Lessons From American Collapse
What the Story of a Collapsing America Teaches us About How Fast and Far Societies Can Fall
I read a bizarre and surreal headline this morning. OK, one especially so. Utah, apparently, is sending public employees…to Mexico… because medicine is cheaper. Wait, what? This — to put it kindly — is the stuff of social collapse. A country unable to provide basic medicine for its public employees — teachers, administrators — so it has to send them to another one? It tells us that America — like the Soviet Union — simply can’t provide the basics to its citizens anymore, which is the most essential and necessary condition of any social collapse.
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Let me quickly review a few lessons from America’s weird and gruesome collapse.
Failed elites and institutions won’t save you from failed elites and institutions.
Do you see how the Democrats appear impotent to stop any of Trump’s abuses, really?
As in, he’s been impeached…and it doesn’t matter…
There he is now, “investigating” the opposition…banning entire countries…attacking the media?
There’s a profound lesson there.
The elites and institutions that failed -- and thus allowed demagoguery to flourish and rise to power -- can hardly protect your from it.
Do you see how the Democrats appear impotent to stop any of Trump’s abuses, really?
As in, he’s been impeached…and it doesn’t matter…
There he is now, “investigating” the opposition…banning entire countries…attacking the media?
There’s a profound lesson there.
The elites and institutions that failed -- and thus allowed demagoguery to flourish and rise to power -- can hardly protect your from it.
It’s a myth to believe otherwise.
It’s a comforting one, sure — those guys will wake up, develop a spine, learn how to play the game, use whatever metaphor you like — but it’s a myth nonetheless.
It almost never happens.
What happens, instead, is that failed elites and institutions go on failing — this time, at the job of checking the abuses of a demagogue and his extremist party and base.
That’s the story of how Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany, or how Soviet Russia became Putin’s Russia, and so on.
Why?
Well, think about what elites and institutions have to fail at to allow demagoguery to rise in the first place.
It’s a comforting one, sure — those guys will wake up, develop a spine, learn how to play the game, use whatever metaphor you like — but it’s a myth nonetheless.
It almost never happens.
What happens, instead, is that failed elites and institutions go on failing — this time, at the job of checking the abuses of a demagogue and his extremist party and base.
That’s the story of how Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany, or how Soviet Russia became Putin’s Russia, and so on.
Why?
Well, think about what elites and institutions have to fail at to allow demagoguery to rise in the first place.
Demagoguery is a predictable function of economic stagnation.
Wherever you see an economy stagnating over the long-term, soon enough, you’ll see the rise of extremism, hate, violence, and authoritarian-fascism, all led by a demagogue.
Why?
Because poverty breeds just those things.
Poverty isn’t noble.
It is deprivation.
And deprivation turns people against one another.
A hungry man will steal from his neighbor to feed his child.
Extend that principle just a bit, and soon enough you have the unemployed good German, who became the cheering Gestapo officer.
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What elites have to fail at for demagoguery to rise is their first and most crucial task in a modern society: the creation, maintenance, and distribution of prosperity.
Consider that in America, fully half of the population works “low-wage jobs”, that 75% struggle to pay basic bills, that 80% can’t raise a meagre amount like $500 for an emergency, that the average person will live and die in unplayable debt.
The creation, maintenance, and distribution of prosperity has failed catastrophically in America.
Consider that in America, fully half of the population works “low-wage jobs”, that 75% struggle to pay basic bills, that 80% can’t raise a meagre amount like $500 for an emergency, that the average person will live and die in unplayable debt.
The creation, maintenance, and distribution of prosperity has failed catastrophically in America.
A society that can’t distribute it’s surplus equitably finds itself in a death spiral.
What happens to a society that doesn’t create, maintain, and distribute prosperity in equitable ways?
A death spiral does.
Remember those public employees above, in Utah — who are being sent to Mexico…because they can’t afford the very same medicine in…America?
That’s what I mean by a death spiral.
What happens to a society that doesn’t create, maintain, and distribute prosperity in equitable ways?
A death spiral does.
Remember those public employees above, in Utah — who are being sent to Mexico…because they can’t afford the very same medicine in…America?
That’s what I mean by a death spiral.
The truth is that Americans don’t have any real public goods — healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, transport, elderly care — and probably aren’t ever going to have them.
Even if noble and wise figures like Bernie and Liz want them. Why not?
Because the average American is now too poor to fund such things.
Utah is sending public employees to Mexico because they can’t afford decent healthcare — but you can scarcely afford to fund public healthcare on a public servant’s meagre salary, either.
Americans are now too poor to probably ever be able afford a society of generous, expansive public goods, like Europe or Canada.
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That is what decades of underinvestment do. They culminate in long-term deficits of public goods — whether hospitals or schools or medicine or the rule of law itself.
Hence, a society enters a death spiral.
Americans go to Mexico and Canada to buy medicine, because they don’t have decent healthcare.
But they don’t have decent healthcare because they’re too poor, by and large, to fund it for all.
Bang!
A society plunges into decline.
So what’s the end state of such a society?
Hence, a society enters a death spiral.
