The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Cycle of Civilization and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

Many mainstream pundits now admit that the rise of the right-wing populism is due to the neglect, over the last 40 years or so, of many people, leaving them to rot, as the rich got richer. Four decades of stagnant wages, soaring housing prices, shitty jobs, and so on, have left people willing to vote against the status quo, no matter what they’re voting for.

This is all very nice. It is even a good thing.

But the warnings were given for decades. I remember very well warnings about rising inequality as early as the mid-eighties, and doubtless some were warning sooner, and I missed it due to my youth. The people doing the warning often said, “This is bad because it will lead to the rise of very bad people, like in the 30s.”

Yeah.

Learning after reality hits you in the face with a shovel, repeatedly, is good, but it’s not as good as avoiding getting hit in the face with a shovel.

Of course, the problem is that elites, and their “pundits,” only got hit in the face with a shovel recently. The last 40 years may have been a terrible time to be a peon, but they were the best time to be rich, or a retainer of the rich, in modern history. Maybe in all of history. Yeah, Babylonian kingdoms and Roman emperors were richer, but what they could buy with their riches was limited (though sex, food, and the ability to push other people around are the basics, and have always been available).

So, the people with power saw no reason to stop, because the policies were making them filthy rich and impoverishing people they didn’t know or care about. Heck, impoverishing ordinary people was good; it made services (and servants) cheaper.

For quite some time, I pursued a two-pronged (worthless) strategy. I told the people being fucked that they needed to fight back and scare the shit out of the elities, or the elites would keep hurting them. Then I told the elites that, as much as the peons seemed to be willing to take it and take it, eventually they would rebel.

Neither strategy worked, and even though the peons are now in revolt, they are backing policies which may help them somewhat in the short run, but which will be bad for them in the middle term–at least so far. (I have some hope that the left will win some in Europe. Spain’s leftists and Corbyn are the most promising signs so far.)

This is, really, just the normal cycle of history. There are bad times, and people eventually learn from them, and create good times, and the people who grow up in good times are weak and don’t really believe the bad times can return, so the bad times return, and the bad times at least make people tough and sometimes get them to pull together, and then they create good times.

Sometimes that cycle breaks down–usually because the bad times make people meaner and more desperate and break them down rather than bring them together, and then you get dark ages. Other times, the good times last for a few generations, not completely destroying the virtue of the people and their leaders immediately, for reasons I’ve touched on in the past and will discuss more in the future (you can read Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy if you need a fix now).

While this is the normal cycle of history, and it may be usually yawn-inducing, if tragic to those caught in it, we are unfortunately also at a point where we’ve done so much damage to our ecosystem that we’re in the middle of a great die-off. We also have climate change which, I suspect, is now not just beyond stopping, but which has reached an exponential, self-reinforcing period of its growth.

On the bright side (sort of), the technology which let us dig this hole gives us a better chance of digging ourselves out, but only a chance.

This is where we are at, and the hysterical reaction of many to Trump and to Brexit is a bad sign, because it hasn’t even begun to get really bad yet. It is going to get so much worse than this that people will look back to the reign of Trump as good times.

This is what we sowed, it is what we are going to reap, and it is what we are going to have to eat. It’s just that simple.

None of this means there is no hope. Some stuff will work out startlingly well, as was the case with the US and FDR in the 30s. Some stuff will be far worse than any but the most realistic thinkers are willing to contemplate, and in the middle of this it will still be possible for many to be happy, to find love, and to live satisfying lives, just as it was during the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s a weird metaphysical question, “Could this have been stopped?” and I’ll leave it aside for now. If we believe in free will, and if we want to have some hope that the future won’t follow the same pattern until we drive ourselves extinct, let us hope that it could have been stopped, not for what it says about the past, but what it says about the future, and about humans.

I’ll write more soon about our current period, best called The Twilight of Neoliberalism. For now, gird your loins. There will be ups and downs, but basically, it’s going to get worse. Find the happiness you can in the middle of it, and don’t let your happiness or well-being rest on geopolitical events you cannot control as an individual.

Originally published Nov 29, 2016.


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59 Comments

  1. V. Arnold

    I have read that genuine change only comes with great and tragic events.
    In my relatively long life, I’ve witnessed the truth of that.
    In the last election there were two candidates capable, and likely, to bring that about; and one is now the elected president.
    No matter what happens in the next month and a half; I think courses have been set and I’m genuinely skeptical the sitting president (regardless of whom it is) will have much influence in the end.
    I no longer much care about what goes on in the U.S.. It’s beyond my ability to influence outcomes; always has been, IMO.
    As to neo-liberalism? We’ll see…

  2. Mallam

    I mean that’s fine and all, but you did spend parts of the primary praising Trump’s words on health care without looking at his actual proposals — same with many of your (ostensibly) left readers. This happened many times despite some of your readers (myself among them) telling you to wake the fuck up. Well hope you’re all ready for HHS Tom Price who has called for the privatization of Medicare. All those members of Congress called to “repeal and replace” Obamacare but never put up an alternative. Price did, and it takes aim at not just Obama’s legacy but LBJ’s as well.

  3. Mallam

    Also, I’d have voted Corbyn in the leadership elections because the other choices were such shit, but he is going to get smoked if he’s the one standing for election. Torres have a 16 point lead.

  4. David

    Another nice essay, thanks. I myself began to think that in the U.S., things were starting to fall apart in the early 90’s. I remember there was a book and a TV series that came out during that time called “America What Went Wrong” where the authors visited places like the Rust Belt that were already in bad economic shape and interviewing the ordinary people there about their lives. I had an English girlfriend then whose reaction was to say that story was already over ten years old where she grew up in Yorkshire.

    I was watching a NASA internet streamed astronomy conference a few months ago and the various speakers were extolling about all the exciting things that future space telescopes could tell us about the Cosmos. After they were though, a fairly well known scientist in the audience, stood up and said that this was all bullshit. She said that after the already funded WFIRST is launched in 2021, that there will be no more such projects in the lifetime of anyone in the room as the public will be much more concerned about surviving global warming and political upheaval than dreaming about the stars. There was complete silence in a the room of say a couple hundred people. There were no more questions or comments and then everyone filed out in silence. I wondered how many were thinking that the work that they spent years training for may not be possible in the middle term future for at least some of them.

  5. However one of the problems is that people concerned about these types of real issues find it (for whatever reason) very difficult to form stable alliances with other political interest groups or to reliably sustain political careers in a system designed to force consensus and compromises even on matters of principle.

  6. Ian Welsh

    Trump’s healthcare reform page.

    https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/healthcare-reform

    Trump on health care.

    http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Health_Care.htm

    “TRUMP: Yes. Now, the new plan is good. It’s going to be inexpensive. It’s going to be much better for the people at the bottom, people that don’t have any money. We’re going to take care of them through maybe concepts of Medicare. Now, some people would say, “that’s not a very Republican thing to say.” That’s not single payer, by the way. That’s called heart. We gotta take care of people that can’t take care of themselves. ”

    “What does Donald Trump believe? Entitlements: Do not cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. Grow the economy to save those programs.

