"the World’s First Rich Failed State"
March 24, 2018 10:12 PM   Subscribe

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse
Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.
posted by the man of twists and turns (162 comments total) 106 users marked this as a favorite
 
While I don't particularly disagree that America is well on the way to imperial collapse, I gotta say the way that the first link keeps resorting to "not quite captured in the numbers" ends up making it less than convincing.
posted by tavella at 10:32 PM on March 24, 2018 [25 favorites]


I read Reinventing Collapse recently. Pragmatic advice was cold comfort -- get a sailboat (for the oil shortage) and maybe a dacha, learn to trade goods. In the post-collapse USSR law enforcement ran out of money and will, so laws just stopped getting enforced.

One thing stuck with me, along the lines of "when politicians stop making sense to each other, then the people start smearing themselves with their own feces."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:33 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


"the World’s First Rich Failed State"????
There have been many Imperial States that collapsed into Failed States in history... America may be "the richEST" to date to be threatened with that fate, but not really the "First Rich" one, which knocks out part of the essay's premise, but not more than half. Come back when you have something better framed.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:59 PM on March 24, 2018 [31 favorites]


"America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq." - I would say they might have larger concerns preventing such an issue.

"In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society." - Or maybe we just have too many weapons freely available.

"Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene?" - *looks at giant crowds marching in protest*

And so on and so forth. Talk about reaching a conclusion and fitting the evidence to it.
posted by Punkey at 11:01 PM on March 24, 2018 [66 favorites]


i think the first link dips a bit too deep into late night dorm room ruminations to be useful.
posted by wibari at 11:05 PM on March 24, 2018 [13 favorites]


Also, I've seen a piece or two on the migratory seasonal worker retirees, and I got the distinct impression that the typical profile was not "I would remain here in the bosom of my extended family but alas alack I must take to the road or be condemned to eat catfood" and more "I want to travel now that I'm retired and spending a few weeks working here and there makes that more comfortable and lets me buy stuff for the grandkids". It's possible said pieces were deceptively written, but a little more evidence than vague allusions would make more convincing evidence.
posted by tavella at 11:23 PM on March 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


Are people trying to say that America isn’t collapsing? Bc like every other FPP is about another one of our institutions that’s been brutalized into a shape that doesn’t work well enough anymore. The systems are running but they’re just so beaten up and patched up with scotch tape and leaking and so on. And no one has any interest in fixing any of it because it’s more profitable to keep doing what they’re doing.
posted by bleep at 11:40 PM on March 24, 2018 [38 favorites]


Are people trying to say that America isn’t collapsing?

America is struggling, America is chaotic and kind of dispirited right now. I don’t know about “collapsing.” I mean, I really don’t know. Societies can behave like chaotic systems, so I think no one knows. We’re a weird nation, always have been. I do know the first article is not very well argued.
posted by argybarg at 11:57 PM on March 24, 2018 [29 favorites]


Gah! All the people in the comments going on about how it doesn't or shouldn't count as a "school shooting" unless it's a calculated, grand-scale mass murder. Forget rearranging deck chairs, they want to proofread the Titanic's breakfast menu.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:58 PM on March 24, 2018 [80 favorites]


Are people trying to say that America isn’t collapsing? Bc like every other FPP is about another one of our institutions that’s been brutalized into a shape that doesn’t work well enough anymore.

I think that people are saying that claiming that America is in a form of decline unprecedented in history is an extraordinary claim that requires detailed argument and clear evidence to support, not simultaneous hand-waving and hand-wringing about a number of disparate ills before asserting that these are unique and (in some unspecified way) therefore proof of US collapse.

There are arguments to be made for the view that America is in the process of collapse which are both cogent and forceful. The problem is that the argument in the first link is neither of those things.
posted by howfar at 12:03 AM on March 25, 2018 [45 favorites]


Greer was talking about the collapse of the American empire several years ago at the Archdruid Report; it was a recurring theme in his posts for years.
An empire is an arrangement among nations, backed and usually imposed by military force, that extracts wealth from a periphery of subject nations and concentrates it in the imperial core. Put more simply, an empire is a wealth pump, a device to enrich one nation at the expense of others. The mechanism of the pump varies from empire to empire and from age to age; the straightforward exaction of tribute that did the job for ancient Egypt, and had another vogue in the time of imperial Spain, has been replaced in most of the more recent empires by somewhat less blatant though equally effective systems of unbalanced exchange. While the mechanism varies, though, the underlying principle does not.
He pointed out that empires are cyclical; there have been plenty of them and they follow indentifiable patterns. The big problem is catabolic collapse, when an empire is spending more on maintenance than it's bringing in, which kicks off a wave of boom-and-bust bubbles as resources get stripped away from some areas to cover problems in others and suddenly it looks like there's a thriving economy. This is, of course, exacerbated by a nation that's willing to literally just print extra money to cover its debts.

In a later post, Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush, he mentions that "collapse" is not an overnight cataclysmic event of the variety that inspires movies.
As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle—or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:17 AM on March 25, 2018 [41 favorites]


Interesting to read a non Orlovian take on this topic. thanks for the Galtung article.
posted by infini at 12:28 AM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think if you selected almost any advanced country you could come up with three or four social problems that are either unique to that country or nearly so. But I suppose even the most pessimistic Americans find it impossible to put aside the idea that their country is special and represents the future, or a future, to the rest of the world.
I think as a matter of fact that American society is large, robust, and diverse to the point where I don’t really see how it could ‘collapse’ in any overall monolithic sense. Some cities go badly wrong, others flourish.
One factor here is that most Western countries have a sense of failure these days which partly stems from the inevitable long-term background erosion of our economic advantage compared to the rest of the world. Psychologically that probably hits America harder than Europe given its postwar golden age as the only major economy not totally wrecked by WWII. But we should keep a sense of proportion; the fundamentals are still good, and there’s probably still a long, long era of relative prosperity ahead.
posted by Segundus at 12:44 AM on March 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


The problem is that the argument in the first link is neither of those things.

Right. School shootings are not per se a harbinger of collapse. School shootings are deadly on the order of magnitude like school bus crashes are deadly. School bus crashes ain't causing or indicative of collapse. The school shooting phenomenon is relevant as fodder for sectarian tensions - and those are gonna be a killer.

The discussion is constrained to respect the territorial integrity of Manifest Destiny - and that is definitely a real constraint as well - so with that in mind I wonder if a desparate attempt at something along the lines of consociationalism, confessionalism, a goddamn millet system, might be attempted. I think actually the Republicans hit a little at this principle in rejecting Merrick Garland's nomination, that that was a Red seat on the court - four Red, four Blue, one wildcard. Make affirmative action an explicit quota system, and so on. Would kick the can down the road a while, at least.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:55 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


But we should keep a sense of proportion; the fundamentals are still good, and there’s probably still a long, long era of relative prosperity ahead.

How good are these fundamentals if 3 white men hold the same amount of wealth as 50% of the population?

How good are these fundamentals if the richest man in the country has a serious problem with the way he treats his employees?

How good are these fundamentals for that long, long era ahead if young people born in 2000 have just begun marching to the center for their lives?
posted by infini at 1:02 AM on March 25, 2018 [49 favorites]


But I suppose even the most pessimistic Americans find it impossible to put aside the idea that their country is special and represents the future, or a future, to the rest of the world.

I seriously don't think that I or most of the millenial Americans I know ever picked up that idea in the first place, never mind putting it aside.
posted by value of information at 1:09 AM on March 25, 2018 [32 favorites]


I'm reminded of Hitchbot, which you can look up if you want the details of what it was, but the salient point was that there was an implicit assumption of a social contract that held up in Canada and the EU but was smashed, quite deliberately, and pointlessly, in the US.

And I wonder how much of the cultural stereotype of Canadian politeness is just because it's usually Americans making the comparison.
posted by Merus at 2:00 AM on March 25, 2018 [16 favorites]


the fundamentals are still good, and there’s probably still a long, long era of relative prosperity ahead.

We'll have lots of aqueduct bricks to build our hog pens from, just like the Late Romans
posted by XMLicious at 2:03 AM on March 25, 2018 [36 favorites]


School shootings are deadly on the order of magnitude like school bus crashes are deadly.

Any numbers to back this claim ?
posted by Pendragon at 2:46 AM on March 25, 2018


This semester I'm teaching a class on history for engineering students. It's strangely structured in that the course covers ancient history till 1860, and then 1960 till now. (I have no idea why). But there are two things I can see that the students really struggle with: that there were only about 70 years — one lifetime — from the rule of Constantine the Great to the sack of Rome, and that just 30 years ago, before they were born, but within their parent's lifetime, Americans still dominated the discourse within their field. I don't know that they even look at the US today.
Last year, when I first taught this class, an Asian student pointed out that the textbook we are using, which is a given, is absurdly Western in it's focus, and he politely suggested that I find some supplementary literature. While searching for that it has really stood out to me what a sea change there has been since I was a student during the 1980's.
What is the collapse of an empire? Sometimes it is a dramatic devastation, but sometimes it is just a slow decline. And how does it feel for ordinary people? When Rome fell, it must have been a huge blow to most citizens. But some of the British are obviously able to imagine they are still at the centre of an empire.
Johan Galtung, in the Motherboard interview, points out that there is a potential in the US that goes beyond the empire, and I think that is worth remembering. Although Hitler's third reich collapsed, a sound and strong country has grown from it's ashes, and today Germany is a force for peace and welfare.
posted by mumimor at 2:49 AM on March 25, 2018 [36 favorites]


Any numbers to back this claim?

