Signs of a Dying Empire

[pbrower2a]

(05-05-2022, 02:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-04-2022, 06:10 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

Your preferences and attitudes are not shared widely. Does America want to give up? Or does it really matter to many of us anymore whether someone is part of "America"? Maybe Americans have not given up, but maybe they don't think we are qualified to push other nations around, and many people might be wising up to the fact that our identity and our goals are our own, not defined as members of a nation (or religion or race or whatever false group we may depend on for our identity because we don't know ourselves and our real connection to real life and divinity).

(really to Jason: Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" is more a rejection of culture other than an extremely low-brow culture that utterly disrespects formal education beyond that needed for basic literacy in which people can barely read and right or do simple arithmetic.. .at that, long division would be iffy. What one dare not do in an authoritarian, anti-intellectual society is to think -- and the effective discouragement of independent thought trips up technical achievement. IBM put the word "THINK). " everywhere -- not "OBEY". 

Quote:And yet almost half of America still identifies strongly with America, and wants "America First!" And they seem to support a (now former) president that wants the USA to militarize to the teeth, even if he is less interventionist than the previous president they followed (W). What this means is that the USA today is culturally deprived, and this is a serious situation. Our scale of values has become seriously warped. Brower has touched on this too.

So, it's complicated.

That's not my idea of America. Brute force is the necessary method of doing some things, but it often shows its shortcomings. A dumb warehouseman can do what "Archie Bunker" did one day, sending a shipment to London, England instead of to London, Ontario. If it's in my purview and I can't determine whether the destination is San Jose CA or San Jose CR due to sloppy handwriting I am going to ask some questions. I'm also going to give a lecture on how important it is to either not abbreviate or to making shipping instructions unambiguous. 

As I see it, I see the United States trapped in the generational cycle. That is a good thing. This country needs to redefine itself in subtle ways every twenty years or so, weeding out some old bad habits while creating a vacuum that draws attention to people who can start nearly-anew. So figure that in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Civic component that the Gilded (the Gilded took on many Civic characteristics after the Civil War) faded from institutional power to scarcity and went practically into hiatus before the GI generation could make a mark. In recent times the GI Generation had great institutional power before it faded completely... and left a hiatus for the Millennial generation to fill in work skills, attitudes, and political values.   Societies that don't have a generational cycle develop a culture that either goes into dangerous directions, like the militarism of Sparta that caused it to wage one too many wars -- the one that brought its ruin. Not having a strong generational cycle but a strong proclivity to maintain the status quo is one way to ensure that rot thrive because nobody solves problems. 

For a system begging to die, just look at the Roman Empire in the 5th century. To be sure, the bloated bureaucracy wanted to save its class privilege, and the aristocracy sought to keep the serfs in thralldom. Such few independent tradesmen and shopkeepers as there were wanted lower taxes, and the serfs wanted to be free of their oppressors. The barbarians found that to meet the demands of the plebs and proles they needed to dismantle a costly and unproductive system. So kill the male aristocrats and ask the poor people where the elite women and the luxuries were, and the barbarians would leave the peasants as freehold farmers. It's easy to see the downfall of the Roman Empire as the start of the Dark Ages... but those began when classical civilization died in much of the Roman world in the climatic disaster of AD 536-537, fully seventy years later. Classical civilization had never been strongly rooted in Britain, Gaul, Hispania, Pannonia (mostly Austria and western Hungary) and those parts of Germany west of the Rhine or south of the Danube. 

The American system still does much for us for comparatively low cost. That's how democracy works -- even if there is Big Government as in Scandinavian countries it at least gives a good deal for the money. In dictatorship, formal taxes might be low, but state enterprises turn extreme profits, and the government can take anything that it wants at any time. The soldiers helping with the harvest are really helping themselves to the harvest on behalf of the State. They rarely help with the planting. Public services in such places are wholly inadequate; soon after casting off Commie rule, Czechoslovakia rapidly privatized state industries so that it could have a welfare state.  

We aren't on the brink of ruin yet, but we can get there -- if we should enshrine neoliberal policies that ultimately turn most Americans into a high-tech equivalent of medieval serfs on behalf of crony capitalists responsible only to themselves.     

Quote:Millennials are acting out their hero role fairly well, for what it really is. Organization and courage are not "masculine." Organization is their forte, but not through becoming corporate drones so much, as the GIs did, but through social media and other groups. They have some concern for political and social matters, such as climate change and inequality. The previous civic hero generation supported civil rights and feminism to a large degree. A civic generation understands that we are all in this national project together. This is not identifying with a nation we have given up on. It is practical attention to how things get done in our country.

History has shown plentiful examples of female heroism, including partisan movements in all occupied countries. Many women involved themselves heroically in either Warsaw uprising (the Jewish one or the gentile one). Women showed great courage in struggles against both slavery and Jim Crow. Even in the animal world -- mess with a momma cat's kittens, and you can be mauled; mess with the puppies of a literal bitch (that is, she barks and bears puppies), and you might even be killed if the dog is large enough. 

We shall see what new evils emanate from the Trump court. I predict that it will go far beyond abortion. Abortion is much less of an economic issue than workers' rights, privatization of anything that can be privatized, and the welfare state, which really are economic issues. I can imagine a super-reactionary regime in America criminalizing any behavior that challenges the class privilege of people responsible to none but themselves.

I hope that we have plenty of peaceful protests about the abrogation of abortion rights or (should such happen) LGBT rights or the right to contraception. If we don't, then we open ourselves to a new form of American exceptionalism -- one in which America becomes exceptionally evil by world standards. That sort of exceptionalism must die, and it will most likely die in some war for profit that goes badly because our soldiers have nothing worth risking their lives for other than fear of military "justice".

My imagination can run wild when crazy, bad stuff happens. We have had a near-dictator, and we could get a full dictator in the wake of some economic downturn. We are due for one because we did not solve the underlying problems in 2009 and 2010, and economic meltdowns are the usual consequences of perverse economics,     

Quote:The trouble is the huge influence of Reaganism and neoliberalism, which has sapped belief in our civic institutions and cut back on civics education. This means millennials have to 

Quote:learn their proper role, which means to support and participate in civic institutions, and not sit back and wait for somebody else to do something because they might not get everything that they want. Obama is a good teacher, but I don't know if that's enough this year.

America will need to remake those institutions from what remains or will have to start over from scratch. Too many rich-and-powerful people believe that no human suffering can ever be excessive in the service of their power, indulgence, and gain. In the 1930's  the remaining rich lacked the means for buying the political system. In the 2010's they had plenty of funds and well-polished operatives for doing this. 

Obama is a good teacher of political ways. The problem is that he had a class full of resolute delinquents.