    The real estate tycoon told CPAC in 2013 that Republicans should not cut Social Security or Medicare because most Americans want to keep the benefits as they stand now. His solution is unclear, but he has indicated that general economic growth would play a role. Trump tweeted in May that he knows “where to get the money from” and “nobody else does.” “

    Universal health care, by the way, is not a synonym for “single payer”.

    It may well turn out Trump was lying, of course, and that he doesn’t fulfill his promises. If that surprises anyone, well, Trump also has some timeshare condos in Florida.

    None of this is more than tangentially relevant to the topic of this post.

  7. “even though the peons are now in revolt, they are backing policies which may help them somewhat in the short run…”

    They are backing nothing, really, because they are electing a president who does not have the power to do what he promises to do, and are reelecting 95% of the legislators who run for reelection, and who are in reality the ones who are being bought off to screw them blind, and hating on the rich, who use the advantages they have purchased from legislators.

    But the rich have no contract with the voting public, and owe them nothing. It is legislators who have violated their contract with voters by promising to represent the interests of the voters and then accepting money from the rich to represent their interests instead. And so we hate on the rich and reelect the legislators who have broken faith with us, and we think that those who have created the problem and who benefit from it are going to change it.

    And we “vote for change” by electing a president, an office which is designed by the constitution to be as nearly powerless as possible.

  8. V. Arnold

    @ Ian

    You speak of free will; I question whether or not it exists in the western world.
    All the evidence I see would point to no!
    Free will means freedom from interference; which is not extant in today’s world in the west; all inclusive.
    There are not many who are free from governmental influence…

  9. realitychecker

    Any time we allow our belief system to diverge from the actual reality, there will be a price to be paid-think Wiley Coyote when he finds himself twenty feet over the cliff lol.

    Can anything exemplify Ron’s “accelerating eddy of crap” more than micro-insults, micro-assaults, micro-invalidations, etc., etc., etc.?

    I think not.

    Whether one’s natural sympathies lie with the left or the right, the bill for departing from actual reality eventually comes due with equal force for both sides. Right now, the country has decided that the bill has become way past due for the left, because they overplayed their hand so egregiously in the last few decades.

    Hopefully, both sides will have their turn in due course.

    It pays to think in larger terms, as Ian is trying to do, rather than just being reactive to whatever is currently on the TV crawl. Forest for the trees, and all that . . .

    Reality has no obligation to be a “safe space.” Once you leave your momma’s tit, you are at risk. That’s why it pays to learn some skillsets for yourself.

  10. nihil obstet

    And the party goes on — instead of working on better policies for the majority of Americans, their self-appointed defenders stay fixated on how awful Trump is. As Bill H. pointed out above, the president is not meant to be a ruler. And does not have the Constitutional authority to rule. Congress and the Supreme Court have abdicated their roles to the presidency. This is part of the twilight of neoliberalism, the pretense that none of it is political but all just technical efficiency. How can we be safe from terrorists if the president can’t run a secret government with the power to kill anyone anywhere as he sees fit? And the power to practice massive surveillance on us all?

    The response of the realists is to say that better policies aren’t possible, because Americans are too stupid and evil to vote the right way. And voting the right way in 2016 was to vote for a candidate who proclaimed that better policies aren’t possible. I’m not smart enough to figure out how that’s supposed to produce better policies.

    The elites wage full out indoctrination in the policies that benefit them. The defenders of the rest decline to articulate and lead towards policies that would benefit the entire society because such policies are unrealistic given the stupidity and evil of most Americans. The only thing you can do is be outraged about how evil the president is? I think we should do better.

  11. Shh

    Nice article Ian.

    I love Ron Showalter’s rant’s. Cracks me up. Every family needs a crazy uncle eh?

    I guess I was a bit precocious as a kid with the dual threads of a complacent electorate and a rapacious oligarchy.

    Times of plenty lead people to become soft in experience and hard in compassion, thus they pursue narcissistic ends, believing themselves to be independent of the welfare of their fellows. Trump is a wholly foreseen end result of this tendency.

    This time however, there really is, as you point out, another thread woven into the tapestry of human experience: the multi-faceted destabilization of a range of ecosystems. You’ve heard me say it at least a dozen times (assuming you bother to read my commentary!).

    Too little, too late folks. The honorable (and dishonorable) people facing down the corporate dogs of war at Standing Rock preserve only their dignity. Depending on where you stand, dignity is either meaningless, or the only meaningful thing. For me, Ron’s pearl clutching is merely a sign of a lost soul. One who’s mistaken value for price. As we all have, myself included. There was a time when I would have gone to Standing Rock to raise my voice to the implacable will of the Gods.

    Now I simply try to be nice to those who aren’t screeching at me. More than that is beyond my ability to offer. To the screeching ones though, I say fuck off. Again and again and again. Paul Krugman is to me the Rush Limbaugh of the Accela Corridor. Blah, blah, blah. Why is it that selfishness is seen as a virtue?

    The problem is a philosophical one, not a political one, ergo, intractable. Thus we will all feel evolutionary pressure in a most uncomfortable way.

  12. bob mcmanus

    In the near term, neoliberalism may live. I can imagine a scenario where Republicans leave the coasts and Nevada/Colorado alone, with the not-so-quiet deal that has been practiced for a decade, and concentrate on returning their Red States to 1840 conditions.

    The would leave neoliberalism in NYC and California, finance + identity politics, and the attractions of the metropole may provide compensation for the local servant classes.

  13. I have some hope that the left will win some in Europe. Spain’s leftists and Corbyn are the most promising signs so far.

    I don’t know much about the situation in Spain but I do know about the situation here in the UK.
    Jeremy Corbyn is very popular with a section of the Labour party membership, that section is a majority (about 65%) of the membership. The problem is that his reach does not extend much beyond that section of the party. The Tories are in complete disarray over Brexit and while they have loosened the thumbscrews slightly, are still pursuing a policy of economic austerity. Their policies are running public services into the ground. The NHS is barely coping and the Prison service is in meltdown.
    The Tories are sitting on 44% in the latest Guardian/ICM poll, Labour is on 28%. This forces me to one of two conclusions either;
    1) Jeremy Corbyn isn’t getting his message across and hasn’t got a strategy for doing it;
    Or;
    2) Jeremy Corbyn is getting his message across and the electorate doesn’t think much of it..
    Neither conclusion leaves me with much hope for the left in the UK.
    As Hilary Clinton found winning the nomination and winning the election are not the same thing. Still at least she won the popular vote and was beaten by a rigged archaic system. Unfortunatly I don’t think that Corbyn couldn win even if the system stays as it is – slightly rigged in Labour’s favour.

  14. bob mcmanus

    Make no mistake, these fucks want slaves. Best bet is criminalizing being a minority. and then using prison labor. Won’t be on SF tv, and what, the coastals are going to kill and die for blacks in Red America? Give me a break. They allowed the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans. This isn’t the Civil War or WW II generation.

    Come to think about it, that’s just the old pattern. Although sharing the army and some justice system, the metropole and country (Paris, Edo/Tokyo) sometimes pretty much left each other alone, metropole providing finance, technology, and the larger expense of security, while the country slave areas send food and resources to the metropole, along with grateful underpaid refugees from slave states eagerly serving coffee and being sex workers for the enlightened and generous cosmopolitans.

    Sounds like a plan. We’ll call it neoliberalism, as homage to the previous liberal white supremacist era.