You should probably look it up yourself, because all kinds of different people are measuring the different things that they care about, but it sounds broadly correct to me. According to the NHTSA (sorry, PDF) there have been an average of 131 deaths per year over the decade prior to 2016 in school transportation accidents, 11 being bus passengers, 22 being pedestrians, and the rest being occupants of other vehicles. Per these researchers at Northeastern, about 10 students per year have been killed by gunfire at school over the past 25 years.
posted by value of information at 3:09 AM on March 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


Are people trying to say that America isn’t collapsing?

America has serious problems, both immediate and systemic that need to be addressed, and we're ideologically locked into a mode of thought that is actively hostile to both of those things. But we're not in the worst shape we've ever been in. Far from it.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:24 AM on March 25, 2018 [13 favorites]


But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Urban sprawl requires either a car or public transportation or money for a cab. In communities without a bus system, it's not difficult to see how that one single factor totally wrecks any hope for poor people to coordinate between themselves economically, socially, or politically.

Living in cars. I see it every week. The local Tex Mex frequently employees people who cook their cheap hot meals, sleep in their car, and bath in their store restroom. It's grim, very grim.
posted by Beholder at 3:51 AM on March 25, 2018 [19 favorites]


America is struggling, America is chaotic and kind of dispirited right now. I don’t know about “collapsing.” I mean, I really don’t know. Societies can behave like chaotic systems, so I think no one knows. We’re a weird nation, always have been. I do know the first article is not very well argued.

America is bottoming out, but even the young hesitate to admit it, so we normalize it. Apartments the size of shipping containers are trendy and pro exercise or something like that.
posted by Beholder at 3:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


I mean, I've been talking about the coming Fall of the American Empire since the school bus. It definitely looks to me like it's proceeding apace, but there's still time to pull out of this dive. Will we? I dunno, fixing things would require a lot ofnwork and change and self-examination, whereas not fixing them just requires that the status quo be maintained. I think that two major things will have to change at the base of it all, if we're going to be OK as a country. Probably more, but at least these;

1: America needs to stop trying to be in charge of the world. We especially need to dramatically scale back our military to something in line with what other developed nations have.

2: White men need to stop trying to rule America. We need to step aside and let our non-white, non-male peers take a representative share of power. Probably more than a representative share for a while, given how unbalanced things have been for so long.

Then of course we need to tackle income inequality, education, housing, healthcare, the social safety net, environmental degradation, and all the rest. But I really think that this is fundamentally about nations and people trying to cling to an outsized share of power.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:33 AM on March 25, 2018 [23 favorites]


American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above.

this is the article's most false statement - americans aren't watching one another die at all, they're ignoring it

---

But there are two things I can see that the students really struggle with: that there were only about 70 years — one lifetime — from the rule of Constantine the Great to the sack of Rome,

constantine the great was so unconcerned with rome that he built a new capitol in the east - rome had become a backwater and was getting as half empty as detroit

much of the u s is going the same route, but it's not collapse - it's the prelude to collapse, which is probably years down the road
posted by pyramid termite at 4:48 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


constantine the great was so unconcerned with rome that he built a new capitol in the east - rome had become a backwater and was getting as half empty as detroit
yes and no, he moved to Constantinople, but he still built great structures in Rome. I don't really see that happening in Detroit, but I may be wrong?
posted by mumimor at 5:13 AM on March 25, 2018


American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above.

This article has the misfortune to have been written in January, so it couldn't know that yet another school massacre would break the pattern of a few days of heavy sighs about gun control, then going back to the status quo until the next massacre. It couldn't know that the friends of those who were murdered would take on the NRA and the entire political establishment and demand justice, that they would lead a movement that had a million plus people marching in Washington and maybe the same number elsewhere.

So while it's not wrong on describing the problems facing the US, it is proven wrong in the American response to it.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:42 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


How good are these fundamentals if 3 white men hold the same amount of wealth as 50% of the population?

What does this have to do with collapse?

Apartments the size of shipping containers are trendy and pro exercise or something like that.

Your standard of living calls for a large house which requires separation from your neighbors. If my standard of living calls for proximity to all my friends (which requires a small space), how is this collapse? Are my choices somehow more delusional than your choices?

This entire comments section seems to be full of people equating "things I don't like" with "collapse," and that's not even remotely productive.

I have this complaint about a lot of articles. The use of the term "late stage capitalism," for example, takes it for granted that our system can't go on and will be replaced by something else entirely -- and, as freeing as apocalyptic thinking can be, I'm not sure there's any evidence for that in practice.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 5:45 AM on March 25, 2018 [38 favorites]


What does this have to do with collapse?

For there to be an economy, money has to move. If it's all locked up as zeros in some rich guy's bank account it doesn't move.
posted by Talez at 5:47 AM on March 25, 2018 [39 favorites]


Honestly I think that the decline of America as an empire is inevitable. But then, I don't like empires. I'm concerned that China is rising to take our place on the world stage and that politically they are even less democratic and humane than we are, but regardless I think that America-as-superpower has been a destructive and destabilizing force in the world for decades, and that the best thing we can do would be to recognize that we're on the downslope now and pull back as gracefully as possible.

That's not to say that we won't be a powerful nation, or that our citizens can't have a high quality of life. But we should be powerful the way that England or France or Germany is powerful—as one among many, not as one over all. Influential, but not dominating.

We can be an excellent country without being The World Hyperpower. In fact, it seems clear to me that the energy we invest in maintaining our power and status is putting serious strain on our ability to do things like take care of our citizens and ensure a high quality of life for them. It's also making us increasingly ill-loved by the rest of the world.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:57 AM on March 25, 2018 [37 favorites]


If it's all locked up as zeros in some rich guy's bank account it doesn't move.

That's fine. We can just print more and hand that to some other rich guys.
posted by flabdablet at 6:02 AM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


We can be an excellent country without being The World Hyperpower.

It's still good... It's still good...
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on March 25, 2018


We aren't playing Civilization anymore. Let the empire collapse. It's time the world moved beyond "empire" as a goal.
posted by SPrintF at 6:03 AM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Thanks for this. Having read the likes of John Michael Greer, Dmitri Orlov, Morris Berman along with many others for several years now (plus my own observations, of course) it appears self-evident to me that the the US has been in a state of collapse for a very long time. I expect that it will be a long, drawn-out process that will only intensify as time goes on. I think of it as punctuated decline, that is an inexorable downward slope featuring many larger traumas, both man-made and natural.

Having fallen into this mindset, I see signs of it everywhere, both on the individual and societal level (to be more precise, reading the above writers has helped me find a context for things that I have observed long before I became capable of making sense of it, or being able to articulate it.)

No, such collapse is not unprecedented, but the effects of globalization will assure that it'll be much more all-consuming than any that has gone before. In my opinion hope is a failure, but maybe desperation will accomplish something good here and there (along with a great deal of bad.) I don't know, I'm no scholar. I just think it's important to find those fleeting moments of happiness and peace wherever you can, while you can; something tells me that those moments may only become increasingly rare as we go.
posted by metagnathous at 6:05 AM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


That's fine. We can just print more and hand that to some other rich guys.

What do you think we've been doing the last decade?
posted by Talez at 6:05 AM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Are you suggesting that that's not fine?

What are you, some kind of socialist?
posted by flabdablet at 6:07 AM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm more of a Bull Moose Progressive.
posted by Talez at 6:11 AM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


It's more a case of a collapsing news narrative. Most of us are pretty happy and content with our lives.
posted by Modest House at 6:23 AM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


No we are not.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:31 AM on March 25, 2018 [66 favorites]


constantine the great was so unconcerned with rome that he built a new capitol in the east - rome had become a backwater and was getting as half empty as detroit

Rome had ceased being the center of the Roman Empire long before Constantine, the Empire was too big and with the Crisis of the Third Century upon them it was too isolated physically to be important. The Western Capital was moved to Mediolanum (present day Milan) before Constitine’s reign due to easy access to Gaul, the Balkins and Italy. It took Rome much longer to realize it wasn’t the important cog in the Roman Empire.

Also Detriot has a long, long way to go before it reaches a Rome level of collapse. Rome went from a population of over a million to 40,000 in about 100 years.
posted by jmauro at 6:35 AM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


As everyone here already knows, no "legitimate" us presidential candidate can call for a decrease in military spending. No "legitimate" us presidential candidate can even call for a cap on military spending. Not even a cap is allowed. The military budget must always grow. The only question is how the money is spent. Any candidate who challenges this is marginalized by the establishment.
posted by Beholder at 6:35 AM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


Your standard of living calls for a large house which requires separation from your neighbors. If my standard of living calls for proximity to all my friends (which requires a small space), how is this collapse? Are my choices somehow more delusional than your choices?

There is a difference, for example, between riding a bicycle to work for environmental reasons and riding a bicycle to work because you can't afford a car.

