All Good Things…
In America . . . it may be said that the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the union.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The worst part of all good things coming to an end is that you have to learn to begin again.
And that ain’t so easy.
I read a headline this week that made me stop and think, which ultimately made me a bit sad for what used to be… what you and I have lost.
I will warn you that the headline will likely anger some people. Just know that I’m not sharing it to be political in any way. It’s just that the underlying sentiment gets to a very sore spot with me—an open wound that I fear has no salve.
The headline: “Donald Trump Is the Greatest Sign of US Imperial Decline Imaginable.”
To be perfectly clear immediately, this dispatch is not about DJT. It’s about the “US Imperial Decline.” Trump is the messenger, not the message.
Think about this: You and I watched the Berlin Wall fall. We saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, once America’s greatest foe. We saw the US emerge as the world’s only superpower.
And look where are we today.
Think about the decline from there to here.
The rot that is pervasive throughout American society. Throughout American government…
Think about the fact that GOP idol Ronald Reagan memorably and historically told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” yet much of the GOP today praises—damn near worships—Russian President Vladimir Putin because of his authoritarian grasp over Russian society.
The irony.
America is an angry place. Americans are an angry people.
That wasn’t always the case, for sure.
The America you and I grew up in was, at least to me, an idyllic place. I love the America that existed before a particular day in 2001.
In recent weeks, I’ve been binging The Newsroom on Netflix. And here I want to steal part of a fantastic monologue in the opening minutes of the pilot, in which a college student at a debate asks Will McAvoy, the lead character played by Jeff Daniels, “Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?”
After running through a litany of America’s current failures, an angry and animated McAvoy calms himself before somberly offering:
We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
I know a lot of people personally who would disagree with that. Who would get mad at me for even printing that, or thinking it was worthy of sharing.
Truth hurts sometimes.
We don’t always like the reflection in the mirror. But the mirror isn’t the messenger. It’s the message, whether you like it or not.
The America that emerged in the last quarter century is an America in decline. An America tearing itself apart from within.
Politicians, lobbyists, and the judiciary have, bit by bit, law by law, emasculated America’s once-vaunted middle class. Aside from Singapore and Hong Kong, there’s not another developed economy where the gap between the haves and have-nots is so big. That’s according to something called the Gini Coefficient, which the World Bank uses to measure income inequality.
As I noted at the start, DJT isn’t the message, he’s the messenger. And his message is American Anger.
American Resentment.
Behind him are what Hillary Clinton called “Deplorables,” but which in reality are people for whom the American Dream was stolen. They’re not deplorable… they’re desperate.
Worse, they’re enraged.
And here’s the problem, the purpose of today’s dispatch: Enraged people go searching for answers. When you’ve got nothing left to lose, who cares about repercussions?
Good countries collapse when elected leaders undermine long-held social contracts, when they change the rules of the game mid-game.
There’s no coming back from that.
American politicians have methodically been changing the rules of the game for years. They’ve undermined society. They’ve rigged the game now so that only the wealthy and the business class win. The “deplorables” are their sacrifice.
Alas, those deplorables are loud enough, large enough as a group, and enraged enough that they’re ready, willing, and intent on burning down the house and starting over.
Which is my ultimate message: I’ve been saying for a dozen years now that a societal break is in America’s future. By that, I mean a Super Shock event that sees the map of America forever altered. No more 50 unified states functioning as a cohesive unit under the oversight of Washington, DC.
That model is now broken. A good thing has come to an end because the governing class ruined it through greed and arrogance.
Soon, America will have to start again.
We’re going to see new countries emerge, or at the very least a new form of government in which states (or unions of states) operate as powerful, independent federations with complete control over their internal affairs. DC will be just a figurehead, an otherwise weak overseer, a gathering place of far fewer politicians who are required to live back in their home state/federation and who travel to DC occasionally to hash out issues like inter-federation trade and security.
DC will have minimal to zero control over a vast array of state-specific issues that right now divide society into Red and Blue.
Basically, American government will go back to what once defined the earliest days of the country…
This Super Shock is going to change America. The world. The US dollar. And the dollar’s role in the world.
It’s going to change everything.