    IOW, we haven’t reached peak neoliberalism yet. Know it by slavery.

  15. Some Guy

    Yes, it is a cycle for sure, but I think it is worth noting some of the key things that may be different about this cycle.

    You’ve identified one big one, climate change. Thinking more generally, I’d put climate change in the category of civilization destroying technologies which are multiplying as technology advances – these could either be inadvertent (like climate change) or deliberate (nuclear war). Similarly we could inadvertently collapse things via breeding super resistant bacteria or do it deliberately, ‘Oryx and Crake’ style.

    Another thing which is different, at least as compared to the last few hundred years, is energy. Previously, we have been moving from one energy source to a better one. This has allowed us to paper over a lot of issues. But it’s been over 40 years since the first oil crisis of 1973 (perhaps not coincidentally the same 4 decades of trouble you reference in your post) and we are still struggling to find a better replacement for oil. It is possible that it simply doesn’t exist. Sure we could run some sort of civilization without oil, but there is an enormous difference between adapting to get by with less and powering on into greater abundance – the West is so accustomed to the latter that most of the population can’t even comprehend an alternative and will therefore assume that someone is to blame if they are forced to cut back.

    Another big thing is communication media. The internet / social media is something new and brings a different world than TV did. In my view, the American reactionary right was able to maintain its strength as well as it did during the TV era by relying on talk radio, which doesn’t really exist in the same way anywhere outside the U.S. that I know of. This sustained strength allowed them to burst forth into social media / the internet and help boost Trump to victory over the opposition of the entire TV and print based media. Read any comment or twitter thread with more than 20 comments on any topic in any location in the world, and you can imagine what internet social/media world will look like once it gets going.

    Whatever one’s view on Trump, you have to admit the man is an unparalleled master of communications and media. Who else has built a global brand name simply on his own last name and personal style, gone on to successfully host a reality TV show for years and years and gone on from there to tweet their way to the Presidency. In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that the first social media president was Trump.

    A final thing I will note is the complexity and efficiency of our current economy and society. Partly, this is social, cities made up of people from all over the world with a mix of views and loyalties, but mostly it is economic, global just in time supply chains where multi-billion dollar factories in faraway lands build wafers one atom thick that are combined with raw ingredients from 6 continents to provide consumer goods, where a flood in Thailand means higher prices for years and a million other examples.

    How easy would this system be to disrupt and how hard would it be to rebuild if it was disrupted. It reminds me of building block towers as a kid. We’ve built the biggest block tower the world has ever seen, but it still just takes one stupid kid to push it down.

  16. ks

    “When will the alt-left Heather slumber-party end, huh?”

    Never. Because, unlike the alt-right and the right in general, the alt-left doesn’t actually do much of anything. Except talk. Endlessly.

    Trump is just another vanity project where they can show you how smart they are and cast pearls of wisdom down upon the masses who are ignoring them. Oh sure, they fell for and helped along the narrative that brought us Trump but if we had listened to them earlier and taken their advice then we wouldn’t be in this predicament now so it’s all your fault anyway. They are still pondering the forest but, like Sonny Bono, they have run face first into the tree. But hey, climate change is going to kill us all and some people did find happiness amid the Great Depression and WWII so “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I wonder what Bobby McFerrin is up to these days.

    Btw, if you want to give yourself a laugh, go read the comment sections of Ian’s old posts after the mostly minor dust-ups involving the WTO protests or OWS or various police actions where he made the commonsense observation (paraphrasing) that violence was a normal and predictable reaction to oppression. Talk about pearl clutching! I though he was going to run out of fainting couches. These people won’t support the notion that the people who actually tried to do something even be allowed to defend themselves so you can’t expect them to get off their chaise lounges now.

  17. Shh

    I keep hearing about “the people who actually tried to do something ” and “Not all of us are nihilistic wimps.” and I wonder…what exactly have you ever done?

    Certainly there is no real way to establish street cred here in Ian’s commentariat, but Ron, I have a question for you, oh master of wisdom: What exactly, do you propose we do?

  18. Troy

    When people like Ron Showalter and his ilk show up, I think, we should argue with them, but then I come to realize, people like Ron Showalter and his ilk, they’re the sorts who’ve profited out of making people miserable. Well, at least, I hope people like Ron Showalter and his ilk are profiting. It’d be rather ridiculous if he was here, screeching at the readership of Ian Welsh for free.

  19. David

    Ian,
    One question, I recall you mentioning your prediction for war. Can you say more ? Thanks

  20. Shh

    I mean no disrespect to Ron and his ilk. It’s very likely I’m among them. But Here is a handful of people with different experiences and expectations, bonded together by enjoyment of Ian’s blog.

    And rather than bicker and snipe, I ask, in all good faith:

    What, gentlemen and ladies, exactly, do we propose to do? Because the only thing that can happen here is…talk.

    So let’s explore the options, being mindful of the legitimacy of perspective that is the underwriting principle upon which all freedom is based. It’s high time we live like honorable people.

    It seems to me important to expose first principles and codify assumptions; something along the lines of…

    “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

  21. Solar Hero

    Yo johnm55:

    You missed one other option: the polls are wrong. Kind-of remarkable you aren’t considering that.

  22. Ian Welsh

    Please do not grind your single axe in every single thread. Thanks.

    Two polls got it right, the IBW poll was also the most accurate for the last two elections. I would say most pollsters just did a very bad job.

  23. Tony Wikrent

    Regarding the polls: As someone who travels extensively in rural areas and to small towns, let me tell you what I think happened, and will continue to happen. The people who support Trump have come to detest almost anything that has to do with the national political system: the two Parties, the consultants, the media, and the pollsters. Trump supporters believe the media and the pollsters intend to sway votes by reporting that their favored candidate — Clinton — is winning in the polls. They do not trust the media and the pollsters. So if someone who supports Trump receives a call from a pollster, what do you think are the chances that they are simply going to lie to the pollster? I think the chances are pretty high.

    In other words, the pollsters are so hated and so distrusted, that it is no longer even possible to get an accurate poll result. In yet other words, this is a result of the collapse of trust in institutions.

  24. Tony Wikrent

    I was talking to Jon Larson about the election of Trump, and he offered what I think is a very interesting and plausible explanation for why people in small towns and rural areas disliked Clinton so intensely, and gave their vote to Trump. Now, you must understand that Larson is a true expert on Thorsten Veblen. He has presented papers at conferences on Veblen even though Larson is not in the academy. And, he served on the board that oversaw the restoration of the Veblen homestead near Nerstrand in rural Rice County, Minnesota, almost exactly 60 miles south of St. Paul.

    Second, you need to understand that Larson believes the most important book Veblen wrote is not The Theory of the Leisure Class, nor The Theory of Business Enterprise, but The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Art. As Larson summarized the book, “real craftsmen often make things better than they need to be for the sheer love of building well.”

    But there is more: from The Theory of the Leisure Class, we know that Veblen presented a class analysis that differed markedly from Marx’s in that members of both the Marxist proletariat, bourgeoisie, and capitalist class, could be producers, not Leisure Class predators. Especially for those engaged in industrial occupations – who by definition are producer class – the instinct of workmanship is very, very important. If you have ever noticed the difference between an auto repair shop that was filthy and disorderly, and one that was relatively clean and orderly (especially for racing teams, which are damn near like NASA white rooms), you have seen a reflection of the instinct of workmanship.