Scaling down should be a choice, not something forced upon you by a system carefully designed to shackle you to a life of serfdom.
posted by Beholder at 6:50 AM on March 25, 2018 [32 favorites]


But I really think that this is fundamentally about nations and people trying to cling to an outsized share of power.

This.

It is this thinking that underlies the actions, the frameworks, and even the whole shebang around surveillance capitalism, which is just another way to pay for "ZOMG total control over the planet's denizens"

Is the imminent decline of FB a signal?
posted by infini at 6:57 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


long before Constantine, the Empire was too big

Inability to pay for maintainance of current territory is a sign of late stage imperial collapse. Now consider the failure to rebuild Puerto Rico.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:16 AM on March 25, 2018 [29 favorites]



this is the article's most false statement - americans aren't watching one another die at all, they're ignoring it


We literally had a nationwide march 24 hours ago, fighting for stricter gun laws and preventing gun deaths. Attendance in the millions. We have seen record numbers of people running for office.

If we didn’t collapse during the Civil War or the Great Depression or the Cold War, I can’t imagine it would be accurate to say we’re collapsing now. Major social upheaval, absolutely. But then our entire national identity is *about* major social upheaval.

Inability to pay for maintainance of current territory is a sign of late stage imperial collapse. Now consider the failure to rebuild Puerto Rico.

There’s a difference between the ability to maintain territory, and the desire of an individual leader to punish the residents of a territory by refusing to maintain their infrastructure.

Our biggest problem right now is a majority party who is rife with prejudice and ignorance, using their power to strike at targets instead of governing.

I think it’d be worthwhile to examine the issue of how power centers are shifting from nations to corporations.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:32 AM on March 25, 2018 [25 favorites]


Inability to pay for maintainance of current territory is a sign of late stage imperial collapse. Now consider the failure to rebuild Puerto Rico.

One person's locusless failure is another's clear refusal.
posted by lumensimus at 7:34 AM on March 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


It's fascinating to me that when you bring up data points about America, to those outside of America, people shrug and say "well of course", as if you've told them water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. Bring these same points up with Americans in America, and suddenly the truth isn't all that clear; things lack nuance, you're told, or you're told that you're straight-up wrong. I see this play out over and over again.

I spent the first 27 years of my life in America, and the next roughly 20 years abroad. Since then, I've seen it happen time and again that there is a significant information bubble around the US; things glaringly obvious to the rest of the world are hypercontentious within the US. Whether it's WMDs in Iraq, the idea of universal health care, the fact that the country is categorically a corrupt oligarchy, that the police force is a racist death squad operating with impunity, that its foreign policy is violently imperialist - outside the US, people take these things as natural facts. Within the US, yes, there are many Americans who believe these things, too, but their voices are choked out by both reactionary denialism and neoliberal centrist pleading for compromise and meeting opponents halfway.

So this is always going to be a contentious conversation to have with the people who most need to examine it, Americans themselves. Especially those Americans who are benefiting the most from the current American status quo.

This isn't to dismiss movements within the US such as BLM or student protests for gun control. These are people harmed by one or more aspects of the status quo, who are pushing back against the aspects directly harming them. They're fighting for their lives, and that's extremely encouraging. Unfortunately, they're not only up against people directly harming them; they're also up against people who, while they maybe don't like the way things are, are not being directly harmed and don't see or feel the same urgency that those who are directly harmed do - people who belong to the apathetic status quo, people who aren't helping, people who tone police and push respectability politics, wringing their hands over punched Nazis, equivocating the false narrative about free speech, and thus aiding the harm. The people whose mealy-mouthed talk about "balance" does nothing to hurt those harming the nation, and everything to hurt those trying to improve the state of things.

We've seen these movements, their enemies and their accomplices, play out before. They have ended in reformism at best. But the forces of power - racism, capitalism, bigotry and imperialism - stay right where they are. These forces continue business as usual, until the people directly harmed get enough energy and solidarity to push back again, and the cycle begins anew. In other words, these movements are not evidence against the state of America's collapse; they're proof that it's happening.

If there is one silver lining in all this, it's that "America" is a very nebulous concept. What constitutes "America" today is, to me, obviously collapsing. This does not mean that America, post-collapse, is going to be some smoldering wasteland flecked with nuclear fallout and warlords. What "the collapse of America" means to me is that the bigoted, theocratic, oligarchical status quo - the same status quo that has ruled America since its inception - is inevitably going to crash, and the society that follows it will bear little resemblance to the old system. It means we go from America 1.0 to America 2.0, rather than vaporware.

All this is my very long-winded way of answering "is America collapsing?" with "both yes and no". The forces and concepts that have led America since the first colonizers killed the first Native, yes, they are hurtling towards destruction and will likely take millions of people down with them. The people who will be left afterwards, though, they will constitute a new America, one radically departed from everything we associate with America today, and that has been associated with America since Day 1.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:47 AM on March 25, 2018 [69 favorites]


There’s a difference between the ability to maintain territory, and the desire of an individual leader to punish the residents of a territory by refusing to maintain their infrastructure.

No, there really isn't. A political system which puts such a person in such a position of power clearly has an inability to maintain its territory. To argue otherwise is special pleading.
posted by enn at 7:51 AM on March 25, 2018 [19 favorites]


If we didn’t collapse during the Civil War or the Great Depression or the Cold War, I can’t imagine it would be accurate to say we’re collapsing now. Major social upheaval, absolutely. But then our entire national identity is *about* major social upheaval.

I mean, we sorta did collapse during all three of those things. Half the country had its government disappear twice during the Civil War and civilization collapsed pretty thoroughly for the people killed in the war itself (scaled accordingly, the equivalent of 6 to 10 million dead Americans today) and for the uncountable non-white people murdered and abused in the pogroms and oppression that followed. The Great Depression and following war arguably ended a great many civilizations and it was only our luck in being at the top of the heap and less damaged and broke than every other country that kept us afloat. And good luck telling all the innocent people we shot trying to escape internment camps that civilization and their world weren't in collapse but merely in upheaval. During the Cold War all odds were that we should have destroyed human civilization itself, our survival being a mere fluke; and our recent re-entry means that the jury is very much still out on that one.

Collapse isn't necessarily an on/off switch or an obvious unidirectional progression for all concerned. A civilization can die of slow, lingering illness but still seem to recover somewhat. Furthermore, collapse is individual as well as collective: an person or a group can enter and leave collapse due to chance and circumstances as the overall process of decomposition continues unabated.

American civilization has already collapsed for tens of millions of people in the country, is actively collapsing for tens of millions more, and for millions yet more never existed in the first place. If you're not seeing it, you're in the thus-far collapse-resistant inner fortress of the civilization. And even there, the cracks in the walls are visible for everyone willing to see them.
posted by Rust Moranis at 8:06 AM on March 25, 2018 [24 favorites]


American civilization has already collapsed

Personally, I'm starting to think of it as The Storm Before The Storm
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:15 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


American civilization has already collapsed for tens of millions of people in the country

The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.
posted by Grangousier at 8:20 AM on March 25, 2018 [36 favorites]


Very apt, twist. Sums up my own thinking nicely.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:25 AM on March 25, 2018


The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

AKA Shit isn’t real until it starts happening to white people. Then it becomes the empire collapsing.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:27 AM on March 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


The best way I can explain the perspective of these "Collapse" narratives is to imagine the instant of minor panic experienced when, in the dark, at the top of a flight of stairs, you expected one more step. Your body is misinterpreting this as falling, when really, you just reached flat space.

At a time when America should be clear-headed about its position (which is quite strong) and measured in its actions, it's panicking. Reactionary. And the 2016 election was the epitome of this sentiment.

AKA Shit isn’t real until it starts happening to white people. Then it becomes the empire collapsing.
I think this is very right. And to add: until it starts happening to the middle class (but since class and race signifiers are really entangled in this country...).
posted by Room 101 at 8:33 AM on March 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


There is a difference, for example, between riding a bicycle to work for environmental reasons and riding a bicycle to work because you can't afford a car.

As someone who fits both categories: not really, no. Drivers don't check my bank statement before trying to murder me, and governments' refusal to build appropriate infrastructure harms us all.

The near-requirement to use personal automobiles to go about daily life tasks in most of the United States is an enormous drain on individual finances, and yet another way we privatize expenses that should be borne by the general public, particularly including the wealth hoarders at the top.
posted by asperity at 8:37 AM on March 25, 2018 [15 favorites]


What will the collapse look like? Will Manhattan become a ghost town with a few sustenance farmers in central park? Will the internet be shut down so even with a solar array we can't post to mifi? Mass migration to Mexico? Hidden MIT monks secretly hording science and tech books for when there is a post-millennial renaissance? I just don't see it, there will be business cycles, some bigger than others and twitter/snapchat/facebook may just be footnotes to history but unless the super volcano shuts everything down, small incremental improvements like asteroid mining and the robot revolution will bumble along.
posted by sammyo at 8:39 AM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


The best way I can explain the perspective of these "Collapse" narratives is to imagine the instant of minor panic experienced when, in the dark, at the top of a flight of stairs, you expected one more step. Your body is misinterpreting this as falling, when really, you just reached flat space.

No. That happened in the 70s. To extend your metaphor, one can either quickly understand that the stair is not there, is not going to be there, and you need to account for the flat space --- or you can stay frozen, expecting the nonexistent stair to support your weight, and thereby fall.

