, Make America Go Away, and this with Christianity, democracy, consumerism, militarism, and other lowness which too many in the West are frantic to perpetuate.
The author makes some valid points, but the tenor of his article appears to be that we are in a nation-building phase and that Trump and MAGA are not doing an adequate job of it.
Nation-building phases often come after a war, i.e. the new nation after the Revolutionary war, again after the Civil War, after World War II, and, perhaps, after the Cold war in the 1990’s. I wish we were in such a period, but we are not. We are not after a war, but rather in it.
The main problem now is not building a nation but saving it. I believe Trump and most of his supporters implicitly understand that a nation is its people and when that people is being replaced, the nation is being lost.
Apart from this, the U.S is 38 trillion in debt, it has been heavily deindustrialized, young people are dying from drug overdoses by the thousands, infrastructure is crumbling and inner cities look like war zones.
Yes, Trump is managing decline, because that is the situation he inherited. But apart from that, he has to come across as positive and inspirational. Could he have done a better job? Perhaps. But he was dealt a lousy hand.
White Nationalism
Thomas Jefferson said that the U.S. was open to “all white people of good character”. Similar sentiments were expressed by the other Founding Fathers and by many Americans in later periods. These sentiments were radical at the time. The English did not invite the Italians to come live there or vice versa. The American Nation developed out of predominantly European immigrants who had little in common except they were white. The U.S. has always been viewed as a predominantly white country; if it was not discussed much was not because it was a secret, but because it was obvious. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which opened the U.S. to mass immigration was enacted on the promise, and genuine belief, that the ethnic composition of the U.S. would not change. In the last 40 or so years third world immigration has sharply increased. This will radically change the U.S. I think it will change it for the worse, others think it will be better.
Trump is not a White Nationalist at all and if some if followers are, their White Nationalism is historically on the weak side.
Unity
Trump did not create disunity, he inherited it.
Charlie Kirk was one who really tried to bridge the gap between the right and the left through debate and discussion. For this, he was assassinated, an assassination which was widely celebrated by the left.
The Right sees the left as mistaken, as clowns. They call the left “Clown World” and make memes. In short, the Left are inadvertently funny and to be laughed at.
The Left sees the Right as evil. They are not clowns; they are demons. You do not laugh at demons, you kill them. Which is precisely what they are doing. There have been assassination attempts on the President, Supreme Court Justices and Republican Members of Congress. Members of Trump’s administration have to live on military bases to stay alive. Bloggers and journalists on the Right of some note have to hire security to stay safe. ICE officers and others are constantly being doxxed with the understanding that they and their families should be killed or harmed.
I would love a red/blue alliance. Unfortunately, that is not the world we currently live in.
Trump can't help himself. But his unwillingness to unify the country is not the same as supporting white nationalism. As you say, white nationalism is such a nothingburger that people can't be bothered to even loosely agree on what it is.
I don't think Trump genuinely supports white nationalism or has any intention of deporting as many people as he promised, but utilizing 4chan memes as propaganda makes you wonder what exactly this administration's prerogative is.
50% making it up as he goes, and 50% 4-D chess. I think the 4-D chess part is “making the world safe for trade” which means de-fanging Western Europe, Britain, and Israel.
Thanks Noopolitik. You might be right about the myth and it has crossed my mind, but I cannot go as far as to speak definitively on that since I no longer live in the States for a decade now, and my short visits aren't enough to really gain the insight into the current cultural milieu — especially as I get some kind of inverse culture shock whenever I go back. I know the American Dream has been dying for some time, but I am not sure how the public-at-large relates to that decline of faith of in the myth.
The US is declining (collapsing more likely) and justly so. The rest of the world(apart from the usual lickspittles) are at best unconcerned and more likely supportive of the collapse.
The collapse is essentially moral (it’s values are decadent and debased). Economic decline (or collapse) inevitably follows moral collapse.