    So, with that preface, Larson believes that most people small towns and rural areas have to deal with very concrete and specific problems every day. If you don’t fix a tractor or car correctly, it simply does not run. Immediate, measurable, tangible results. People who are accustomed to this as a way of life naturally dislike politicians and the news media, because politicians and the news media can be terribly, horribly, disastrously wrong – and nothing happens to them. There are no consequences for their being wrong. And Clinton was the penultimate specimen of the political type. While Trump could reasonably pass himself off as someone who actually gets things done: he’s built casinos and hotels and what not. It doesn’t matter if they all were successful projects or not, it’s just that these type of voters could relate to Trump on a level or in a way that they never could with Clinton.

  25. Lisa

    One thing that has to remembered is that neo-liberal ‘economics’ is actually anti-capitalism and is in basic terms an attempt to a return to a pre Adam Smith feudalism/rentier past. If you think of the wealthy individuals and corporations as feudal lords with a peasantry ..and business .. constrained and their rentier hands taking their slice at every point.

    The Wealth of Nations was in many ways a cry to end the dead hand of rentiers and let creative capitalism out to be free.

    What we know of as the ‘Keynes’ model of the social democratic capitalistic model was a way of taking the raw energy of capitalism and channeling it into positive areas because, as was found, pure capitalism could be incredibly destructive.

    The neo-liberal model is an attempt to return to that past of the capital owners, not the capital creators, owning and controlling everything, eliminating competition and creativity. Hence the ultimate example of the TPP (and the EU equivalent).

    The logical result is concentration of capital ownership, and hence income, into a tiny number of hands… out new landed gentry who have vested interest in ending competition and hence creativity. Let’s face it the silicon valley bunch, started by the mini computer boys of DEC (etc) later the PC ones, would never had gotten anywhere these days, IBM would have bought them all out. But back then as powerful as it was IBM was constrained.

    Not now hence ..notice how little real innovation there has been in recent decades?

    Controlled and channeled capitalism within a social democratic framework actually works very well.

  26. Ché Pasa

    Out here in rural New Mexico, it’s not that hard to figure out why 60% of the voters in my county voted for Trump and another 11% voted for Johnson, leaving the remainder to Clinton and Stein.

    The Dems, for whom many rural New Mexicans once had great hopes, have done them wrong over and over and over again. It’s not because of racism or bigotry or any of those hot-button issues (though I’m sure that in some households it is, it’s just not a general thing) it is because Democrats as a political class have had a habit of making things more difficult than they need to be without providing any gain to the people they are affecting with their endless complexities.

    Overregulation and social engineering are part of the rejection of Democrats and their policies. Plain cussedness and cowboy – fierce independence is part of it, too.

    Mostly, people out here just want to be left alone. That’s not hard to understand at all, and it doesn’t need a deep sociological study to figure out. People out here by and large don’t have a lot of money, and they don’t have a lot of time to wrestle with the myriad social problems the Dems tend to focus on — with no economic/financial benefit to the people being subjected to all that focus. From their point of view, Dem “solutions” often make things worse.

    This is ranch and farm country, so the issues are a little different than one finds in deteriorated manufacturing areas, but I think the attitude is similar. Dems have done nothing but make life more difficult for those trying the best they can to get by under increasingly difficult circumstances.

    And that’s the neo liberal game plan. The Rs have the same game plan of course, and I think most of the folks out here know and understand that, but the mitigating factor is that they believe that the Rs will leave the locals alone, even say nice things about them from time to time, whereas the Dems will be constantly berating them, betraying them, and trying to change them into some ideal of “good citizens” instead of respecting who and what they are.

    Trump tapped in to that frustration whereas Clinton dismissed it — though she knew it was there. You can be sure that Trump will do nothing that doesn’t benefit him first and foremost. He’s a conman and has no intention to follow through on whatever promises he might have made to lure and hook his marks. With him, the Deal is negotiated after the sale is closed.

    But that aside, he knew and knows how to use people’s fears, desires and needs to get what he wants. For Clinton and the Dems, it’s a whole different ball game, worked from the premise of how they think the Little People should be, not how they are.

    

  27. if we believe in free will

    I would say, “I believe – to some extent.” In The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Erich Fromm points out that we have more freedom at a crossroads than when we are going full speed down one of the highways branching from there – we can decide freely at some points, at other points the momentum is much harder to overcome.

    It also seems to me that the will can be free to the extent that one’s knowledge is accurate – and one’s motivation is wholesome – and one’s will is NOT free to the extent that these are not so – Buddhism says much on this.

    Finally, there is the wisdom in the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior, humorously said to have been discovered by B.F. Skinner in his work on operant conditioning: “Under carefully controlled experimental conditions, the subject organism does what it damn well pleases.” Those who run the world implicitly depend on the assumption that everyone can be bribed or threatened – certainly those who they associate with on a daily basis behave that way – and so actual behavior in the field can surprise them.

  28. Mark Pontin

    Ché Pasa: “The Dems, for whom many rural New Mexicans once had great hopes, have done them wrong over and over and over again. It’s not because of racism or bigotry or any of those hot-button issues (though I’m sure that in some households it is, it’s just not a general thing) it is because Democrats as a political class have had a habit of making things more difficult than they need to be ….’

    You’re too kind to the Dems. It is a truth universally accepted that they’re the lesser evil. Yet if you actually go through the evidence of the last thirty years since the Cold War’s end, in the same way that only Nixon could go to China the Democratic administrations have been complicit in enabling the most criminal acts of domestic looting. A short list: –
    [1] GATT – 4.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs shipped off to China;
    [2] Ending of Glass-Steagall;
    [3] Promotion of mergers under William Perry, Clinton’s defense secretary, whereby the likes of Boeing was merged with Lockheed -Martin, and American preeminence in aviation, the central technology that originally enabled U.S.-led global leadership, was flushed down the toilet;
    [4] The Obama administration’s active complicity with the banks in helping them ‘robosign’ — that is, actively forge — chain of title on 1.5 million or so American homes so the banks could fraudulently deprive that many American families of homes, while flushing 400 years of Anglo-American property law down the toilet;
    [5] The Obama administration– and specifically Eric Holder and Tim Geithner — permitting the TBTF banks to directly launder the $2 trillion of drug cartel money that washes through the global economy annually. That’s why HSBC thought it could get away with it — all the big American banks were allowed to launder drug cartel money in the wake of the 2008 GFC. And where was the heroin coming from? Afghanistan, where there are two factions and the Taliban don’t permit opium poppy farming. Who does? Well —
    https://www.globalresearch.ca/drug-war-american-troops-are-protecting-afghan-opium-u-s-occupation-leads-to-all-time-high-heroin-production/5358053

  29. Mark Pontin

    David wrote: “I was watching a NASA internet streamed astronomy conference a few months ago (where) … a fairly well known scientist in the audience, stood up and said that this was all bullshit. She said that after the already funded WFIRST is launched in 2021, that there will be no more such projects in the lifetime of anyone in the room as the public will be much more concerned about surviving global warming and political upheaval than dreaming about the stars.”

    That’s probably naive.

