To understand current American social developments, we need to place them in historical context. Ibn Khaldun and Oswald Spengler saw that civilizations, like living organisms, rise and fall; they are born, grow to adulthood, and eventually weaken and die. From the Ibn Khaldun perspective, the US grew out of a “barbarian” (European) conquest, peaked in strength during the 20th century, and has now grown decadent. From Spengler’s German idealistic perspective, the US was founded on an idea, deistic liberalism, whose possibilities have now been exhausted, leading to the decay of the social organism that grew up around the idea.
Today, deistic liberalism has declined into satanic narcissism. Identity politics that exalts sexual deviance and harbors fanatically nonsensical racial obsessions is all the rage among the half-educated, while the uneducated majority seethes in reactionary resentment. Meanwhile, economic inequality continues to accelerate. The billionaire oligarchy that rules America’s fake democracy stokes identity politics polarization in hopes of distracting the population from the ongoing larceny.
There is a statement that refers to the United States, as a contradiction. It is argued that its founding principles embrace the ideals of freedom and equality, but it is a nation built on the systematic exclusion and suppression of communities of color. From the start, so many of this country’s laws and public policies, which should serve as the scaffolding that guides progress, were instead designed explicitly to prevent people of color from fully participating. I am not sure that the premise—that all “communities of color” have been systematically and equally excluded—is true.
Asians, for example, were brutally oppressed in 19th century America, but today are more economically and educationally successful than whites. And today’s Latinos are hardly excluded—they are surging demographically and gaining increasing political and to some extent economic power. The one group that has been historically excluded is the black descendents of the victims of the African slave trade. The reasons for this exclusion are too complex to summarize here. But today there is a strong backlash against the historical exclusion of blacks, and that backlash (and the backlash against the backlash) is adding to the identity politics polarization I mentioned earlier.
The political structure of the US—usury-driven oligarchy—is incapable of addressing these problems. The rentier oligarchs who own the US are the ones driving the polarization and decay. Their lack of spiritual and moral values, unlike their money, has “trickled down” to the whole population.
The only conceivable political solution to the current American dilemma would be the abolition of the billionaire oligarchy through confiscatory taxation, and the seizure of many large “private” enterprises, especially banking and social media, so as to run them as regulated public utilities—alongside the break-up of large corporations, especially media corporations, into smaller, competitive units. But this won’t happen, at least in the absence of a major crisis, because the oligarchs have the power to crush any serious opposition.
Some scholars argue that the Post-American era has begun. I agree that the post-American era is beginning. Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard predicted it would happen around 2040, but the pro-Israel neoconservative extremists—who wasted $7 trillion on the Israeli-driven fake “war on terror”—have managed to damage the US enough to destroy Pax Americana a few decades early. Their foreign policy fiascos, including the botched COVID attack on China and Iran have accelerated America’s civilizational decline.
I hope and expect that China, Russia, and Iran will continue to successfully fend off aggression from the dying empire of the Western oligarchs. I also hope that they will find ever-more-effective methods for suppressing all forms of usury, which is the basic sin that gave rise to the most toxic, pernicious, and decadent features of the Western oligarchy. Islamic Iran, in particular, could find itself in a position to lead the way in re-thinking modern economic systems to minimize usury and prevent the rise of a ruling class of rentier oligarchs.
“But today there is a strong backlash against the historical exclusion of blacks, and that backlash (and the backlash against the backlash) is adding to the identity politics polarization I mentioned earlier.”
Although this backlash does exist, the real question is how far is the black community from a civic movement and how the US has adopt its social control against this community. Because I am not optimist about answers of these questions I think these backlashes will cause no prominent effects.
I don’t know if this is a common comment in such a website, but I wonder if I could ask 2 questions from the dear professor
1) What is the main method of US social control in front of black community
2) In the Trump era dichotomy of Rioters and Civil Protesters, what will at last help the black community? Radical actions or Civil unrest?
This is not the dying of US Empire… this is the growing influence of China axis among Middle East.
Kevin is looking at the story from one side, I am partly agree with him. The United States of America is the world’s foremost economic and military power. It has the third largest population in the world (325 million) and its economy produces around one quarter of the world’s wealth.