Is America Fixable? Is America Past the Point of no Return? – City Watch

I want to think about this question as simply and clearly as I can. Ill think about classes, groups, and institutions. I dont pretend that Ill have the one true answer, but I do think that we, meaning sane and sensible people, need to ask:has America reached the point of no return?

Lets begin by thinking about Americas political elites.

On the right, the American political elite has degenerated to something like a Soviet or North Korean style joke its literally happy to absolve a President of crimes even while admitting hes committed them. LOL what? The rich world hasnt seen the like since the rise of Nazis a theme well return to. On the left, though, we have the bizarre spectacle of the Democrats an opposition who, having funded concentration camps, cant then try a President for them. Having sided with capital just like the right it can hardly be on the side of the average working person. Wait what? Hence, on both sides, Americas political class is paralyzed, captured, and only really good for one thing, which is what its been doing for the last few years: letting the bad guys win, either by enabling them, or, cowed, by refusing to really challenge them.

Then theres Americas thinking class its intellectual elites.

I put that in quotes because the tragicomic truth is that it too is, to put it kindly, a weird joke. Nobody in the world takes it seriously because well, how can you take a thinking class seriously that let its society slide into this kind of disrepair? Who takes these ideas seriously people shouldnt have healthcare, capitalism should run everything, kids should pay lunch debt? Only in the whole world, only Americas intellectuals. To everyone else literally theyre grotesque and bad jokes. To consider them ideas is an insult to intellect.

And yet, weirdly, Americas thinking class like medieval theologians in an act of astonishing hubris, thinks it knows the answer to everything, but in fact knows self-evidently precisely nothing. That answer is always exactly the same: capitalisms cruelty, selfishness, and greed. Hence, it has literally no explanation for any of the following things: why capitalism failed, why America collapsed, why fascism arose, how authoritarianism carried the day, how slavery and segregation laid the groundwork for all this. (Sure there are thinkers here and there who connect these dots, but by and large, they are rejected viciously from the establishment.) The establishment, meanwhile, is busy interviewingliteralNazis, like Jake Tapper, or the NYT, or publishing defense of climate change denial, or repeating the fantasy that the same old dead ideas capitalism for everything! Make those kids pay their lunch debts!! can work.

Then there are American ideas another thing we should think of as an institution, but dont.

If you understand that American history can be divided up into three chapters slavery, segregation, and capitalism whats the common thread? I often say that Americas really only ever had one idea, and thats violence and Americans get mad, and start toviolently insult me (LOL). And yet what else links those three clear chapters of American history but violence exploitation, abuse, cruelty?

America built its riches by constructing an international slave trade think of how horrific that is for a moment. Today, thanks to extreme capitalism, Americans are made to beg one another for pennies to pay for basic medicine online or. . .die.

Do you see the link? I do. Exploitation, abuse, cruelty, selfishness.

Violence is the rule by which America has always been run. Sure, violence to slaves is hardly the violence of denying each other medicine. Or is it? The strong survive, the weak perish, and that is the moral law. But how can that idea which is the only one America ever really had result, ultimately, in anything but the kind of brutal authoritarianism finally arising now? Violence first slavery, then capitalism, now authoritarian-fascism is the American Achilles heel. But those three words are just different expressions for the same idea: extreme, total, systemic violence, in the form of exploitation, whether of those with the wrong skin color or the lack of money or status, as a way to order society.

What about that, the social order, as in, how classes cooperate or conflict? That brings me to the next piece of my little analysis.

American society. Instead of the kind of society a healthy democracy is made of a broad middle, moderate inequality, and an ever-shrinking number of poor Americas social structure is now the complete opposite. The middle class imploded and is now a minority. The ranks of the poor therefore swelled to a point the United Nations calls a crisis. These people which are something like 9099% of Americans are now one class: the new working class, the new precariat. They are proles exploited by the whip of capitalism so extreme it would have made the Victorians blush.

Meanwhile, a tiny, tiny number of people have grown so rich that they could literally pay off Americas student debt. . .fund its education system. . .cancel its healthcare debt. . .overnight, put together.There is no reason none for them to have grown so rich. No, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates didnt make people better off why are life expectancy and income and happiness all still cratering? This argument, beloved of American economists and pundits, is facile, idiotic, on its face. The riches of Americas capitalist overlords are precisely what they appear to be: profoundly obscene. Obscene as in: made of misery, decline, poverty, and collapse.

A nation thats become a sea of exploited proles, on the one hand, and capitalist wage-slave-masters, on the other, can hardly cooperate. It must conflict. So, America never developed the things Europe enjoys, which depend on cooperation public goods, expansive social systems, a modern social contract.

Without those essential features of modernity, Americas ultra-rich have become a class much like new medieval overlords and the people they rule over are as much or more serfs as proles.

They will die in debt, unable to pay off their bondage. What the. . .? What do we call a person thats born in and dies in debt that they can never pay off? Well, we cant call them free, because that means they never really own anything at all. Americans are the worlds newest class of serfs. But whose fault is that?

That brings me to an oft overlooked institution the populace. The American people themselves.