    The future is arguably ‘techno-fascist,’ in that as the U.S. collapses, advanced technocratic economies will likely continue in the areas around Boston, the SF Bay Area, and Seattle, where elites will implement the new biogenetic technologies to their own advantage and have vaccine passports. Meanwhile, “the public” in the rest of the country will fulminate about Bill Gates’s vaccine conspiracy against the Murrikan people, suffer from disease and refuse to be immunized, try to survive climate disaster, march around with guns and commit violence upon each other, and flock to whatever political barbarians follow Trump.

    “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” was the famous Gibson line. Well, the future that’s coming will just be even more unevenly distributed, to the extent there may even be actual human speciation.

    Bob McManus wrote: “Make no mistake, these fucks want slaves.”

    Do they? Why? What earthly use would such slaves be?

    Bob McManus: “Come to think about it, that’s just the old pattern. Although sharing the army and some justice system, the metropole and country (Paris, Edo/Tokyo) sometimes pretty much left each other alone, metropole providing finance, technology, and the larger expense of security, while the country slave areas send food and resources to the metropole.”

    There you’re on firmer ground. To be facile, the future may look somewhat like that old SF movie, ZARDOZ: centers of technocratic advance where the elect enjoy the fruits of AI and biogenetic technologies, surrounded by larger areas inhabited only by Brutals – the vast mass of unaccommodated humanity.

    “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal.”

    – KING LEAR, Act 3 Scene 4

  30. Stirling S Newberry

    https://xkcd.com/2318/

    One of the problems the left has is that it has no clue about what really needs to be solved. Let me take a loud case: nursing homes. When you look at Western Europe, we do worse than they do but most of the countries do badly. While China under-reports cases and does not report when it really started, the death toll is still smaller than the US. They don’t have many in Nursing Homes. While older populations get savage badly, this is not the whole reason.

    Many of the problems that we solve aren’t the real ones: minority people in Nursing Homes are treated much worse than majority people in the “same” environment. Corbyn would have done badly – not as badly as Loonfest the PM did but bad enough – because he would keep people in Nursing Homes. You people need to change your attitude about what “left” means. Only then will you see real problems. The other problems need solving, however, the real problems have to be in the mix. That means data-driven solutions. I told people about the problem – and was not listen to. There are thousands of deaths because of it.

  31. krake

    Mark,

    Most of North American social memory and ordinary thinking is frontier-survivalist, and was even as the thoroughly Enclosed era of the New Deal was ascendant. I think it is genuinely difficult for most people to think about futurity without resorting to the survivalist posture. That’s why it’s so much more tempting to see present-to-future scenrios as ones of conflict, though the primary mode for a generation and a half has been triage and neglect.

    There’s a reason why the overclass has signed on to police reform so rapidly, and (despite well-intentioned premises regarding bodies in the streets and media coverage) it’s that this dovetails very nicely with a broader trend of elite disengagement.

    The elites do not need bodies once automation and escape to near orbit are realized. They don’t need as many bodies as they did 6 months ago. And they will continue to need fewer and fewer, until a critical threshold is reached, and the ‘revolt of the rich’ becomes something else, something permanent.

    If you don’t live in Columbia, the Northeast, the Toronto metropole or the Chicago megacomplex, accept now that you are plainly hosed.

  32. Stirling S Newberry

    Jesus flag
    consequential century
    North Carolina dozen
    Flagpole preaching
    oppression God
    Confederate ancestors enslaved
    Ku Klux Klan a circle
    White supremacist murdered parishioners
    perpetrated
    Lamposts Prufrock permanently Confederate immemorials
    Dean imfaith
    theological tenor.
    Religious coalitions subsumed successful
    ignored fetishized, trotted
    amorphous interfaith prayer
    Social Gospel consequential congressional
    jeopardizing unemployment eliminating
    interrupted deliberations environmental spiritual
    potent religious spontaneous
    abolitionist American Prophets

    https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/is-there-a-religious-left

  33. Krystyn Podgajski

    I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world. Letting be is from the fear that men, (when interfered with), will carry their nature beyond its normal condition; exercising forbearance is from the fear that men, (when not so dealt with), will alter the characteristics of their nature. When all men do not carry their nature beyond its normal condition, nor alter its characteristics, the good government of the world is secured.

    Tsâi Yû, or ‘Letting Be, and Exercising Forbearance.’ from The Writings of Chuang Tzu

  34. Stirling S Newberry

    vilipend Future wonders funeral
    architectural tragedies comedies democracy
    class consciousness
    devastated epidemic
    ravaged military brutal debilitated catastrophe.
    murderous oligarchy
    Millennia eternal plague
    legacy lethal ruinous
    Republic

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-plague-a-cautionary-tale-of-democracys-fragility

  35. Ché Pasa

    Interesting to compare where we were in 2016 to where we are now. No one could have predicted, of course, that we’d be facing the multiplicity of crises we are today, and many were certain that Trump would be the solution to the now petty problems we faced back then. He was going to end neoliberalism, he was going to end the wars and bring home the troops, he was going to bring America back from the brink, provide universal health care, and on and on and on. As we know, Hillary would have started WWIII and we’d all be dead if she’d been elected, so even if Trump didn’t do anything he said or people imagined he would, he was the lesser evil by far.

    It all seems so silly now. Corbyn, Sanders, and so many other of the Socialist white hopes have faded away, neoliberalism is a tottering pardigm but it still rules, the wars continue, some now on city streets, the economy is shattered and won’t recover, a virus pandemic is raging and selectively taking out useless eaters and “essential” (but disposable) workers at will, the rate of global warming may have slowed a bit or maybe not during the shut down, and more and more people are reaching the point of desperation — not simply discomfort — every day, with little or no succor in sight.

    Who could have imagined four years ago that we’d be where we are today?

    Authoritarianism is the ruling fashion just as Fascism was before WWII. There is no Communist counterbalance, just Fearsome Antifa who aren’t caravanning to the sticks to raise mayhem. The rabble is revolting, but without a clear direction. At least the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone of Seattle has found its voice and stated its — soon-to-be petty — demands.

    The uprisings haven’t stopped. Racial, economic, and social justice along with de-policing and criminal justice reform have become the core goals of the rebellions. But… we know how these things tend to go.

    I wonder where we’ll be in six months.

  36. Ian Welsh

    Trump and Brexit are both repudiations of neoliberalism. Covid is doing vast damage to neoliberalism.

    The socialist electoral hopes failed, that doesn’t change that neoliberalism is dying.

    The question is what will replace it. Better hope these uprisings work and keep going, because otherwise the likely alternatives are… bad.

    Deaths of sub-ideologies can take quite a long time. Took 12 for post-war liberalism. The death of the previous system took either from 14-45 or 29-45, depending how you want to count it.

  37. Krystyn Podgajski

    Ian,

    I am expecting the worst and I am looking for a possible quiet place to pass the time. Neoliberalism will not be replaced and they will hold on to the ideology by force, just like Obama did to Occupy.

    The only place we should be going is back to the far past, before agriculture and authoritarian structures, nomadic and free.

    Have you ever head the story of The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove?

  38. bruce wilder

    The world has no shortage of Cassandras. The claim, “No one could predicted . . .” is surely false, as everything that happens is predicted, much of it regularly and even by ostensibly establishment figures and responsible institutions.