Americans go to Mexico and Canada to buy medicine, because they don’t have decent healthcare.
But they don’t have decent healthcare because they’re too poor, by and large, to fund it for all.
Bang!
A society plunges into decline.
So what’s the end state of such a society?
The endgame of a society like America is essentially to become Russia.
A society of mass poverty and stagnation, where living standards are bitterly low, which fuels tidal waves of resentment and fury and rage, which are expertly misdirected at minorities and others and the vulnerable, by a talented demagogue.
Nobody — and I mean nobody — should want to become Russia.
It’s the prime exemplar of a modern failed state, a state that failed at becoming modern.
Society is stratified, immobile, and growing poorer by the day.
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A society of mass poverty and stagnation, where living standards are bitterly low, which fuels tidal waves of resentment and fury and rage, which are expertly misdirected at minorities and others and the vulnerable, by a talented demagogue.
Nobody — and I mean nobody — should want to become Russia.
It’s the prime exemplar of a modern failed state, a state that failed at becoming modern.
Society is stratified, immobile, and growing poorer by the day.
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In the 1930s, the end state of the vicious spiral that societies found themselves in (as a result of under-investment and exploitation) was Nazi style fascism.
Today, fascism is a different affair — but it’s no less fascist.
It doesn’t wear the uniforms, maybe, and drape the banners.
But it still dehumanizes and hates and blames minorities for economic woes, hoping to deny them personhood and equality and freedom and justice — in a word, "belonging"— so that there is more to go around for the impoverished one of true blood.
Do you see how that works?
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Just like then, now too, neo-fascism is a way to ration economic stagnation.
If there is less for that dirty, filthy subhuman, then there is more for me.
Therefore, he and his kind are the cause of all our problems.
They have taken our jobs and stolen our women and occupied our land and infected our minds and poisoned our lives and so on.
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The demagogue understands intuitively something that elites don’t.
Remember when I said the first job of elites is the creation, maintenance, and distribution of prosperity?
The demagogue gets this much: all that has failed, and failed badly.
What he offers, though, is a vicious and violent solution: exclude, marginalize, maybe even annihilate them, those "others," and then there will be more for you.
But at least he recognizes there is a problem.
He has the wrong solution — often a Final One.
Elites, though, don’t even usually recognize there is a problem.
Remember when I said the first job of elites is the creation, maintenance, and distribution of prosperity?
The demagogue gets this much: all that has failed, and failed badly.
What he offers, though, is a vicious and violent solution: exclude, marginalize, maybe even annihilate them, those "others," and then there will be more for you.
But at least he recognizes there is a problem.
He has the wrong solution — often a Final One.
Elites, though, don’t even usually recognize there is a problem.
Take America’s elites.
They’ve been trained to look at one number, maybe three, and adore them like wide-eyed children: GDP, the stock market, and possibly how many ultra rich people America has.
But these figures don’t tell the true story of American collapse.
How can GDP be growing — while expectancy is falling?
How can the stock market be booming — while the average American has gone from a comfortable middle class life, to working a “low-wage job” of precarity, meaninglessness, and despair?
Now every average person knows the answer to those question: economic growth is predatory.
Those billionaires became billionaires by making the average person poor, broke, miserable, and hopeless — through exploitation.
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But Americans elites still don’t understand how mass stagnation and fresh poverty drove social collapse.
You can read articles every single day about how “the economy’s booming!”
What the?
How can an economy in which nobody, really, can afford decent healthcare, or ever retire, be “booming”?
Elites don’t question the exploitative nature of American growth because they don’t understand it.
And they don’t understand it because they don’t ever really encounter it.
If you live inside the DC Beltway, life’s never been better.
Northern Virginia is like some kind of modern-day utopia — all gleaming towers and new metro lines and highways and public libraries.
But leave the bubble — just drive a few short miles away — and you’ll see the opposite: a decrepit, neglected society.
But elites don’t leave their bubbles of comfort and privilege — why should they? — and so they don’t see the obvious truth with their own eyes, and so they don’t even understand the job they’ve failed at, which is prosperity itself.
You can read articles every single day about how “the economy’s booming!”
What the?
How can an economy in which nobody, really, can afford decent healthcare, or ever retire, be “booming”?
Elites don’t question the exploitative nature of American growth because they don’t understand it.
And they don’t understand it because they don’t ever really encounter it.
If you live inside the DC Beltway, life’s never been better.
Northern Virginia is like some kind of modern-day utopia — all gleaming towers and new metro lines and highways and public libraries.
But leave the bubble — just drive a few short miles away — and you’ll see the opposite: a decrepit, neglected society.
But elites don’t leave their bubbles of comfort and privilege — why should they? — and so they don’t see the obvious truth with their own eyes, and so they don’t even understand the job they’ve failed at, which is prosperity itself.
That brings me to my final lesson.
If failed elites, and the institutions they lead, won’t save a society from stagnation-fueled demagoguery because they can’t even see it, recognize it, much less understand how to fight it…what can?
The answer is one that you won’t like.