The US does not, it appears to me, to be psychologically accounting for the possibility that we've reached flat space.
posted by PMdixon at 8:45 AM on March 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


What will the collapse look like? Will Manhattan become a ghost town with a few sustenance farmers in central park?

Manhattan will be a bit of ocean with rusty buildings sticking out of it.

Will the internet be shut down so even with a solar array we can't post to mifi?

The very rich will still have electronic communications for a while no matter what, so try to be rich I guess.

Mass migration to Mexico?

The other way around. All tropical and most subtropical regions of the world will pretty throughly depopulate.

I just don't see it, there will be business cycles, some bigger than others and twitter/snapchat/facebook may just be footnotes to history but unless the super volcano shuts everything down, small incremental improvements like asteroid mining and the robot revolution will bumble along.

The old Roman baths were still operating normally in the Eastern Empire at a time when in the British Isles they had already forgotten how to make wheel-thrown pottery. Good luck telling a 6th century Briton that this is just the downswing of the business cycle.
posted by Rust Moranis at 8:45 AM on March 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


I was quite surprised recently during a power outage that my solar power system couldn't work on it's own, even in sunny weather. It's something I'm going to look into, and hope to amend. But I think we are all more on the grid than we even know.
I have a friend who works in IT security, and they are pushing me to start prepping — seriously. They believe there will be a serious breakdown soon, and that even as they are certain most states will deal with it eventually, there will be a period of chaos, where solar powered freezers and a big store of canned food will be a luxury.
(I live part time in the city, and part time at our family farm. My friend expects me to host everyone at the farm when it all breaks down).
posted by mumimor at 8:51 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


The US does not, it appears to me, to be psychologically accounting for the possibility that we've reached flat space.

Tell that to the plutocrats siphoning-up every possible dollar from the rest of society. They know full-well we've hit bottom and see what's coming. So, they're making sure the gates and walls they've built around themselves and their luxuries can't be breached, and to hell with the other 99%.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:54 AM on March 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


Chalmers Johnson is another author worth reading.
posted by infini at 8:55 AM on March 25, 2018


AKA Shit isn’t real until it starts happening to white people. Then it becomes the empire collapsing

Exactly. When I have to deal with (or even recognize) the same shit you've been spending your life dealing with it's clearly a sign of the apocalypse. There can be no question about it, now we are all doomed.

I mean, the whole point of civilization is to make sure I don't have to deal with shit!
posted by aramaic at 8:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


Tell that to the plutocrats siphoning-up every possible dollar from the rest of society. They know full-well we've hit bottom and see what's coming. So, they're making sure the gates and walls they've built around themselves and their luxuries can't be breached, and to hell with the other 99%.

This is often referred to at smaller scale as "calling dibs," and in dysfunctional families is frequently seen as the death of a central figure approaches.
posted by PMdixon at 8:57 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Scaling down should be a choice, not something forced upon you by a system carefully designed to shackle you to a life of serfdom.

What makes you think it isn't a choice? The decision here isn't between living in a box and living on the streets. The decision most young people are making is between living in a micro-apartment or living with a long commute. (As has been frequently pointed out, micro-apartments frequently aren't that much cheaper than housing in either the surrounding area or housing opportunities in other neighborhoods in a city. This isn't coercion.)

In general, this is my object to the decline narrative in a nutshell -- everyone wants to point to their own pet peeves as evidence of societal decline. Why is a decline in material lifestyle (or, hell, the rise of the uber-wealthy) somehow worse than the decline of adult friendships or social institutions?
posted by steady-state strawberry at 9:02 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


In this, as in many things, Talleyrand's observation on the Russian army remains useful: "It's never as good as it looks, it's never as bad as it looks."
posted by mojohand at 9:08 AM on March 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


I was quite surprised recently during a power outage that my solar power system couldn't work on it's own, even in sunny weather. It's something I'm going to look into, and hope to amend.

As someone who works in solar, I'm disappointed but not surprised that the salesperson at the company who did your array didn't educate you about this. Almost all residential solar is grid-tied with no backup. It's by far cheaper to do it this way, and even just the maintenance on a large-enough-to-be-useful battery backup system is pretty significant. That may change, but the point of solar as currently implemented is not to power your house, but to offset the power that you consume by putting power back into the grid. Your salesperson really should have educated you on this but, ehh, they don't. They're salespeople. The sales side of residential solar is kinda gross.

Anyway, the reason your system shuts off when the power goes out is that the electrical code requires it. You can't have your panels backfeeding electricity into the grid when the maintenance crews show up after an outage to make repairs; that's how maintenance people get killed. And your panels can't power your house directly because they don't make power based on your house's demands, they make it based on how much sun happens to be hitting them at any given moment. So rather than connecting to the stuff in your home, they connect to the grid (which can easily absorb whatever your house is putting out) and send their power there.

If you want to use solar to run your house when the grid is down, you'll need a battery system and an automatic transfer switch that changes your house and your array over to that battery system when the grid power dies. Most people who want backup power in the event of an outage (if they're doing it the fancy way with an AT switch) have a natural gas generator instead, even if they also have solar. The cost and maintenance is considerably lower.

Derail over.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:18 AM on March 25, 2018 [76 favorites]


But I really think that this is fundamentally about nations and people trying to cling to an outsized share of power.

Outsized share of power? Well, no, actually, because the ruling class gonna ruling class. Their life is better than ever. Their projection of power is still unchanged and unchallenged.

Let's not pretend that the working class, or even middle class, ever had any real say in American policy, so the suffering of both doesn't represent some pendulum swing towards normalcy, whatever normal is. Joe Sixpack going bankrupt over medical bills doesn't help a 3rd world villager in any noticeable way.
posted by Beholder at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane makes a point worth repeating, about the American bubble — that the “heroic” America (of 20th century fame) is gone is a fact nowhere in serious dispute except within America itself.

I’m not sure that America can be easily captured in a handful of statistics. I believe it’s more about perception and feeling. It’s like America’s character — if we can say countries or cultures have character — has shifted dramatically. To her friends, it’s like she’s a new person. To this extent it is certainly fair to say a version of America has collapsed. Her institutions go on functioning, given broad enough definitions of function, but her persona is new. And she’s the only one who thinks the change is subtle, or slow, or remains largely in the future.

It’s less a matter of finances and more one of moral leadership. America once had moral leadership in the world, but doesn’t anymore. That’s sad for the world, and confusing for Americans.

When does national self-image catch up to real world relevance? Hard to say especially in a case where relevance is confused for attention, so it must feel an awful lot like relevance when no one is ignoring you. Nobody is about to stop paying attention to America anytime soon. But notoriety is not nobility. People can’t tear their eyes away from trainwrecks, too.

I say this not to make Americans feel bad, because I care about my American friends and wouldn’t wish them upset. But I do continue to be repeatedly shocked by moderate, informed voices in America that are so blatantly out of touch with how the rest of the world thinks. The bubble is real, it is cartoonishly dramatic, and it is pervasive. Americans definitely do live in their own highly distorted Jobsian reality.

I love America. I love Americans. I love American history and science and entertainment. But America collectively has no idea what’s going on on this planet, compared to even the ferocious ignorance and blind spots the rest of us swim in day to day.

Subjects that are “debated” in America are often considered obvious elsewhere (q.v. global climate disruption, gross disparities between rich and poor, whether providing no national health service is barbaric, whether guns promote deadly peacetime violence, the desirability of evaluating human worth via skin tone, poverty as a personal moral failing, and so on).

I’ve heard thought-leaders in America suggest that the rest of the world — when we seem to agree on these subjects — has fallen victim to some kind of powerful socialist group-think that demonstrates our susceptibility to liberal propaganda. Well...we are agreed that group-think is at play, yes. But not in the way American pundits believe.

The old America has certainly collapsed. The new America is someone we are still getting to know.
posted by Construction Concern at 9:26 AM on March 25, 2018 [40 favorites]


Maybe for some folks, but there are great swaths of the globe that are familiar with the “new” America. The places we destabilized or looted or bombed or occupied. The peoples we plundered in order to enable the lifestyles of both us and our European allies.

The curtains have fallen, and you can see the masque of the orange death out in the open now, but it’s been here since 1776 — and beyond.

I disagree with “this is not normal” statements. This IS normal. It isn’t RIGHT, but it’s always been here.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:40 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


We'll have lots of aqueduct bricks to build our hog pens from, just like the Late Romans

Y'know there are civilizations other than the Romans that have collapsed. Take China for instance, which has dynasties that each went through a cycle of ascendancy, peak, corruption/decline, rebellion/warring states, and ends with a new one emerging and the whole thing starts over again.

But, I'm also not saying the second half of a dynasty was a cake walk either.
posted by FJT at 10:06 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


This video about wealth inequality in America is already six years old, but I keep looking at it and wondering what it's telling us. The collapse of an economy? The successful routing of a country's GDP into the hands of the few? But mostly I see it as What's going to happen here in Canada if we let them get away with it.
posted by sneebler at 10:12 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Y'know there are civilizations other than the Romans that have collapsed. Take China for instance, which has dynasties that each went through a cycle of ascendancy, peak, corruption/decline, rebellion/warring states, and ends with a new one emerging and the whole thing starts over again.