    I have wondered for more than twenty-five years about the seemingly vast number of people determined not to heed the Cassandras among us. How can they be so impervious?

    Whether you imagine the impervious as an extensive and passive public who have lost interest or a privileged and foppish elite indifferent to consequences (to others) it remains a fundamental mystery of our time.

    The great complaint about Trump until recently from the useless Resistance that impeached him has been that he isn’t “normal”. I am not sure what that means. In many ways he is a mirror-image of Obama in orange-face. I suspect he makes it harder to ignore Cassandra. Trump makes it marginally harder to ignore the malevolent negligence of the political classes. If you did not already know how incompetent MSM or the Democratic Party had become, Russia,Russia,Russia was certainly instructive. And, if you did not get the message of contempt, they nominate Biden just so you can get further schooling: go ahead, elect a demented fabulist to replace an idiot reality teevee star, see how much change you get.

    I suppose I am a fan of revolutions: I like reading about them, anticipating one. People always express surprise as change accelerates in a political revolution, but people are rarely really surprised that the system breaks down. The problems, the stressors are obvious, even if the effort to remedy problems seems misdirected or futile.

    It is remarkably difficult to get people to see that what they are doing is not helping. Why?

  39. Tom

    Only thing these uprisings will lead to is catastrophic system collapse of the US into Syria, with multiple factions, the military deserting and turning on each other as orders come to fire on protesters, and mass destruction.

    Battle lines are being drawn, pick a side or none. Either way this will turn messy real fast.

  40. bruce wilder

    The New Deal owed a lot to the precedents of Progressive reform. In many ways, the New Deal was FDR’s do-over of the two great depressions of the late 19th century (1871-77, 1893-96), followed by a do-over of Great War. The mentality and experience of the Populists and the Progressives fed the New Deal and the conduct of Foreign Policy. It helped that there was highly developed criticism of the economy and international relations in the era before the New Deal.

    I am not sure if I would want people to learn much from neoliberalism. And, the great success of neoliberalism was its “TINA”: there has not been much real thought or criticism advanced outside the paradigm. It is a reason to be pessimistic.

  41. Willy

    Once upon a time there were guys like Wright Patman, doing what they could to protect the American wage earner from those plastic fingered white collar conservatives. But telling the tale to most current citizens tends to put them to sleep, or invoke some kind of brainwashed by whatever media rant mode.

    Maybe we can publish Chick cartoons about his mission and adventures?

  42. Ché Pasa

    “No one could have predicted….” is a riff on Bush II era hogwash regarding the attacks of 9/11/2001. Of course they were predicted, gamed out in detail within the administration and at the Pentagon. The regime ignored the predictions and the recommendations. There was even an episode of a television program that included a commercial airplane used as a weapon to crash into the World Trade Center. These things were well understood prior to the events, just as the current confluence of crises had been gamed and re-gamed prior to its appearance. Predictions and recommendations once again were ignored. This is how our governments work — or don’t as the case may be.

    By now we should be used to it.

    The strain this time is acute, and a lot that we took for granted for a long time is not coming back. But the neoliberal paradigm is still supreme though weakened. Who got the lion’s share of the various stimulus and relief measures? Same people and outfits who did after the crash of 2008. They profit no matter what. And they intend to keep it that way.

    Meanwhile the rest of us are living on surplus — which is quickly running out — and you can best believe our betters have gamed out what happens when it’s all gone and what to do before it does. The current demonstrations and police response are prelude. As was the gilets jaunes and the gendarmes going at it in France.

    Six months from now the world will have turned upside down once again.

    The parallels with the Between the Wars era of the 20th century are not exact, but still, they’re chilling.

  43. Richard

    Isn\’t money required for anything our overlords want to do? But where shall they find it? $10 trillion wasn\’t enough to kickstart investment; instead tens of millions of people lost their jobs. This seems lost on people, but capitalism must expand in order to even function as poorly as it does. And there is little to no investment in anything since profits are not expected. Even if our overlords desire it, can they maintain control without profits? Police and military must be paid after all. The crumbs they pick up from minimum wage workers is not going to do it.

  44. gnokgnoh

    I doubt Trump has ever used the term neoliberalism in his life, let alone contemplated repudiating it. He throws stuff against the fridge to see if it will stick. It seemed to work in the campaign and before. He lost interest after he became President.

    People have been and will continue to suffer from climate change and resource depletion. Late-stage neoliberalism is the escalation of the power of the wealthy in the face of the dawning realization of what’s ahead. Noblesse oblige is not possible, anymore. Not enough to go around.

    It’s not planned other than the hoarding and storage of wealth and food like a squirrel hoards nuts. There will be no techno-havens of haves and hinterlands of have-nots. In the short-run, maybe some will attempt it, to their peril. Even globe-trotting has and will become passe, although I wonder if Russian, American, and Arab oligarchs are still flying all over the place in their private jets. Perhaps they don’t have to quarantine upon arrival in other countries.

  45. Z

    As bad as things look right now in the political sense, Sloppy Joe is still a 77 year old man who is probably on a pretty strong cocktail of drugs. If he keeled over or had a stroke at this point there’s almost no way they could deny Bernie the nomination short of murdering him, which would create a huge amount of suspicion and unrest in this country if they did.

    It’s been a crazy year thus far and we’re not even halfway done with it yet …

    Z

  46. Hugh

    “there’s almost no way they could deny Bernie the nomination

    Of course, they would. After all, that’s how Biden became the presumptive nominee. Nobody in our ruling classes has any interest in real change. And as Stirling said, first you need to know what needs changing, where the problems are. For that, we need a vision of the kind of society we want. My view is that our solemn duty to each other is provide each of us with the basics for a good and meaningful life. Warehousing the old and sick in nursing homes where they can be forgotten has nothing good or meaningful about it. It’s something we can all understand, and that’s key. With a vision of what we want we can decide for ourselves what fits and what doesn’t. As in real caregiving, yes. Billionaires, no.

  47. gnokgnoh

    “there’s almost no way they could deny Bernie the nomination.
    Of course, they would. After all, that’s how Biden became the presumptive nominee.”

    Sorry, but no one denied Bernie the nomination. This was not planned, and the Democratic Party was as astonished as anyone. Biden barely campaigned, and it happened too quickly. The Democratic Party is not that all-powerful or prescient. At the most, there was arm-twisting behind the scenes to get all the other candidates to pull out after South Carolina.

    I’m frankly amazed at how many delegates Sanders has earned, a significant chunk of it after South Carolina. Someone noted that if Biden does not make it, Sanders should be the presumptive nominee. Based on delegate count (Biden 2,144; Sanders 1,047), they are correct. At that point, though, it’s a brokered convention, and Sanders is not a shoo-in.

  48. Mark Pontin

    Krake wrote: “Most of North American social memory and ordinary thinking is frontier-survivalist, and was even as the thoroughly Enclosed era of the New Deal was ascendant. I think it is genuinely difficult for most people to think about futurity without resorting to the survivalist posture. That’s why it’s so much more tempting to see present-to-future scenarios as ones of conflict, though the primary mode for a generation and a half has been triage and neglect. ”

    Well-articulated, and you’re at least partly right about all this.

