I hope future historians really study how an orange chimp was able to take the US Empire off course and make so many deadly mistakes
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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It wouldn't be the first time in history that an empire's fall was accelerated by a short sighted petty buffoon ascending to its throne. This is not a coincidence as empires in decline have a tendency to produce self-destructive leaders. They are a symptom of the underlying rot.
That being said, empires also have a certain amount of institutional inertia and can keep going for a while essentially on autopilot despite jarring leadership changes. In modern terms we recognize this as the deep state which will try at all costs to keep the neocon project going no matter which elected figurehead sits in the White House.
I would argue that opportunists taking helm is a direct outcome of the systemic pressures created by the early stages of the collapse. The dynamic is that people's material conditions start to decline which in turn leads people to become disillusioned with the political establishment. This opens up opportunities for people on the political fringes to come in and pose as fresh alternatives not tainted by the establishment.
This is precisely the dynamic we saw play out during 2008 crisis that gave rise to the occupy movement on the left and maga on the right. A lot of people lost faith in the system, and started looking for solutions outside mainstream politics. Trump seized upon the moment promising to drain the swamp, and so on.
I agree that there is a lot of institutional inertia, and this is a big factor in ensuring the collapse continues progressing unabated. Halting and reversing current trends requires honestly acknowledging root causes of the problems in order to take corrective action. However, existing political climate precludes this from happening as was illustrated during 2020 election. Sanders proposed some sound and necessary policies such as The Green New Deal, public healthcare, and student debt forgiveness. Yet, even these necessary corrective measures were rejected by the establishment.
Since the effects of the collapse are not evenly distributed, the plight of the working class is largely invisible to the policy makers. This creates a lag between problems occurring and the leadership becoming aware of them. Thus things have to degrade quite significantly before people in power become convinced of the severity of the problems.
The further along collapse of the empire progresses the more difficult it becomes to arrest it. At the same time loss of trust in public institutions and the rise of opportunists ensures that tough measures that are necessary become increasingly impossible to take politically.
This creates a lag between problems occurring and the leadership becoming aware of them.
I don’t think they are unaware. I just think they don’t have a solution that is acceptable to them.
For example this is their economic policy https://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1713961141800464837
Agreed, they have been systematically increasing the surveillance state and police budgets nationwide, that is their solution to the problem, not to fix it, but to try and suppress the people harder.
I mean, they're aware of it in an abstract way. They're not aware of this in a sense that it's an urgent problem that's driving the collapse of their regime.
iirc it was either when Trump assassinated Soleimani, or when he ordered that coordinated missile strike on Syria with the UK and France, that the NYTimes said he was "at his most presidential" or some shit.
He tried to kill Maduro and the plot was foiled lol, and yes you’re right, Chapo talked about it at length in an early-ish episode, how all the lib media praised him for bombing the Middle East like a “good president who respects the office” or some weasely bullshit like that
Oh yeah, the mask is all the way off with the Trump reporting. They aren't afraid of Donny installing a fascist dictatorship or sending people to camps, not really. They're afraid that he's going to ruin all the war mongering bullshit that we've had under Biden and Obama. Liberals are terrified that Trump is going to put a stop to the Empire, that's why they don't want him in charge.
What did you make of Trump being friendlier with DPRK and Kim Jong Un than other presidents? I was never able to make sense of it.
I think first and foremost- Trump was and is a narcissist, a showman, and a businessman (however good a businessman he might or might not be). It's all circuses, wheeling and dealing to him- play hardball (or even a fair bit deranged) with China and Iran, make a big show of talks with DPRK ("peace with the unimaginable"), he may be of the same hegemonic mentality than his peers, and he might be the farthest thing mentally from a peacenik- but when it comes down to things I think he was someone who could be dealt with, someone for whom the constraints of reality and the circumstances all around him in his country (those who were white, anyways) actually holds some weight. (the same I would not say of mainstream western politics nowadays)
Trump’s a pretty dumb guy, he hears about a powerful man in charge of an entire country that has nukes and Libs hate him, so he was like “Ahhh, he must be a guy like me, I hear he has the biggest army, everyone’s telling me , Mr. Trump please don’t talk to him he’s so scary, and I said lemme talk to this guy. And I said he’s probably a great guy. Not many people know that, he’s actually very smart like me”
I always interpreted it as Trump seeing it as him getting to say he made peace in the Korean peninsula or something.
He tried to make them give up the nukes, as would Al Capone say, "with a kind word and a gun", instead of the usual for US just gun.