Or take Easter Island, where a population in the tens of thousands with its own written language diminished to 100 starving people with no trees in 200 years.

There are many historical different models of collapse to choose from and while it's unreasonable to focus on only a few specific simplified formulas, it's also irresponsible to ignore the more dramatic and severe ones.
posted by Rust Moranis at 10:19 AM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Construction Concern's comment reminds me of the conversation I had at lunch today with a young global nomad of Finnish origin. He's grown up in the US, China, India, and parts of Europe before returning to Finland thanks to his dad's work.

He said something similar - he'd moved to the US (Texas iirc) at age 4 and loved it and thought of himself as American for the longest time but of late, when he travels he notices the reactions to his American accented English and most recently felt the need to deliberately use a Finnish accent in order to feel more welcomed. He felt he had to put away an entire part of himself in today's world.

Camelot is in decline and the young are in the streets again.
posted by infini at 10:42 AM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly."

I tend to take "doomer porn" with a grain of salt. Head over to any of the right-leaning websites and you'll find tons of articles written by any number of people who try to take historical precedence and apply it to our world today.

There's a lot of things that are just plain not good right now, but ask anyone in the late 1850s-late 1860s or the 1930s-mid 1940s and I suspect (in different ways) they'd have a similar sense of doom, foreboding and helplessness. The big difference being that there wasn't this gigantic sounding board called the internet back then.

History rhymes; humans, fundamentally, are the same today as we were 2,000 years ago. Societies will rise, they will fall. We will fight. Dumb mistakes will be made (World War I), good ideological battles will be fought (Cold War), but in the end I'm optimistic we're going to come out okay. I'm not oblivious to the world's problems, I'm confident in individuals ultimately doing the right thing.
posted by tgrundke at 10:45 AM on March 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'm surprised by all the resistance to the "America is collapsing" message, because I think it's more accurate to say "America has collapsed".

Usually, when doomsayers speak of "collapse", they're referring to "socioeconomic collapse": that is, the breakdown of society and the lack of a stable economy. I'll admit that our economy is chugging (or, at least, lurching) along, but to say that we have a functioning society is ridiculous.

As an American, I have never—in my entire life, even as a child—experienced a society that isn't dog-eat-dog. Everyone and everything in America is transactional. People aren’t kind to their neighbors because that’s the right thing to do; if they talk to their neighbors at all, it is for an explicit purpose. (Heck, I do this myself: I talk to my neighbors primarily because I want them to like me and not shoot me in event of a crisis.)

Let me give you a parable that I witnessed recently. I know a family, the father of whom is a VP of a major regional corporation and who has a middle-six-figure income. Their daughter is a teacher at a small private school in a rural area and makes below than the poverty line. The family usually makes a big deal about birthdays, and they are especially important to the daughter, for whom it is an escape from the great difficulties of her day-to-day life. This year, the parents told the daughter that if she wanted a birthday party, she’d have to provide her own dinner and cake, because money was tight for them right now. She did so because it was that important to her, even though it forced her to dip into her meager savings.

On the one hand, I'll grant that this is anecdotal. On the other hand, it's all I've ever seen, and further, I'm a member of the privileged male, white, raised-Christian, relatively-affluent class.

You can talk to me about a functional society when the parents aren’t eating their own children alive. Until them, I'm learning to grow my own food.
posted by ragtag at 10:52 AM on March 25, 2018 [31 favorites]


America once had moral leadership in the world, but doesn’t anymore.

I'm a 56 year old Australian and I do not recall ever believing in that moral leadership.

My political consciousness was formed during the US war in Vietnam, and it has always seemed to me that the kindest possible explanation for the endless and frankly nauseating proclivity of successive US administrations to hold themselves up as moral examples to the rest of the world is that they have genuinely mistaken their horseshit for bullshit.

I have met and enjoyed the company of many deeply impressive Americans. Such a shame that none of them actually run the joint.
posted by flabdablet at 11:22 AM on March 25, 2018 [18 favorites]


good ideological battles will be fought (Cold War)

LOL, WTF?

You know that both sides were serving up Flavor-Aid, right? And that when the USSR collapsed, it got replaced with a robber-baron model cheered on by and benefiting the capitalist global elite?
Say what you will about the Russians but at least they understood that they were being lied to.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:22 AM on March 25, 2018 [16 favorites]


> mumimor:
yes and no, he moved to Constantinople, but he still built great structures in Rome. I don't really see that happening in Detroit, but I may be wrong?"

You need to do some more fact-checking. That's Istanbul.

(Sorry. This is grim reading. Needed a bad joke break.)
posted by Samizdata at 11:26 AM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


>> Inability to pay for maintainance of current territory is a sign of late stage imperial collapse. Now consider the failure to rebuild Puerto Rico.

> There’s a difference between the ability to maintain territory, and the desire of an individual leader to punish the residents of a territory by refusing to maintain their infrastructure.


Is this how centrists talk themselves out of guilt for their country's crimes? That the colony of Puerto Rico was doing just fine until the guy on the team they don't like became president and suddenly all the electrical and storm prep infrastructure that a properly-run tropical island should have had just vaporized somehow?
posted by Space Coyote at 12:07 PM on March 25, 2018 [16 favorites]


The parallels that are frequently drawn between the US, today, and the Soviet Union towards the end of its run (variously anytime in the 80s), are intriguing, largely because unlike other large-scale social discontinuities—I'm not sure "collapse" is always the right word—there are still a lot of people around who experienced it, even participated actively in moving it along.

However, I think it's important not to take the Cold War comparisons too far. When the USSR started to falter, there was an obvious alternative right there. People in the Soviet Union, and especially in the GDR, were very aware, by the late 80s, that their standards of living were not the same as those in the West, and presumably the propaganda about how great and superior their society was started to ring pretty hollow. To borrow a phrase that stuck with me from a recent cstross book, "capitalism delivers the goods".

I'm not sure that there's a consensus—at least, not yet—in the US that there's an alternative system out there that would produce better outcomes than what we have. I tend to think there might be an emerging enviousness of certain structures in Europe, but only on the part of some Americans, and I urge people who see signs of the same thing to check carefully for sample bias. I mean, I think that it's pretty fucking obvious at this point that a market-driven healthcare system is a bad idea and produces objectively, measurably bad outcomes compared to alternative systems. The jury is no longer out, at all, on that, and I find it hard to imagine any reasonably-intelligent person disagreeing. But, of course, lots of people do, for a variety of reasons. And if there's no consensus on a structural issue where it's pretty easy to measure and do an A/B test, then I think we're pretty far from achieving it on more nebulous social issues.

And without some sort of viable alternative, I think we're going to get the same thing that you would have seen in the USSR, in a parallel universe where the US totally botched its (and Western Europe's) postwar economic recovery—where capitalism failed to deliver the goods in an obvious way. (Thought experiment: imagine the Morgenthau Plan had been implemented with extreme prejudice in Western Europe, and the US returned to a policy of isolationism at home.) People in the Soviet states would probably have kept their system going well into the 21st century, because even a poorly-performing society is better than chaos, and that's the alternative when you don't have a better idea on hand. And humans are pretty good at band-aiding things, for generations if necessary.

So, yeah. I think we're in for more of the same, perhaps for a very long time, unless a consensus emerges that the system we're using has failed and there's a plausible alternative for replacing it. But when that happens, things could change pretty quickly.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:16 PM on March 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm surprised by all the resistance to the "America is collapsing" message, because I think it's more accurate to say "America has collapsed".

there's two problems with this discussion - the first is that many of you don't actually remember what the old america pre-1965 was like - trust me, it wasn't very good unless you were a middle class WASP or could give a plausible imitation of one - these are not worse days by any means

the second and biggest one is that no one's defined collapse and many other concepts being discussed here - the late 60s were much more bitter and divided than things are now, although i'll admit, they're getting there - but it wasn't a collapse

there's always been some callousness in america - it's nothing new and it used to be worse
posted by pyramid termite at 12:33 PM on March 25, 2018 [13 favorites]


Also, I've seen a piece or two on the migratory seasonal worker retirees, and I got the distinct impression that the typical profile was not "I would remain here in the bosom of my extended family but alas alack I must take to the road or be condemned to eat catfood" and more "I want to travel now that I'm retired and spending a few weeks working here and there makes that more comfortable and lets me buy stuff for the grandkids."

There's both and everything in between, from the comfortably retired who visit Yellowstone every summer in their land yacht to the "houseless" who winter in Slab City or attend the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (aka Burning Van) for its community building and skill share.

This country does has a sizable dispersed and mobile Hooverville made up of people boondocking on public lands and Walmart parking lots in their vehicles while traveling seasonally out of economic necessity. These people are who the article's author is referring and their daily existence is much more precarious than the #vanlife tag on Instagram.
posted by peeedro at 12:41 PM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


However, I think it's important not to take the Cold War comparisons too far. When the USSR started to falter, there was an obvious alternative right there. People in the Soviet Union, and especially in the GDR, were very aware, by the late 80s, that their standards of living were not the same as those in the West, and presumably the propaganda about how great and superior their society was started to ring pretty hollow. To borrow a phrase that stuck with me from a recent cstross book, "capitalism delivers the goods".