    Not incidentally, I’ve been noticing that you and I foresee a broadly similar scenario for the next few decades (absent a titanic climate disaster like Siberia’s permafrost melting away, leading to massive methane release, in which case all bets are off). With the difference being that the scenario fills you with horror and you’ve described it as techno-fascism because ….

    Krake: “If you don’t live in Columbia, the Northeast, the Toronto metropole or the Chicago megacomplex, accept now that you are plainly hosed.”

    You left out the SF Bay Area out of that collection of elite localities (and maybe a big earthquake or tsunami takes that permanently down, though I doubt it). But, sure, it’s possible that the rest of the country becomes the domain of the Brutals.

    But I don’t think that necessarily has to be the case. I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to interview some folks a few years back. I had only a superficial fly-in, fly-out view of the place, but nevertheless I was pleasantly surprised by how well Pittsburgh — Pittsburgh, for fuck’s sake! — had done in moving beyond its industrial rust-belt origins to become a functioning 21st century post-industrial city.

    So maybe there’ll be a space for local city-states to build something in the next iteration of whatever the country formerly known as the U.S.A. becomes. Yes, some emergent, profoundly disruptive technologies are intensive in terms of physical capital, like quantum computation; only technocratic elites will exploit that. The biogenetic technologies mostly are relatively cheap to do, on the other hand, requiring just knowledge, mostly. Local communities of ordinary people could do those, if they applied themselves

    What needs to vanish are the giant, federal super-states where all wealth is continually sucked in by predatory imperial capitals: super-states like the U.S.A., the E.U., the former U.S.S.R., and so forth. Maybe China works for the Chinese. But even in countries only of the scale of the U.K. and France, for instance, too much wealth gets sucked up by London and Paris, respectively.

    In a world where the U.S. federal superstate ceases to exist or at least to dominate, of course, the current elite in Columbia ceases to matter so much. Because what genuine technocracy does D.C. have? Only the MIC. So there’s a currently-existing elite there that wants things to stay as they are. Which brings us to ….

    Krake: “The elites do not need bodies once automation and escape to near orbit are realized. They don’t need as many bodies as they did 6 months ago. And they will continue to need fewer and fewer, until a critical threshold is reached, and the ‘revolt of the rich’ becomes something else, something permanent.”

    The exterminist scenario, huh? Well, maybe. But, firstly, in a collapsing empire you have intra-elite competition, as we’re witnessing now. There are different elites. Financial ones need a U.S. state somewhat like the one that exists now; technocratic elites, somewhat less so.

    Then, too, escape to near-orbit and the kind of automation are less achievable in the near-term than you may think.

    Permanent escape to near orbit certainly isn’t possible for elites in the next couple of decades at least — and probably never for the current ones. Unreconstructed human physiologies simply can’t endure null gravity and radiation in space for extended periods of over a year.

    Hypothetically, you could tow an asteroid into Earth-orbit and hollow it out for the shielding its exterior rock would provide, then put a spin on it to provide artificial gravity. Longer-term, you could also redesign human beings from scratch to be homo astronauticus, and there are people at NASA, Harvard, and elsewhere who’ve been working out how to do that for decades.

    But these are big projects and even if executed they won’t personally help the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Bezos knows this, by the way. Musk, on the other hand talks mostly nonsense; it’s not clear to me if it’s simply PR hype and he knows better, or if he’s just ignorant — and it may be the latter. He’s not a real technologist; he did *two days* in a physics graduate program at Stanford, then dropped out, and made his money as one of the Paypal Mafia, like Peter Thiel.

    Automation, also, has limitations. In the near-term, yes, it can enable killer drone swarms. It won’t achieve true self-driving vehicles outside the context of smart cities configured for those vehicles.

  49. bruce wilder

    Sorry, but no one denied Bernie the nomination. This was not planned, and the Democratic Party was as astonished as anyone. Biden barely campaigned, and it happened too quickly.

    That other candidates dropped out suddenly seems like evidence for planning and coordination.

    I do not think Bernie was on a trajectory to the nomination. His campaign had found a strategy that limited his appeal to a third of the Democratic Party electorate and pulled in too few new voters.

    But, it was pretty clear that the Party establishment coordinated among themselves to arrange things so that Sanders would not have a plurality with his solid support, nor would he be able to build out his support in a longer campaign.

    From the vote counting app in Iowa onward, high and low tech manipulation of the vote was common practice.

  50. Hugh

    Obama staged a coup against Sanders at a point where with Super Tuesday Sanders was going to consolidate his position as the frontrunner, and therefore become the presumptive nominee. South Carolina was hyped because it looked good for Biden but was irrelevant in the great scheme of things because it would be about the last state in the country to go Democratic in the general. So ditch the other candidates, hype South Carolina and voilà you get the demented corporatist guy who was running third or maybe fourth. Yep, nothing to see here. Move along.

  51. Hugh

    The twilight of neoliberalism looks a lot like Alice in Wonderland with Trump as the Red Queen screaming, “Off with their heads!” right and left. Trump thinks the coronavirus is pretty much over. “Let’s open up the country!” So he’s going to stage big rallies again, but he’s going to have attendees sign waivers that absolve him and his campaign in case they catch Covid-19 and/or die as a result. Meanwhile the stock market dropped a couple thousand points yesterday, not because we are in a severe recession and the economy has been devastated, but on concerns over Fed policy, showing once again that it is the Fed and not the economy that calls the shots on Wall Street. Racism, protests, and militarized delegitimized police. In the death of neoliberalism, the disconnects are everywhere, and multiplying. And of course the biggest disconnect is the disconnect from reality. We can not solve problems by ignoring them or calling them names.

  52. Z

    Gnokgnoh,

    Sorry, but no one denied Bernie the nomination. This was not planned, and the Democratic Party was as astonished as anyone.

    Thanks for the laugh this morning!

    Personally, I think that if we could be so lucky that Sloppy Joe, that beaten down old political whore horse, collapsed splay-legged and our rulers still denied Bernie the nomination the youth in this country would burn this place down, and for good reason IMO, because Bernie is the only candidate who offers them a path to a future rather than a sentence in neo-liberal hell.

    Biden’s handlers keep pumping him up full of drugs for the important interviews and then he is a stumbling idiot for a few days. After they had him jacked up and gave us peak Biden for the last debate with Bernie, we didn’t see Sloppy Joe for damn near a week, or maybe longer, and when he came back it looked like they had the old whore painted-up to conceal a black eye. They keep juicing him and they very well could blow something. There’s a lot of brittle hoses to his engine.

    I’d love to see that corrupt bastard keel over during one of his campaign conferences, collapse face first on the table so that our rulers would be denied the opportunity to stick a hand up his ass and puppet that sorry bastard along to the election. He’s done enough damage to this country, though he’s been too doped up to know it, and in particular the blacks, the youth, and the working class as a whole. His policies have killed and damaged plenty all over the world. He’s used his power to damage millions of people in the world, easily. And when I watch the tapes of his carnival barking in Congress while he sold out this country to the powerful, what appalls me the most about him as a person is that he’s gotten so much personal enjoyment out of doing it.

    Z

  53. Dan

    Krystyn, thank you for referencing “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.” I’ve been admiring much of the related artwork.

  54. Stirling S Newberry

    >Thanks for the laugh this morning!

