Democrats Take The Senate & House

correct Ian. if they were to reverse trump, would mean reversing bill clintons policies, ain’t gonna happen. schumer will stay the head of the senate, jeffries the head of the house. filibuster will stay in place, trumps administration will survive mostly.

under this scenario, the billionaires will have control over a useless economy, with their paper assets ignored around the world.

I mostly concur with Ian’s take here, with one pretty major dissension which I will mention. I felt pretty giddy last night as I saw how Trump had pretty much demolished not only the Republican party’s power, but his own grip on it. I think the present Duopoly system is suffering from a chronic, fatal disease, which may be slow-acting or fast-acting. But the US as a Hegemon certainly, and likely even as an agent to keep its own Citizens/Consumers under control is a Dying Animal.

Philip Roth wrote a novel called The Dying Animal which is a reference point here. I have not read it, but looked at the precis/ summary and it fits. All I’ve ever read by him was Portnoy’s Complaint when I was much younger, and I did an extended review of Roth’s The Human Stain on this site some months back, based mainly on a long piece in Harper’s by a female author on the final (I would guess, she wasn’t sure) meeting of the Philip Roth Society in NYC last year, and watching the first half of the abysmal film, with Nicole Kidman the Rothian decades younger sex-object for the Rothian Libido. The meetings are every decade, and his ouvre is as irrelevant as, say, Norman Mailer’s (who I used to admire and wrote some good books for his era) is today. This is the Micro-level of the Empire’s demise, let’s look at the Macro level of history.

Some time back on here (7-10 years?) there was a discussion of the death of Empires. The historical consensus notes that it took the Western Roman Empire about 2 centuries to fully collapse when the final Emperor moved to the Eastern Empire and it integrated into Asia. Many people noted also the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire before it fell to invading forces with cannons. US is comparable to the Ottoman Empire in that over time it turned into an utterly hardened, inflexible carapace which denied any real, lasting change, a Conservative society which refuses any real innovations.

Now the Tech Bubble seemed to contradict this on the surface, but didn’t truly. As spud and others have covered here, the decision of Bill Clinton to deindustrialize the US in the lead-up to the year 2,000 and outsource all the Industrial Capacity to China, Northern Mexico and other low-wage areas led to the rotting from the inside of the US, the rise of giant Rust Belts and sacrifice zones across the country, etc.

Meantime, the Rentier Lock over the Tech sector was handed over to 7-9 Monopoly corporations, we all know who they are, from Alphabet to Google, Amazon, Oracle, Elon’s grifts, etc. These are also tech surveillance platforms used to gather data on every ‘Murican, though not them exclusively, anyone who is strongly implicated and spending in the US economy directly or indirectly is likely targeted.

In the political sphere, to oversimplify only a bit, after USA was riding high with its Unipolar moment in 1946, control of the international economy via the Bretton-Woods agreement, a sometimes unstable alliance with the petro-states of Western Asia and the vassal states of Europe, decay set in, picking up speed in the Clinton 90s as noted, accelerating since the Bush Steal of the 2000 elections, the post 9/11 Great War of Terror right in the open. It is significant that 3 of the 4 scum Presidents of the US since 1946 were all born in that year, a New Era inaugurated with the fall of the 3rd Reich and the UK Imperial sphere, with the USSR a near-rival power to the US until its demolition by Gorbachev c. 1989-92, in collaboration with Bush Senior and others. Note that Donald J. Trump, Bush the Lesser, and Clinton will all born in 1946. Obama a young knock-off of Bush Jr. just going thru the motions. The only one who was competent up to a point was Clinton (despite major betrayals of ‘Murican interests), the other 2 were clownish incompetents puppetered by more powerful senior advisors: in Shrub Junior’s case, Karl Rove, James Baker, and Dick Cheney, e.g. In Trump’s, by the Epstein class and others; having no ideology beyond insecure glorification of his own Ego and an unsupported belief in his own Jenius (which the J. in Donald J. Trump stood for, per him), the latter was the perfect simulacrum of an Alpha Male “Businessman” created by NBC’s “The Apprentice.” Shape-shifting from a Democrat allied with the Clintons in the 80s (his Salad Days) to a Nativist, White Supremacist with the simplistic borrowed idea of “MAGA” and a concomitant cult of MAGA CHUDs which he utterly destroyed last August, by being the only Chief Exec. stupid (or more likely compromised enough by the Epstein files) to give Bibi Netanyahu what he’d been demanding for 4 decades, a futile attack on Iran which every smart commenter realized would utterly fail within 48 hours of its initiation, even NatSec Ghouls like PNAC’s founder Robert Kagan admitting within a week or so in the august pages of the Atlantic that Trump had failed, bigly.

Now Trump is exactly what he admitted he would be if he continued the “war” after signing the MoU with Iran at Versailles, a 2nd Hoover, & the electoral Drubbing he delivered to his party yesterday proves this. (Or 3rd; Harper’s did a very convincing Cover Story on Obama as the 2nd Hoover for his non-bailout of consumers, in lieu of bailing out the Financial Class after the ’08-09 Summers-Greenspan Crash, late in Obama’s 2nd term.)