To someone like me who was living in Europe at the time, what happened in Russia was a a tragedy, not least because it was a catastrophe anyone with a brain could see would happen.
I've still not been to Russia, but I travelled a lot in the rest of the eastern block during the late 80's early 90's and the most crazy thing about that experience was how much the "East" resembled the US, whereas Western Europe was a whole other beast. It was right down in the tiny details. The bureaucracy, the weird food, the colors, the buildings, the attitude of people. Obviously, some parts of the US were much richer, but other parts were at least as poor, something I wasn't used to from Western Europe, where there was a bottom line back then (not so much today, sadly). In reality, the US system wasn't the ideal alternative to the USSR system, but it was sold that way. In most Eastern Block countries, supply side economists ran in and got to experiment on a grand scale, which led to oligarchs, mafia and extreme inequality. I'm not saying that what they had was better, but I am saying that there were better alternatives that never got a chance because of a totally fake and unproved "American Dream". Even a Singapore style authoritarian state would have been better than what happened in Russia and other post-USSR countries, and what happened was driven by American ideologists trying to prove something that had never worked anywhere ever.

I think that in order for ordinary people to prosper, you need to build a society, rather than a state. But for people who live within the confines of a corrupt and unreliable state, the concept of a society, where everyone shares both riches and challenges, is hard to grasp. It's a huge task to change that mindset and make everyone across class, race and gender believe that society is possible. Looking back, a well-founded distrust of the state was what the US and the Eastern Block shared, which I couldn't understand at the time. I lived in a society based on trust and relative equality and couldn't imagine why it could be so difficult to share knowledge and improve the functions of our community, like hospitals, schools and police.

At the time, there were huge differences between the European nations, but the EU was growing into a stabilizing factor. In 1989, when the wall came down in Berlin I was working there, and while a lot of my leftist Danish friends were against the Union, all of my German leftist friends were for, acknowledging that only the EU could stand up against the corruption they knew in both east and west. An EU that stood up for workers' rights, for human rights, against the mafia, and against corrupt politicians. I learnt a lot from those friends.
posted by mumimor at 1:01 PM on March 25, 2018 [30 favorites]


Y'know there are civilizations other than the Romans that have collapsed. Take China for instance, which has dynasties that each went through a cycle of ascendancy, peak, corruption/decline, rebellion/warring states, and ends with a new one emerging and the whole thing starts over again.

Yes, but your anecdote about China doesn't make my point at all. Aqueducts being disassembled for cheap bricks does: that the "long era of relative prosperity" can be had at the cost of cannibalizing the support structures and resources which a far more robust old order was dependent on.

I wonder if the people who are scoffing at the concept of a collapse of American civilization consider Venezuela to have collapsed or be near collapse. I mean they still have modern technology—even some of the latest stuff because the government has arranged to pay China in petroleum instead of cash. Individual Venezuelans have for years been facilitating natural resource extraction by the markets of surrounding countries, by smuggling subsidized petroleum products over the border for arbitrage. And most recently a town issued its own local paper currency—there's a thing that characterized the terminal-mode breakdown of society during some Chinese dynasties, degradation in the financial infrastructure supporting long-distance trade.

You can still smile on a sunny day in Venezuela, as we'll still be able to here; but there are very material differences once social and economic momentum has switched to a sort of parrying retreat on all fronts.
posted by XMLicious at 1:16 PM on March 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


Are people trying to say that America isn’t collapsing?

People have been proposing "American Collapse" scenarios for America since the 1960s. It was considered to be a matter-of fact background element for most SF- and pretty much the accepted background for Cyberpunk (anyone remember all the "And Japan owns California" scenarios?). And that's just as far back as I've bothered to check. You could probably find predictions of America's imminent collapse going back decades before. Certainly there are people who believe the 16th amendment to the Constitution heralded the end. Not to mention the 19th, 13th and 14th amendments surely heralded the imminent collapse of all that was great and good.

Honestly, It's a nearly masturbatory cottage industry which gives a great excuse to not be involved- "Oh, we can't be bothered to actually be an activist about anything, because Ameica's going to collapse." Why march when you can write blog articles about the inevitable?

What's interesting in the last 15-20 years is the framing of America's collapse as a GOOD thing. It does after all, ignore the fact that given how intertwined the world economies are, a collapse of America would also take a good chunk of the rest of the world with it. The Great Depression of the 30s was global- and an American collapse would have far greater repercussions; the economies of Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, England, Western Europe and the like for a start, would also collapse or be badly damaged. We're probably talking more of a worldwide collapse than a national one. Of course the Accelerationists would rub their hands with glee at the prospect: "Oh surely all this misery will bring the Inevitable Revolution even closer!"

Russia might make out well in a global collapse though. They may even be able to expand- or have to. I wonder how many people looking gleefully at the prospect of the collapse of the American Empire would glance at the Balkans and Finland and say, "Ah, well they were really always part of Russia anyway. Now let's go onward to sensually describing the ruin of American cities."
posted by happyroach at 2:07 PM on March 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


There's a difference between the collapse of the American Empire and the collapse of the United States of America. I think the first would be a fine thing albeit with a lot of drama and even loss of lives. The second would be catastrophic, and not only do I hope we never get there, I believe a majority of states across the globe will do what they can to prevent it. This includes several states that the current US administration believe are enemies.
posted by mumimor at 2:35 PM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


So is this discussion basically a prepper thread for those left-of-center? Because those to the right have been ahead of the curve on that front.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:50 PM on March 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


On the standard of this article, I don't think there is ever a time when the US wasn't about to collapse.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:00 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's more a case of a collapsing news narrative. Most of us are pretty happy and content with our lives.
posted by Modest House at 3:23 AM on March 25 [2 favorites +] [!]

No we are not.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:31 AM on March 25 [43 favorites +] [!]


This map is illuminating (TLDC: US has dropped from 7.2 to 6.8 in aggregate 'happiness' over the last ten years)
posted by Sebmojo at 3:27 PM on March 25, 2018


White people love to complain that things are bad in the US now, like Jim Crow was, what? Part of a successful society?

I mean... yes, in the sense being spoken of. All of the empires which we are describing as having collapsed in the past or the post-colonial nations which went from being regarded as promising up-and-comers to "failed states" didn't owe their preceding prosperity, robustness, or stability to an absence of injustice or exploitation. In fact in many cases the preceding stability was thanks to continuous colonization and subjugation enterprises or bloody conquest and enslavement.

By the way, the above-the-fold first link in the OP was written by a man named Umair Haque who lives in London and describes himself as a "mutt" and a "global orphan".
posted by XMLicious at 5:54 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


that there were only about 70 years — one lifetime — from the rule of Constantine the Great to the sack of Rome

I know people are harping in this, but it’s such a misleading analogy. Rome got sacked because the Emperor repeatedly screwed and betrayed Alaric, a Christian general who had fought on behalf of the Romans and who had repeatedly sought accommodation.

And it’s not like the Sack was the end of Rome. The Western Empire lasted another 50 years, and the Eastern Empire (Byzantium) lasted another 1000 years. Justinian, Basil II, Heraclius, and many many others were yet to come.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:55 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Yes, but your anecdote about China doesn't make my point at all.

Well okay, though I wasn't really trying to make your point. it's just you were the first one in the thread to bring up Rome and that's why I grabbed your quote. And to elaborate a bit more, every time American collapse is brought up it's frequently compared to the Fall of the Roman Empire. But we aren't the Romans (or at the very least I know my ancestors were never Romans). I feel like that's another bit of American Exceptionalism once again cropping up: Americans feeling that they are #1 in the world so they want to compare themselves to the #1 of the Past.

Sometimes the talk of collapse on certain corners on the Internet resembles more the excitement of some kind of movie event, like "Oh Rome's collapse was huge, but America's collapse is gonna be the sequel that will be bigger and more of everything in every way!!"
posted by FJT at 6:01 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


As an American, I have never—in my entire life, even as a child—experienced a society that isn't dog-eat-dog. Everyone and everything in America is transactional. People aren’t kind to their neighbors because that’s the right thing to do; if they talk to their neighbors at all, it is for an explicit purpose. (Heck, I do this myself: I talk to my neighbors primarily because I want them to like me and not shoot me in event of a crisis.)

Ragtag -

I grew up in a very affluent neighborhood, and there were a fair share of assholes and idiots - but i've also lived in far less affluent communities that were filled with the same ratio of assholes to angels.

My parents and those of my friends had extremely high academic and moral standards, and I can never recall anyone acting in quite the same callous Dickensonian manner that you describe. I'm not saying that those people don't exist - because I've met them - but I also don't think they're quite as common or dominant as the power-dynamic-obsessed on the far left would have you believe (similar for those on the far right who think everyone is a society-sapping welfare queen or illegal immigrant). Cuts both ways.

I know that there is a subset of America that is transactional, but this is not a uniquely American construct. There is nothing inherently wrong with talking to your neighbors with a purpose, not wanting a deeper relationship. I currently live in a community where the neighbors are definitely not intimately involved, but we sure are neighborly. In heavy snows, we'll snow-blow the driveways of those who don't own a snow thrower; We'll bring up the trash cans when necessary, and when, a year ago, a corner bar became a dangerous nuisance due to a gunfight that spilled out into the street, we banded together to get the bar shut down.