The actual political minutiae of the process of decline/collapse is of no importance at all. Inevitably though , this is what the “experts” focus on as they have no real perspective on the process.
Meh… You can blame Trump for a lot, but this is rather silly.
MAGAs has always been about taking America back from the international financier class. You can’t separate that from closing the border.
And btw: Hispanic Americans suffer just as much from unchecked immigration as WASPs. Probably more.
I mentioned that minority voters were upset about immigration. The issue here is the messaging around ICE, not that ICE is doing its job (which it appears to be doing very slowly with as much showmanship as possible). It's a missed opportunity to unify the base and bring more people into it, but instead the opportunity is squandered deploy some sort of neo-South Strategy. MAGA is clearly not taking on the International financier class, but instead supporting it with different prerogatives. Maybe this is all a distraction?
“MAGA is clearly not taking on the International financier class”
Which is the basic problem with Trump 2.0. He surrounds himself with all these neocons, and actually listens to a non-entity like Kellogg.
The establishment GOP can’t wait to stab Trump in the back, but until the time is ripe for that, they’re apparently happy to dress in MAGA colors and pretend that support for Israel is America First.
It’s a disgusting farce.
Blaming MAGA for the current disunity in the USA is painfully stupid.
MAGA is the result of the disunity. MAGS was created by 60+ years of unchecked leftist politics.
I think you will find that leftism was certainly not "unchecked" in the 1960s. The whole reason Nixon won his election was a growing backlash against the radical youth. My article is not blaming MAGA for this state of affairs either. There's plenty of blame to lay at the left of the Obama administration. My overall point is that MAGA lost an opportunity for something better than this. Trump received a clear mandate from the American people and has decided to seek more division instead of crafting a new vision for the American people.
Nixon’s election was a band-aid on sucking chest wound.
Your premise is flawed. The division you describe is exactly because Trump is actually attempting to enact his agenda.
From my perspective, Trump is not enacting his agenda, he’s just putting on a show. What are you blaming the left for when the only guy they had was Jimmy Carter, the one term president, —until the Clinton Admin — which even conservatives are nostalgic for. The GOP ruled the USA for the majority of this 60 year period you are referring to.
Your perspective is deeply flawed.
Have you seen what’s happening at the border? It’s basically closed.
Have you seen what happened on his Asian tour? He brought China to the negotiating table by sourcing rare-earth minerals from other nations.
Have you seen what’s happening in Tech? The H1-B program is crumbling.
What are you expecting?
He got out-negotiated by China what are you talking about. I addressed H1-Bs in my article.
Wrong.
He did not get out-negotiated. That’s a blatant misrepresentation.
This is glue-eating schoolhouse rock logic.
Look, the government expanded consistently from the 1960's through the 2010's and those agencies are effectively the real government. They are overwhelmingly democrat jobs programs, and multiple sets of laws (vra, cra, ect) effectively enshrined leftists positions as the law of the land.
Fundamentally, America is a leftist nation, as the result of leftist Enlightenment thought. The USA has been a key geopolitical player in dismantling the old order of tradition.
There are conservative approaches within this framework, but let's not pretend that VRA and CRA are not natural consequences of the philosophical principles that America is founded upon.
Also, what you are describing is the transition from one kind of liberalism to another: classical liberalism to social liberalism, a process that was already underway for sometime — as classical liberalism was failing as an ethos for an ascending America which needed social programs (e.g. Department of Education under Reagan) to train its citizens for the post-war era of American dominance.
Fundamentally, a nation doesn't seek to have violent racial conflict within its borders, nor for its population to devolve into two irreconcilable factions. It seeks a degree of unity for productivity and its partisan lines to be drawn to keep people believing in the dog and pony show of democratic politics — but not rioting in the streets.
This false left vs right dichotomy you offer me is what happens your reading of history starts in 1935 and hyperfixates on the American perspective. It fails to understand what America represents, her philosophical foundations, and the broader trends of political philosophy through the centuries.
