Meaningless rambling

This is an old post from another blog that I would like to delete but want to save some of the content. Bear with me :) I do not want to edit it too much because I like to remember how my understanding of history and the world evolve over time. I think I was trying to review Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips, which has influenced a lot of my thinking lately.

Now I am (almost) an historian, so I am more comfortable looking back instead of forward. But I also do think a lot about what is in store for the United States in the near future, so looking ahead to what would probably be my golden years I can make a few conjectures.

Yin and Yang, trying not to be too pessimisitic yet holding back from unbridled optimism, there are several possibilities for the US and the world. A short examination of world powers throughout history gives us both Rome, which lasted for centuries and that culture really didn't entirely vanish until the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and Nazi Germany, which only lasted a dozen years, with most empires/great powers falling somewhere in between with varying amounts of impact.

I'm a big fan of Kevin Phillips' work, lately his study has concentrated on historical parallels comparing the US with 16th Century Spain, 18th Century Holland and 19th Century Britain; finding several similarities. Each mastered a means of power, Spain had New World bullion, Holland had wind and wave power and Britain had coal; each employed this power source to rise to the top of its world as the US has with oil. Each society matured with productive middle classes trading, manufacturing and transporting goods all over and flexing military might around the world. Also, each of these lost this productive middle and degenerated into a society stratified into idle rich and impoverished poor, having exported that which made them powerful. Means of production atrophied, leaving the masses without any employment while the elite invested their ancestors capital abroad in search of greater returns.

Leaving aside partisan interpretations, this is exactly what has happened in the US, a vast exhalation of meaningful production and stratification of wealth. The middle class of America teeters on the edge of collapse under mountains of debt and the insecurity of jobs. We no longer really make anything that the world wants and import a huge amount of our daily neccessities. In previous hegemons, however, it was the government and aristocracy that short-sightedly ran things awry and in the US it is a corporate culture that sees only individual, short-term gains for each firm; no one is really looking out for what the country as a whole needs.

I often liken the calcification of American society that accelerated under the Reagan administration and proceeds apace to Emperor Diocletian in late-stage Rome, who introduced draconian reforms to preserve the Empire. Security for freedom, only what the Reaganites did was dismantle the New Deal system of regulating the society as a whole and entrenched the elite, enabling the rot of previous hegemons to become the norm. The US really reached its zenith in the early 1960s and was slowly declining before that, so when Reagan announced "morning in America" it was an attempt akin to Diocletian to preserve a spot for the idle rich.

The obstructionism seen lately is nothing new, in short order. The Hartford Convention in 1815 was the last gasp of the aristocratic Federalists to preserve their place in Jeffersonian America. The Civil War was precipitated by an elite of southern planters who, sensing that they could no longer control the national government to their liking, tried to leave. Yes, it really was more complicated than just slavery and that is a whole different subject but that is for another time. New masters emerged from the ashes of that war, robber barons we usually called them, and they ran the country through giant trusts like Standard Oil until fucking up bigtime and bringing on the Great Depression, another long story for another time. However, the collapse of unregulated capitalism and stratification of the still young country was resurrected by the New Deal, republicans then as now did everything in their power to stop a reassertion of National power through the people's representatives.

Fast forward to the new century, vast tracts of the US are like a devestated peasant society. Or more accurately, like Sub-Roman Britain, the half century after imperial retreat from that island where the natives tried desperately to cling to Roman culture but succumbed to barbarians and their own decay. It is a national catastrophe when plants close, low-paying service jobs replace them if anything and slowly through medical emergencies and other disasters, our towns decay. If you take my hometown, it is interesting to see that there are gleaming new stores everywhere but most houses are falling apart. Not from neglect but debts incurred elsewhere that leave nothing left to counteract entropy. I imagine this is happening all over since in places where population is moving to, like California and the south, home prices were going way up, meaning that young people already saddled with student loans and credit cards have nothing left to improve their situations either.

Dang, praddled on again. Look for part 2 soon, where I might actually get to what I really wanted to talk about.