It's functional. No, we don't BBQ together or talk often - but we respect one another and look out for one another. That's fundamentally American: I'll take care of mine, you take care of yours, and if there's a common threat we'll work together. I see nothing wrong with that.
posted by tgrundke at 6:16 PM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


I think there's a dream on the left that America will finally collapse and something something FINALLY the glorious people's revolution will be achieved. But we still have the largest military in the world by far. We still have prodigious amounts of natural resources to draw from. We still have prodigious numbers of people. We're not post-WW2 Britain with major cities in rubble and food rationing. I absolutely think we'll shift from a unipolar world to detente with China and it's already in process, but I also think China's got problems of its own we just don't know about because of the prodigious levels of state control in place.

Indeed, one of the advantages of the federal system is if the national government is deadlocked, the local services more or less continue running. We may not get funds for a big federal project, but it's not like my state is going to be thrown into anarchy if Congress shuts down yet again. We may see a trend towards more states working around a deadlocked federal government, as many are starting to do with guns and health care.

Our per-capita GDP is ~7th in the world and has relentlessly gone up since the 70s. We're hardly collapsing.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 6:26 PM on March 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


You need to do some more fact-checking. That's Istanbul.

It's Istanbul? Not Constantinople? Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:58 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


@Ghostride -

Good points. I'd add that doomer/collapse porn is not unique to the left - there's a LOT of it on the right.

You also make a very good point about the federal system. The 10th Amendment was intended to leave the majority of power at the state level, allowing for experimentation - and, it allows for the vast majority of critical services to continue functioning. The National Guard answers to governors, and federal intervention must be requested by the state.

Part of the armageddon preparations made during the Cold War included ensuring continuity of government at the state and local level. It's still strongly embedded into our system.
posted by tgrundke at 7:05 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


This country does has a sizable dispersed and mobile Hooverville made up of people boondocking on public lands and Walmart parking lots in their vehicles while traveling seasonally out of economic necessity. These people are who the article's author is referring and their daily existence is much more precarious than the #vanlife tag on Instagram.

Well, not really -- they dismiss the traditional nomadic poor, what they claim is unique is "In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die " and I have not seen any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of people who retire and then are forced to take to the road to pursue this seasonal work to avoid starving.
posted by tavella at 7:10 PM on March 25, 2018


Which is not to say that there are not retirees who are suffering in the US! Just that their particular illustration of this was... not convincing.
posted by tavella at 7:14 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


White middle class people finally experiencing he brutality of the american system (i.e. suddenly finding themselves on the wrong side of the "screw peter to pay paul machine") isn't because we've made so much progress on racial and gender justice (we've made some)
The machine is eating them TOO now because its relentless and it demands more than just blacks, immigrants, the disabled, women, etc.

Has america peaked? longevity, literacy, per100k homelessness, real wages many stats show decline hard to know how far and fast that decline will go. Is the political sysyem broken and near crisis needing either constutional revision or a civil war, sadly yes. Is the ecosystem and climate in crisis, you bet. Are we easter island... no.

Are we 1990 Yugoslavia? (shrug, i don't know yet)
but that's the trouble with Collapse-pocalypse-mageddhon-o-meters. They only work when you point them backwards.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 7:16 PM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


tl;dr
America peaked and is eating its seedcorn, hasn't collapsed yet but that is looking possible, but maybe it does collapse until climate change wipes out enough crop yeild to meet the "can i post to metafilter" standard of certified collapse.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 7:20 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I have not seen any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of people who retire and then are forced to take to the road to pursue this seasonal work to avoid starving.

I mean maybe not traveling around, but fast food used to be a job for high school students and now it isn't. And where do you think Wal Mart gets large numbers of employees? These "retirees" aren't making you fries because they are bored, certainly.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:21 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


But that's thing -- those weren't the people they were talking about, they were claiming it was this brand new group:
"Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart."
It was like the rest of the piece, a bunch of disparate references to stuff that had been in the news slapped together and then not backed up with evidence. As someone said in the thread, more late night dorm bullshitting than a convincing essay. And as I said at the start, I'm someone who indeed thinks that the US is well on the slope of imperial collapse. But that doesn't mean I have to accept crap work on the subject.
posted by tavella at 7:30 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Huh, the nomadic retirees working temp seasonal jobs because they can't afford a house seems like a pretty solidly established scenario to me - it's obviously a difficult one to get demographic numbers on, but Amazon's CamperForce isn't being staffed by old people walking 15 miles a day for three months just to buy presents for their grandkids. The uptick in nomadic 'retirees' is often traced to the housing crisis/market crash in 2008, when people managed to hit the end of their career at the wrong time, lose their house and lose their savings.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 8:20 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


I think that in order for ordinary people to prosper, you need to build a society, rather than a state. But for people who live within the confines of a corrupt and unreliable state, the concept of a society, where everyone shares both riches and challenges, is hard to grasp.

Mumimor, I might have bumped into you at the Berlin Wall :) I was there on my first vacation to Europe seeing it getting torn down, and since 1994 most of my expat experience has been poking around the ashes of the failed Communist block.

I think your analysis of society vs. government is an important point, but in my direct contacts with friends, family, colleagues that lived through all of this I have quite a different takeaway.

The eastern block was full of people who were good and willing socialists, and who believed in the underlying theory and much of the practice. In fact the USSR was quite successful in building a socialist society! People really did enjoy the fairness, the (theoretically) equal access to opportunity, education, culture, etc. Many people who were alive in the USSR are very wistful of the lost egalitarian thinking - all nations equal, women and men equal, workers paid at least something close to the managers and administrators, everyone getting a holiday and travel...

What screwed the USSR was not that there was not a society, it was the failure of the state to deliver on the promise that was implicit when they built the "New Soviet" people. Those are usually really good people - if you meet someone that is 40 or older and ask them about the USSR you will hear about what an excellent society it was. People helped each other, people looked out for one another in their community, there was a lot of intermarriage and cultural sharing because for the New Socialist Man it was all about solidarity and brotherhood. Yes of course there were dissidents, and gulags, etc., etc. But that is not the problem inherent in socialism - that is the way in which the state betrayed the ideals of the society it had created, the society it was supposedly advocating for and defending against the parasitic capitalists.

After all this time, and living through the eyes of my ex-Soviet family and friends, I really miss Soviet society even though I was never there. And thinking back to my mindset as a young man reading Solzhenitsyn and raving against totalitarianism, I am ashamed at how unwoke I was to the Flavor-Aid that I had so thoroughly gulped down, how much a cheerleader I was for team freedom.

Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:33 PM on March 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


"gulags etc" thats a huge yada yada covering up the less than stellar conditions of state terror. White middle class americans are free of state terror not because their state doesn't spy detain and torture and execute, they just think it won't happen to them. Wait until they realize it can and instead of "oh, the collapse" it will be "oh, this all-powerful domination".
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 9:09 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I'm surprised by all the resistance to the "America is collapsing" message, because I think it's more accurate to say "America has collapsed".

I agree with this. Entire regions of America are either dead or dying, and they aren't coming back.
posted by Beholder at 9:29 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


White middle class americans are free of state terror not because their state doesn't spy detain and torture and execute, they just think it won't happen to them. Wait until they realize it can and instead of "oh, the collapse" it will be "oh, this all-powerful domination".

No, that will work out fine because guns.
posted by flabdablet at 9:52 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Say what you will about the Russians but at least they understood that they were being lied to.

To be fair, substantial numbers of Americans know that too.

Alex Jones told them so.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Speaking of China ...

Why Is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?

That article ^^ about Chinese-owned pig farms in NC makes me think "US collapse" more than anything I've read recently. It's could get ugly quickly, not for our economy or status in the world, but for the daily lives of average Americans stuck nowhere with nothing.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:05 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Why Is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?

Jesus. That's a seriously offensive headline (the article is much better). It reflects the sort of attitude that makes us in the developing world say, fuck off and collapse already, America.

I know Americans by and large don't think in such clearly dismissive terms, but it does reflect the ahistoricity and exceptionalism that characterises much of the breastbeating about American collapse.
posted by tavegyl at 10:32 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Talking about societies independently of the states and state-run apparatus that produced them, or at least the conditions for them to exist, seems naive, perhaps dangerous.

I mean, there are aspects of American laissez-faire Liberalism that look pretty damn nice if you zoom in on the working-as-designed parts and ignore the ugly stuff—the classic postwar single-earner whitebread household with a freshly-built house in the suburbs and a Ford in the driveway and Blue Cross health insurance for the kids and a company pension to retire on and bowling league on Thursdays was a pretty neat concept, too. That's the American equivalent to the New Soviet Man—it's Ward Cleaver.

There's a reason that sort of imagery is such a staple of conservative political polemic—it's powerful. People—lots of them, judging from the last election—miss it even though they were never there, too.

Politics isn't math; it's not an abstraction that can be divorced from the reality of its implementations. On the other side of the coin from the rose-tinted propaganda is the reality of each system, the way it makes itself manifest in the real world; that's where you get Solzhenitsyn on one hand, and perhaps MLK or Betty Friedan on the other, just for starters. There's certainly value in studying a society's stated goals and the places where they have come closest to achieving them, but only in the context of the cost that it took to achieve those ends.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:33 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I agree with this. Entire regions of America are either dead or dying, and they aren't coming back.