Ian calls the likely future convincingly, as usual. I do think that Trump will be forced out due to “health” reasons or some other excuse. He is a babbling, senile idiot, at Joe Biden-like levels now, since nobody can control him, and he lives in his own Bizarroworld variety. Due Dissidence covered the Donald’s closing appeal for Votes yesterday, a bizarre 20 minute diversion about how he’d saved the White House Reflecting Pool, Max Blumenthal also referred to this in a recap after the results were in this morning.

His pitch to the voters was “We’ve mad a beautiful Reflecting Pool, Obama and Biden failed at this, but I succeeded,” how utterly irrelevant, he is simply an embarrassment. Look at his entire destruction of the White House East Wing for a vanity project of a “Ballroom”/ Nuclear bunker. He can’t help but indulge his gayest aesthetic tendencies to cover everything in Gold and build gilt statues of himself at the taxpayers’ expense, unchecked. He has no concept of the US’s vaunted “Strategic Interests” nor anyone in his crackpot administration to launch such a program.

I believe Keaton Weiss of Due Dissidence was correct and he will surely be removed, fairly soon, Weiss predicted this soon after his successful 2024 election campaign, for the obvious reasons that I’ve touched on in passing.

As to Dan Lynch’s comment, the half-wits at Lawyers, Guns and Money noted that if the Dimmies were smart enough to do a Trial Run by impeaching Kegsbreath, the most vulnerable clown in the circus act, they could then escalate and have the successful template to take out the Donald. True as far (not very) as it goes. He notes, as I did, that Trump made himself a 3rd Hoover by bucking the MoU. He had a moment of sanity when he signed it, TACO’ed due to ego, dooming himself, the R’s and MAGA cult, and the Exceptional Empire as Hegemons. I’d bet money (if I had any stake in this, which I no longer do as an expat) that the R’s will take him out as he damages them more.

Dan’s comment that the Dimmies “will not end any wars” is the true Gem in his analysis, in fact they will surely double down on the failed Ukraine Proxy experiment, further dooming any European states whose insane leaders choose to participate. There will be protests and riots in Europe if Merz’s and Von Der Lying’s dream of a 4th Reich is forcibly engaged, the Europeans neither have the Military, the populace, nor the competence to force a success in that Fool’s Dream. Though they might succeed in killing off 90% of the remaining Ukraine population before admitting defeat.

When the Dimmies pour more resources into failed shit like that, US will fall apart at the seams even faster. I would guess that they will stick with the failed Zionist state too; they don’t know basic war-fighting doctrine, neither Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu or any other authority. Colonel Wilkerson often cites that no Empire should “multiply its enemies” beyond the capacity to fight on all those fronts. The current doctrine of being able to project/ fight on 2 fronts simultaneously (W. Asia and Central Eurasia) has currently failed completely and will never be revived.

spud is correct viz the economy, his final paragraph states the case succinctly and clearly and I can add nothing. I think domestically, the Empire will fragment generally, as the Western Roman Empire did. Will there be ANY successful local City-States? It would be possible if the Centralized Authority breaks down effectively quickly enough. I have no idea if that will happen or not.

Another point that Wilkerson and others have made I will simply echo as it is obvious, Max Blumenthal has said the same, as have some of the smarter Communist cliques, etc. There is no Left Opposition group as a kernel around which a real “Resistance” (which the Brunches of Trump’s first term weren’t) can or will form in the foreseeable future. The DSA is a shadow of such an ideal, but they are neither grounded nor courageous, like successful revolutionary movements of the past in Latin America, Vietnam or elsewhere have been. Formerly “1st World” people have had all the fight bred out of them by having the memory of being prosperous once upon a time.

The forecast: continued environmental, social, health and mortality, mental health levels of average ‘Muricans will fall precipitously until some actual Left Movement arises. I wouldn’t predict that in the next decade, maybe in 2-3 if there are any survivors. US will not crash and burn as quickly as Europe will (Europe may crash, will more likely freeze than burn), the White Man’s Dominion/Burden has ended after 5+ centuries, Josep Borrell’s “Garden” Delenda Est, and the “leaders” of the Sacred Narrative will salt its soil, no external entity need do so.

“The center cannot hold.” Capitalism is a death machine, it has done its work unopposed. Civilization will be reborn somewhere, odds inside the current political borders of USA are very bad, at best. My best guess would be in totally marginalized, little-known cultures: possibly parts of Eastern Europe, maybe Indonesia or Malaysia or other spots (if not subsumed by rising seas too rapidly.) Perhaps the Scots or Welsh could survive if they secede and guard their own borders, similar small states elsewhere as well. The Basques? Perhaps.

Corruption is rife
Special interests rule
Our rulers don’t care about me and you
The abject take the shaft
The angry rant and rave
So watcha gonna do, or as a 4th grade poetry student once wrote:
So you want to be a poet
What are you going to do about it?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.