    He believes that all – all – Democrats are complete and utter fools. Everything else follows.

  55. Stirling S Newberry

    Caribbean Flatbush
    downtown Brooklyn
    progressive Democrats
    engine justice
    police rousted young black i will on
    aggressively moving protesters
    visors department terrorism
    orange chemical
    combination bewilderment burning
    volatile belligerent
    supervisor ordered medical
    operated intentions unacceptable.
    mammoth protesters.

  56. S Brennan

    Enough with the Sanders crap.

    Sanders is a sell-out; period. As soon as Tulsi finally quit [19 March] and publicly committed political seppuku in order to retire her massive campaign debts, Sander’s job was done [05 April]. Sanders had wanted to throw the towel in earlier, but was convinced to hold on longer so the DNC could put a stake thru Gabbard’s heart.

    Sanders has, in two campaigns ensured that Al-From’s DNCers remained in total control of the Democratic Party apparatus. And he was perfect for the job, he cleared the political solar system[D] of any young “meteor” who could appear and harness the seething unrest that 40 years of the D’s autocratic gilded age [sans mercantilism] produced.

    The deniers are out there, they can’t bring themselves to own-up to who Bernie was and is…even if he did it a 3rd time they’d still fall for his shtick. I had supported Tulsi, the day they made her commit ritual suicide through disembowelment I dropped my support for her. And yet through two separate betrayals, both motivated by “thirty pieces of silver”, Bernie retains his admirers, because, Bernie’s fan club can’t admit they have been had…a con man’s dream if there ever was one.

  57. krake

    Mark: “The exterminist scenario, huh? Well, maybe. But, firstly, in a collapsing empire you have intra-elite competition, as we’re witnessing now. There are different elites. Financial ones need a U.S. state somewhat like the one that exists now; technocratic elites, somewhat less so.

    Then, too, escape to near-orbit and the kind of automation are less achievable in the near-term than you may think.

    Permanent escape to near orbit certainly isn’t possible for elites in the next couple of decades at least — and probably never for the current ones. Unreconstructed human physiologies simply can’t endure null gravity and radiation in space for extended periods of over a year.

    Hypothetically, you could tow an asteroid into Earth-orbit and hollow it out for the shielding its exterior rock would provide, then put a spin on it to provide artificial gravity. Longer-term, you could also redesign human beings from scratch to be homo astronauticus, and there are people at NASA, Harvard, and elsewhere who’ve been working out how to do that for decades.

    But these are big projects and even if executed they won’t personally help the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Bezos knows this, by the way. Musk, on the other hand talks mostly nonsense; it’s not clear to me if it’s simply PR hype and he knows better, or if he’s just ignorant — and it may be the latter. He’s not a real technologist; he did *two days* in a physics graduate program at Stanford, then dropped out, and made his money as one of the Paypal Mafia, like Peter Thiel.

    Automation, also, has limitations. In the near-term, yes, it can enable killer drone swarms. It won’t achieve true self-driving vehicles outside the context of smart cities configured for those vehicles.”

    I am aphantasiac; I sometimes forget/neglect that my absence of internal commentary, ideation and image conjuring is both difficult to capture and of a tendency to build metaphor and relation into language, that most people can substitute with their normal ‘illuminated’ self experience. I will model a model and sometimes miss on the simple device of explaining that this is how I think the parties in question see the world.

    That’s a lot of discursive exposition, I know. What I should have built in, but didn’t, is that I’m not offering a prediction about likely outcomes, when it comes to the elites escaping into the heavens. I just think there is sufficient evidence to accept that a large number of them are operating, and therefore deciding, from this premise. There is nothing as hopeful and self-deceiving as the faith-in-self of “great men”. It’s powerful enough to provoke tidal disruptions in the fates of peoples.

    Do I think the Musks and Thiels and Bezoses will actually go post-human, of at least near-orbital? No. But they are going to keep moving money and bodies like they can and will, and that is going to have down-chain ramifications that will exacerbate the already compounding crises of capitalism, ecological collapse and commons raiding.

    I concede, without reservation, elite factionalism. I’ve always found the belief in interlocking directorates and transnational cabals to be, well, delightful in their naivete. Corporations, bureacracies and extraction regimes are structurally self-cannibalizing.

    As for the Bay Area, I just kind of assume it is the high-cost, lowet boundary zone of the emerging region of “Columbia”, extending north through P-Land and the Willamette, Seattle and the Puget, into Vancouver and Victoria, but eventually also including the coastal strip up to Anchorage and maybe the Banff through to Calgary. Seems to make economic, cultural sense.

    This is what I replied last week:

    “The US has been prepared, sometimes quite meticulously, for a soft balkanization, where the state and national fictions are maintained, but where whole regions are abandoned to direct corporate control, or alternatively, fallujahfication. If you live in northern New England, or greater Columbia, you will probably be fine for the rest of your expected lifetime. If you live in a municipality with a techno-specific workforce, you will probably be fine, if you maintain your subscriptions. If you live and work in a competitive merit zone, like Manhattan, parts of Atlanta, San Francisco or the posher sections of LA County, you’ll pay a much, much higher access cost, and if you can afford it you’ll be fine. Occasionally interupted by surplus-body outbursts, but mostly fine.”

  58. Mark Pontin

    @ krake —

    So you’re speaking not always specifically, but impressionistically, as befits an internet thread’s length requirements. That’s fine. I recalled your more detailed graf from last week. “The US has been prepared, sometimes quite meticulously, for a soft balkanization ….” That seemed on the money.

    Krake: “I will model a model and sometimes miss on the simple device of explaining that this is how I think the parties in question see the world.”

    I figured maybe so. But I can’t know for sure till you say that, right?

    I have to confess. I’m in one your the un-hosed territories on the left coast and have access to those on the right coast through work and family. And though I’ve lived here for decades as a resident alien, I’m anyway not an American precisely because I always thought the chickens could come home to roost (and partly just because listening to white Americans and what they believed often just irritated me).

    For quite a few years, too, the U.S.S.R. and its collapse has been of interest to me. Whenever I’ve raised the possibility of the U.S.A. collapsing similarly, Americans have almost always looked at me like I was nuts. I’ve been right about some other things at this point, so I’m not too surprised about seeing history elsewhere recapitulating itself here. I’m not that happy about being stuck here while things are kicking off, though.

  59. krake

    Mark,

    My best friend’s wife is Ukrainian. She was born in the USSR. After they asked me to be a godfather to her first born, and I was on the inside of the weird, hard-to-explain Eastern European bubble, where everything becomes really blunt and intimate but still mercenary and guardef, I brought up Orlov. It took her some time to reply. It’s been years, but I still remember how she put it.

    “Americans are weak once you get to know them.”

    Synopsis:

    Maybe it never falls here. But yes, if it does, so much worse. There, nobody owned anything and everyone was literate and skill trained. So, bad but not fall to bottom bad, because no banks, no cops, no courts, no owners. Everything already bribes and more bribes. No one trusted words, meanings, systems. Not many true believers. A “sideways” bad. But not death of god.

    Here, loss of faith. Loss of money. Loss of pride, identity, power. Loss, loss, loss. Americans are “babies”, which is why they’re afraid of all the people from bad places, the hard survivors. That’s the worry. Americans won’t know how to be mortal and ordinary.

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