It takes something like a revolution — a real one, in the direction of civilization and progress — to stop the vicious cycle above.
And we haven’t seen it very often in history.
The examples are so few and slender they’re barely worth discussing.
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You see, to combat demagoguery, a society needs a coalition, a group, a party, offering a unique agenda: the idea that a genuine transformation can deliver a better life for all.
Every word in that sentence is the key word.
“For all”: not just for the true or pure, like the demagogue and the fascist wants.
“Genuine transformation”: not just some kind of minor-league policy change — but a larger alteration of values, norms, ideals, aspirations: in America, that would be the idea that giving your neighbor healthcare is a far, far worthier thing to do with your life than to own a McMansion or three.
“The idea”: all that needs to be expressed through moral imagination, not just sterile policy analysis.
People need to be led to understand that the direction in which greater happiness and prosperity lies for themselves is when there is more of those for everyone, first — and that is a strange and profound idea, which takes "moral imagination" to reckon with.
Every word in that sentence is the key word.
“For all”: not just for the true or pure, like the demagogue and the fascist wants.
“Genuine transformation”: not just some kind of minor-league policy change — but a larger alteration of values, norms, ideals, aspirations: in America, that would be the idea that giving your neighbor healthcare is a far, far worthier thing to do with your life than to own a McMansion or three.
“The idea”: all that needs to be expressed through moral imagination, not just sterile policy analysis.
People need to be led to understand that the direction in which greater happiness and prosperity lies for themselves is when there is more of those for everyone, first — and that is a strange and profound idea, which takes "moral imagination" to reckon with.
How am I better off, just because that kid has a free college education?
How am I better off because that family has childcare?
Because that old person has a decent retirement?
The answers to these questions might be obvious to you because you are a wise and sane person. But they are, self-evidently, not obvious to many Americans.
That is why I say it takes leadership in the direction of "moral imagination" to help people literally imagine the answers to these questions. (The answers, by the way, are: they might cure that cancer you’ll get; such families make for a happier, healthier, gentler society; and because it’s the right and fair thing to do.)
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It’s on this last point that I feel America’s the most challenged. It still doesn’t really, as a society, fully understand the moral challenge before it.
It’s used to being a selfish and cruel and domineering society, to be painfully honest.
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They don’t have healthcare?
Send them to Mexico! Wait, what?
Make those kids pay lunch debt!
Make them pay off those student loans forever!
Those are all moral challenges before they are anything else.
America’s elites don’t see them as such, because they still subscribe to a morality that says: the strong survive, and the weak perish. It’s the (im)morality of the predator — and it’s easy to believe in when you’re strutting down K Street or Madison Ave.
But when you’re trapped in a dead end life in Scranton, Topeka, Indianapolis — what then?
Societies don’t often rise to the challenge of moral reinvention.
How many can you name that have?
Germany, notably, did. But it took generations of decades and pain.
And the ugly currents of fascism are recurring there, too.
Russia, by contrast, didn’t pass the test of moral reinvention.
It never really progressed much beyond the mentality of tribalism and kleptocracy that brought the Soviet project to a halt — which you can see now in the mafias that rule it.
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It is not OK — morally, not just intellectually — for people to beg each other for money to pay for insulin online; for kids to pay lunch debt; for half a society (any society) to work “low-wage jobs”; for millennials to be unable to start basic adult lives; for their parents to never be able to retire.
None of that is OK.
All those things are great and terrible moral failures.
It is not OK — morally, not just intellectually — for people to beg each other for money to pay for insulin online; for kids to pay lunch debt; for half a society (any society) to work “low-wage jobs”; for millennials to be unable to start basic adult lives; for their parents to never be able to retire.
None of that is OK.
All those things are great and terrible moral failures.
Yet that — that shocking kind of poverty and deprivation, that level of moral failure, especially in a rich country — is the root of the rest of what’s not OK: authoritarianism, hate, the abuse of power, rampant corruption, the total disintegration of institutions, the breakdown of norms and values, the legitimization and normalization of violence and anxiety and rage, the failure of elites to see how any of those dots are connected.
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You see that photo above? How Trump covers up his moral corrosion with fake tan? There’s a lesson there, about American collapse, and its deeper truths: its moral roots, and how they’re papered over.
Societies usually fail the task of moral reinvention.
It cuts to the heart of who they are, why they exist, what they are for.
America’s failed to morally reinvent itself -- for decades when it needed to most by each person giving themselves the courage, desire, thoughtfulness, empathy, compassion, will, power to give everyone else a decent life.
Will it succeed, over the next few years?
Only time will tell.
For the rest of us all these stories, and how they’re connected, teach the lessons of what we can, should, and must learn from American collapse.
It cuts to the heart of who they are, why they exist, what they are for.
America’s failed to morally reinvent itself -- for decades when it needed to most by each person giving themselves the courage, desire, thoughtfulness, empathy, compassion, will, power to give everyone else a decent life.
Will it succeed, over the next few years?
Only time will tell.
For the rest of us all these stories, and how they’re connected, teach the lessons of what we can, should, and must learn from American collapse.
Umair
February 2020
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