CORRECT: "Fundamentally, America is a leftist nation, as the result of leftist Enlightenment thought."
So it follows that the hordes of Americans who claim to be conservative and antileft are clowish fools who do not know theirselves. The American conservative is desperate to preserve a system which leads to outcomes he loathes and which he refuses to understand, mostly because he despises the burden and discomfort of self-examination.
Spot on 🎯
Lol bro i have not offered you a dicotomy i'm just observing the temperature of the country and basic friend-enemy. The right isn't an ideological category it's the official opposition collition. They are tied together by a shared persecution under the global order. Thats why i said it's everyone else vs race communism.
As for the bent of the united states, it's not a nation in any real sense it's an empire of sorts.
These observations are rooted in the realization that history did not in fact start post-ww2 and that, to steal a phrase, things have been fucked since the 17th century.
That said, in practical terms doing big things is easier than doing small things. It's much easier to sell retvrn to a dissaffected shitlib than some vague middle way conservatism that goes nowhere.
There is no gay race communism (that's just a meme). There was never anything communist about it and that was an export of the liberal world order, which the United States benefits in upholding as its a vehicle for their hegemony (as you corrected pointed out is an empire not a nation). It was the attempted Americanification of global culture.
Now, if you think MAGA is going to dismantle the liberal world order, then keep drinking the Kool Aid. Trump has been utilizing tariffs to desperately maintain American hegemony, not replace it with a new system.
The right is an ideological category with many subdivisions that has been more capable of working together because of being persecuted, but the very people who persecuted it have adopted some of its line and are compromising with it. We now see phenomenon, such as in the UK, where the right are adopting feminist talking points and the left have adopted anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Now that we see this is unfolding before our eyes: do we on the right believe that we are still in coalition with people like MAGA who undermine everything we've been building by appealing to low IQ chuds who will repel all respectable people from our movement?
I, for one, see no reason to parlay with people like this who are far more odious than middle way conservatism which at least they knew what they were doing with the economy. Nothing about MAGA is a return to a pre-enlightenment world, nor the beginnings of it.
Nor is that necessarily desirable. We can never RETVRN, and there were problems with those pre-enlightenment systems too. The question for the right is what do keep from the enlightenment, and what do we try to restore from the more distant past.
I don't see much of that happening in America, nor can it go back to a period that doesn't exist in its history. America is a product of the Enlightenment with no other alternatives to look back to. We on the right need to be suspicious of Americans and never make it locus of our movement.
Nigger every plank of the communist manifesto is in place and they were handing out subsidized mortgages and forgiven loans to anyone who wasn't white fuck off with "there is no gay race communism" FDR's wife was a card carrying member of the communist party USA.
Wake up and smell the ashes, you live in the slow motion collapse of the GAE and MAGA is just everyone trying to cobble together a lifeboat.
This author may not be emotionally and cognitively prepared to recognize root problems: The USA has been, all along, a civilizational wrong turn, as any major course change must be when directed and dominated by merchants, lawyers, financiers, imperialists, and egalitarian ideologues. The roots of this tragic mistake are buried in the past, of course, but esp. in the foolish Protestant rebellion against Rome's own foolishness; the experiment with republicanism under the Cromwells; and the English obsession with commerce and industrialism of the past 370 years or so.
The people of the so-called West lack plausible, widely believed explanations of existence, theirselves, and correct goals in life. So most of us don't know what to do with our time other than to satisfy base needs and desire. We are also, for the most part, rabidly averse to asking the right questions about existence and life. Instead most of us prefer the comfort of idolatrous superstition, the thrill of acquisition through commerce, gluttonous consumption, the brutality of war, sexual titillation, or amusement with gadgets and by spectacles such as sport and moving pictures. So, it's no coincidence, I think, that in Donald J. Trump many of the West's lost people have found an external reflection of their own vulgar selves to follow into the alley dumpster of history, perhaps in the holocaust of another nuclear war.