Can a nation of bereft, helpless proles or serfs really ever develop a modern society? Or are they just powerless to descend into hatred, violence, and ignorance?

America can be divided, broadly, into three groups.

Thirty percent Americans are, to put it kindly, crazy: theyd be quite happy living in an Irani style theocracy, or a North Korean dictatorship. That should be one lesson of the last few years (but is it?). Another 40% or so are bewildered, confused, and paralyzed. Theyre the ones who say, in polls, that they want better healthcare, education, higher incomes, retirement, and so on but when the chance to actually vote for such things, or to back such candidates, arises, they throw it away. Their teeth seem to chatter in nervous fear, and they turn right back to the status quo. So about 60 to 70% of Americans as a society just dont seem to be interested in actually overcoming the parlous state of their society.

Then theres about 30% of Americans, in my estimation, on the other side. Theyre sane, intelligent, thoughtful people. But they are concentrated in areas where they have little political power cities on coasts, that wield little to no clout, thanks to Americas bizarre political system, itself an institutional leftover of slavery. Those 30%, as much anger and despair as they feel, are impotent. Their votes dont matter and their attitudes dont, either. What about those, attitudes, though? Are they really good enough, sophisticated enough, advanced enough, to power America to becoming something vaguely resembling a civilized society?

That brings me to my next area: norms. Americas developed a bizarre, grotesque, obscene set of norms over the last few years or perhaps it always had them.

The Prez passes ethnic bans, and puts kids in camps, and declares himself above the law. Americans take to Twitter to rage about it. But they simply wont call all that what it needs to be called: authoritarianism, fascism, democratic collapse into the worst kinds of abuses. Sure, some do but theyre a tiny minority. Americans choose to use the vocabulary of plutocracy, not fascism if they speak at all. But that is like calling a vampire a pickpocket. A plutocracy is one thing but most plutes dont put kids in camps or ban entire religions and continents from personhood or want to annihilate Mexican babies.

America has, in other words, developed all the norms you might expect from an imploding society, one collapsing into genuine authoritarianism.

Silence is perfectly acceptable and is legitimized every day by pundits asking rhetorical questions (My God! What is the GOP doing?) Complicity reigns and is normalized as people merely doing their best. Aggression and cruelty are present in increasing amounts from the extremists who are capturing society wholesale.In other words, culturally, growing cowardice from the good people is the norm now, while increasing hostility, abuse, and violence is the norm from the bad ones.How can a society like that make anything of itself, redeem much in itself, much less ever progress again?

Let me finish with one last institution the economy. Driving all the above is a very simple and grim reality. America has been through something that is precisely like an Invisible Depression for decades now, longer and more vicious than the Great Depression.

Yes, really. Incomes havent risen forfifty years. Savings have fallen to negative levels, meaning the average American dies in debt. Half of Americans now work in low-wage jobs and 75% struggle to pay basic bills. The social effects of poverty have been what they always are: social bonds blow apart, relationships fragment, social groups begin to turn one another, punching down in the hierarchy. The declining middle punches down on the old working class and poor, who became the Trumpists, that punch down on hated minorities, blaming them for all their economic woes.

Stagnation and depression are the original sins of political economy. They breed all the ills that we know of.

Hate, violence, despair, decline, rage, fury. Those malign sentiments organize into fascism and authoritarianism, led by demagogues. Which capture polities. Which pervert norms. Which subvert institutions. Which corrode democracy. Which replace any semblance of democracy and its ideals, aspirations, and values justice, peace, equality, truth with just this: might makes right.

When people grow poor enough, all those fundamentals of democracy truth, equality, justice, peace stop mattering. Nobody can afford them anymore.

That is why we say today in America that reality doesnt matter anymore. Or that, seeing a President walk away, above the law, that justice doesnt matter. Or that, seeing a class of billionaires rich enough to pay off societys entire student debt, that equality doesnt matter. Poverty and deprivation of the kind America let itself degenerate into systemic, social, chronic, absolute, inescapable means, in the hardest, concrete terms, that none of the fundamentals of democracy matter, either. When you are struggling to put bread on the table, like that poor, foolish Trumpist maybe youll believe the lies. Probably theyre more comforting than the bitter truth. And who else is on your side, anyways, anymore but the lie?

So. Let me ask again? Is America fixable?

I wont answer the question. Having thought about it together, Ill leave it to you. Ill simply conclude with this. America was, not so long ago, the richest and most powerful nation in the world. And now its a nation of poor, desperate people, collapsing into authoritarianism, in denial about fascism, unable to imagine a better future collectively, fractured into tribes, at each others throats.

I think that America is a warning to the world.

About what happens when you believe a little too hard in your own catastrophically failed ideologies. When elites cant let them go. When leaders refuse to step forward. When a populace grows morally weak and intellectually feeble. What happens when you dont outgrow cruelty, hostility, aggression, violence, and anger as a way of life? What happens when your society is based on exploitation and abuse? What do people do when they grow so poor theres nothing left to do but believe the lies, and cheer on the hate?

American collapse does.

(Umair Haque has been a Mediummember since Jun 2018. He writes for Eudaimonia and Co where this perspective was first posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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Is America Fixable? Is America Past the Point of no Return? - City Watch