Why Americans don’t fight back – Living on the edge of ruin is exhausting

Filed in National by on April 16, 2019

America today feels like the last days of the Soviet Union.

Haque also remembers those days for the “one party rule” and notes that while the US is dominated by a single party (one that cheated its way into control over the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court and many state governments), it is technically a two-party system, but any Democrat who offers real progressive policies is marginalized and backstabbed by the Democratic establishment.

Other similarities include “power seeking” or structural corruption (think of the establishment’s refusal to enact popular programs like universal health care or network neutrality) and the silencing of dissenting voices and the lack of a real public discourse on the failings of capitalism and the ways that other countries solve their problems.

Friends across the world often ask me: “why don’t Americans do more to fix their crumbling society?” They’re aghast, astonished. I tell them the reality of American life: Americans would, if they could, but they can’t, mostly. Apathy is forced on them by a predatory kind of capitalism that forces them to live something like poor people in a rich country. Breadlines — insulin lines — what’s the difference, really? Americans are forced into being apathetic, weary, drained of energy and ideas and time, by a fatally broken political economy which makes them more and more of them live at the edge of ruin, more and more so every day — but that forced apathy, my friends, is the kind of trap that has led societies throughout history to collapse, whether the USSR or Rome.

What happens if you do try to change the system, though? Well — how exactly are you going to do it? The second way American collapse resembles Soviet collapse is through one party rule. I mean this in a subtle way. It’s true that one party controls most of America’s government — and its society, too — and that party has imploded into the kind of extremism that makes dictators proud. Still, think about the opposition for a moment. What do you notice? They don’t oppose.

(How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse [Umair Haque/Eudaimonia and Co]

(via Naked Capitalism)

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Jason330 is a deep cover double agent working for the GOP. Don't tell anybody.

Comments (2)

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  1. Alby says:
    April 16, 2019 at 12:38 pm

    An insightful indictment of a failing country. Another key segment:

    The Republicans and Democrats don’t differ very much, do they? The Dems don’t offer any of the following, for example — retirement, healthcare, affordable education, childcare, safety nets, and so on. Instead, both parties seem to believe in more or less the same things — markets as the solution to every problem a society has, populated by greedy, self-interested, profit-maximizing “consumers” on the one side, and corporate “people” on the other. Witness Obamacare — and its legacy of ruin (life expectancy’s falling, my friends.) So the Democrats don’t oppose. Americans are offered a set of false choices — between implosion, the Republican way, or collapse, the Democrat way. Neither of these, though, amounts to progress. The result is the functional equivalent of one-party rule.

    Read the whole thing.

  2. jason330 says:
    April 16, 2019 at 12:58 pm

    That brings me to my fitth and final parallel. American society has become a place where dissent isn’t really allowed. Sure, there’s more freedom of speech than in the USSR, and you won’t be shipped off to a gulag. But what has happened is that there is no room to express any ideas except the very ones which have failed — markets, self-interest, profit, advantage, greed, materialism, and so forth. You can’t do it in mainstream media (go ahead, have fun reading the NYT op-ed page). You can’t do it as a thinker (take my example, I can’t publish a book on it no matter how hard I try, because I get told “Americans are too dumb to read that!” by publishers.) You can’t do it as an individual — unless you’re willing to pay the price, which is being shunned and ostracized by all kinds of institutions, societies, clubs, organizations.

    Saying “I’m a social democrat in America” is like saying “Look, maybe capitalism isn’t all bad” in Soviet Russia. You’re a what? A communist? What the hell is wrong with you? You’ll get questioned and hounded and shouted down everywhere you go, every time you say it, by wannabe Tucker Carlsons…except maybe amongst people like you, in little havens of reason here and there. But everybody in the rest of the rich world more or less, is some form of a social democrat by now. The extremists are us, my friends — just as Soviets were yesteryear.

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