The prospects for a healthy major course correction are poor, but we do know that the solution we need won't involve Making America Great Again, much less servilely doing the bidding of Jewish supremacists. Instead, we must, at minimum, Make America Go Away, and this with Christianity, democracy, consumerism, militarism, and other lowness which too many in the West are frantic to perpetuate.
The author makes some valid points, but the tenor of his article appears to be that we are in a nation-building phase and that Trump and MAGA are not doing an adequate job of it.
Nation-building phases often come after a war, i.e. the new nation after the Revolutionary war, again after the Civil War, after World War II, and, perhaps, after the Cold war in the 1990’s. I wish we were in such a period, but we are not. We are not after a war, but rather in it.
The main problem now is not building a nation but saving it. I believe Trump and most of his supporters implicitly understand that a nation is its people and when that people is being replaced, the nation is being lost.
Apart from this, the U.S is 38 trillion in debt, it has been heavily deindustrialized, young people are dying from drug overdoses by the thousands, infrastructure is crumbling and inner cities look like war zones.
Yes, Trump is managing decline, because that is the situation he inherited. But apart from that, he has to come across as positive and inspirational. Could he have done a better job? Perhaps. But he was dealt a lousy hand.
White Nationalism
Thomas Jefferson said that the U.S. was open to “all white people of good character”. Similar sentiments were expressed by the other Founding Fathers and by many Americans in later periods. These sentiments were radical at the time. The English did not invite the Italians to come live there or vice versa. The American Nation developed out of predominantly European immigrants who had little in common except they were white. The U.S. has always been viewed as a predominantly white country; if it was not discussed much was not because it was a secret, but because it was obvious. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which opened the U.S. to mass immigration was enacted on the promise, and genuine belief, that the ethnic composition of the U.S. would not change. In the last 40 or so years third world immigration has sharply increased. This will radically change the U.S. I think it will change it for the worse, others think it will be better.
Trump is not a White Nationalist at all and if some if followers are, their White Nationalism is historically on the weak side.
Unity
Trump did not create disunity, he inherited it.
Charlie Kirk was one who really tried to bridge the gap between the right and the left through debate and discussion. For this, he was assassinated, an assassination which was widely celebrated by the left.
The Right sees the left as mistaken, as clowns. They call the left “Clown World” and make memes. In short, the Left are inadvertently funny and to be laughed at.
The Left sees the Right as evil. They are not clowns; they are demons. You do not laugh at demons, you kill them. Which is precisely what they are doing. There have been assassination attempts on the President, Supreme Court Justices and Republican Members of Congress. Members of Trump’s administration have to live on military bases to stay alive. Bloggers and journalists on the Right of some note have to hire security to stay safe. ICE officers and others are constantly being doxxed with the understanding that they and their families should be killed or harmed.
I would love a red/blue alliance. Unfortunately, that is not the world we currently live in.
Trump can't help himself. But his unwillingness to unify the country is not the same as supporting white nationalism. As you say, white nationalism is such a nothingburger that people can't be bothered to even loosely agree on what it is.
I don't think Trump genuinely supports white nationalism or has any intention of deporting as many people as he promised, but utilizing 4chan memes as propaganda makes you wonder what exactly this administration's prerogative is.
50% making it up as he goes, and 50% 4-D chess. I think the 4-D chess part is “making the world safe for trade” which means de-fanging Western Europe, Britain, and Israel.
Thanks Noopolitik. You might be right about the myth and it has crossed my mind, but I cannot go as far as to speak definitively on that since I no longer live in the States for a decade now, and my short visits aren't enough to really gain the insight into the current cultural milieu — especially as I get some kind of inverse culture shock whenever I go back. I know the American Dream has been dying for some time, but I am not sure how the public-at-large relates to that decline of faith of in the myth.