Aside from some major cities and those smaller ones that have significant government employment centers, that's pretty much how it's always gone in the US. It would be odd if there weren't a lot of internal migration and evaporating cities. Even regionally, there is a lot of churn in which towns are in decline and which are on the rise.

This is especially true in areas where resource extraction is the dominant industry. It should come as no surprise that much of coal country is in decline. What's new is the resistance to pulling up stakes, moving the family elsewhere, and starting fresh. That's a lot harder than it used to be thanks to increasing specialization and outsourcing, cheaper manufacturing, and the like.
posted by wierdo at 10:41 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


To pick an arbitrary period in America's history, wasn't the '70s a time of doom and gloom and economic malaise and uncertainty? Of crumbling cities and spreading crime? What's to say we're not in a similar trough of sorrow, to be followed a few decades later by a short-lived golden decade, followed then by terrorist attack and war and misgovernment, and then the present day again?
posted by Apocryphon at 10:57 PM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Aside from some major cities and those smaller ones that have significant government employment centers, that's pretty much how it's always gone in the US. It would be odd if there weren't a lot of internal migration and evaporating cities. Even regionally, there is a lot of churn in which towns are in decline and which are on the rise.

Drudge, of all people, is linking to a CNBC article about a volunteer ambulance service.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/23/rural-hospital-closures-force-towns-to-take-action.html
posted by Beholder at 11:52 PM on March 25, 2018


To pick an arbitrary period in America's history, wasn't the '70s a time of doom and gloom and economic malaise and uncertainty?

Millenarianism is an old American tradition. We've always been teetering on the brink.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:24 AM on March 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


> justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow:
"You need to do some more fact-checking. That's Istanbul.

It's Istanbul? Not Constantinople? Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople?"


Yeah. Why they changed it, I can't say. People just liked better that way. 🤷
posted by Samizdata at 12:26 AM on March 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


This is actually good for bitcoin.
posted by Phssthpok at 1:17 AM on March 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


There's a difference between the collapse of the American Empire and the collapse of the United States of America.

This. People are talking about two different things - but the first is already well on its way, and people can recognize it. In part, it leads to the second - we no longer dominate the world, such that we can’t force prosperity on our citizens by way of having the only working factories and a sort of friendly colonialism. We are learning that the way of life we guaranteed doesn’t work in the new world, and people are having a lot of problems with it.
posted by corb at 1:45 AM on March 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


a sort of friendly colonialism

Strangely enough, colonialism only ever looks friendly to the colonizers. To the colonized, it's pretty much never any good.

It's odd that the US, itself founded as a union of breakaway British colonies, would be more sensitive to this than it is.
posted by flabdablet at 2:32 AM on March 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


One thing stuck with me, along the lines of "when politicians stop making sense to each other, then the people start smearing themselves with their own feces."

That quote is a perfect description of the state of the UK right now.
posted by Dysk at 3:24 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Speaking of China ...

Why Is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?

That article ^^ about Chinese-owned pig farms in NC makes me think "US collapse" more than anything I've read recently. It's could get ugly quickly, not for our economy or status in the world, but for the daily lives of average Americans stuck nowhere with nothing.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:05 PM on March 25 [+] [!]

There is some stuff in that article:
As jobs and talent have flocked to American cities, once-prosperous rural communities are finding their primary competitive advantages are desperate residents willing to work cheap, and local Republicans ready to extend tax breaks and slash regulation. American companies have long taken advantage of these trends. A leaked report from the 1980s, which was prepared for a waste-management company seeking a community for "locally undesirable land use," listed the "least resistant personality profile" as: "longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest," "conservative," "Republican" and "advocates of the free market."
You might as well tattoo "idiots" on their foreheads.
I know and understand the type of desperation these people feel well, but sometimes I really want to scream when they let themselves be fooled into actively worsening their conditions.

Anyway, the quote also shows that there have been very poor and badly serviced areas in the US since forever. Where these places are and how they look changes all time and it's only natural when people are scared and sense doom when their own area moves from prosperous to poor. It's a huge problem, but it is a separate problem from that of the fall of the American Empire. We've known at least since the Vietnam war that the US can not end wars successfully in spite of having the greatest military force in the world. I guess that is why Trump and several other idiots fantasize about using atomic bombs, as if it is lack of force that is the cause of the failure.
What is happening now is that while a lot of people thought that the US and saint Reagan won the cold war, they really, really didn't as much as the USSR broke down all on its own and then western grifters rushed in to take away the spoils while bandits grew into oligarchs. Then the same happened with the hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if Trump succeeds in bombing Iran, we'll see the same again. All of this is making formerly safe allies/vassals doubt US leadership, while Putin is figuring out how to wreak havoc on a low budget, both in the US and elsewhere.
posted by mumimor at 3:42 AM on March 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


People—lots of them, judging from the last election—miss it even though they were never there, too.

I heard a speaker describe the last election as 70-year-olds arguing over the ways to return back to a more prosperous society that they enjoyed in their prime. (His answer was, we can't return back to those times because we have far more outstanding debt and invested upkeep. Regardless of our GDP, we have more commitments per capita than anyone did back then.) Everyone wants to return back to the ideal of a more prosperous society, but I don't think they want to think about the changes they'd need to make in order for it to happen.

But declining relative prosperity isn't the same as collapse, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. When people think about the glory days of American society, they conflate a lot of things that didn't all happen at once -- the one-wage-earner families and social ties of some white people in the 1950s, but with the houses and material possessions we've come to expect from the 1980s (or so) onwards. Per-capita, the houses of the 1950s looked far closer to the micro-apartments derided above than they did to the McMansions of today.

Collapse is a lovely idea to accelerationists, and apocalyptic thinking is a heady form of escapism, but there's little reason to think that the collapse of the United States would be anything other than devastating to the rest of the world.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:57 AM on March 26, 2018 [15 favorites]


When people think about the glory days of American society, they conflate a lot of things that didn't all happen at once -- the one-wage-earner families and social ties of some white people in the 1950s, but with the houses and material possessions we've come to expect from the 1980s (or so) onwards. Per-capita, the houses of the 1950s looked far closer to the micro-apartments derided above than they did to the McMansions of today.
This.
I love those TV shows where the hosts dress up and live like in a former time, like this one. OK, that one is more of a joke, but here there are also more serious shows that go out of the way to show how that one-wage-earner family was really poor compared to even lower middle class today, and also how hard everyone in the family worked to just make everyday life work: hand-laundering and mending all the clothes, cleaning with primitive tools and products, repairing furniture and fittings that would just get thrown away in our day. Here in Europe most people didn't get cars or fridges before the fifties, so you'd have to shop daily and cook from scratch or eat canned food. My grandparents who were fairly well-off lived in a house of 125 m2 - about 1345 ft2, with three children (and for a while with a refugee family of five too).
posted by mumimor at 5:04 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Per-capita, the houses of the 1950s looked far closer to the micro-apartments derided above than they did to the McMansions of today.

Per capita they are pretty much the same size. In 1950, an average family of 4 in an average house of 1000 sq ft is 250 sq ft per person.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:42 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


that one-wage-earner family was really poor compared to even lower middle class today, and also how hard everyone in the family worked to just make everyday life work: hand-laundering and mending all the clothes, cleaning with primitive tools and products, repairing furniture and fittings that would just get thrown away in our day.

Very true. Although I think part of what drives the hagiography of that era (specifically, the immediate postwar period in the US) is the pace of change, which created a sense of optimism—at least among some people, specifically middle class whites—that is part of the "great" in MAGA.

And there is some basis for that optimism to have existed at the time: someone who was 35 in 1950, just to ground the hypothetical, would have been born in 1915, which makes it likely they would have been born in a rural village or town (the US went from majority-rural to majority-urban with the 1920 census), and saw the first automobiles replace horses. They might or might not have fought in WWII (only about ~25% of American men of draftable age and <10% of the population overall served in uniform during WWII) but they would have seen a vast upward surge in disposable income (>30% by 1950 for the average household vs <20% in the teens). By 1950 the majority of households had a car. There was nearly full employment (as far as the Government was counting, anyway).

So even if the houses were modest, the expectation of what conditions would be like in another decade were not. If a middle class family in the 50s didn't have a washing machine or an electric refrigerator, they probably figured they'd have one soon enough, and in many cases they were right—since the US didn't have to rebuild or worry about feeding itself after the war, many industries shifted from munitions to consumer goods like personal cars and home washing machines. Market uptake of appliances was very fast. By 1950 the hot item to contemplate wasn't a washing machine, it was an electric dryer, and the first dishwashers were a year away.

It will very soon be the case that the only people in the US who have seen anything like that change firsthand, are somewhat ironically, immigrants. And looking back at it, it was the completion of the United States' demographic transition, which societies generally only go through once. So it's certainly reasonable to have a fond collective cultural memory of it, although it doesn't make much sense as a thing to go back to.

There's probably a common thread in there somewhere, where societies tend to solidify their idea of what an idealized life looks like during the peak years of their demographic transition. In most of the Soviet states it happened later than the US (Russia/SFSR apparently had about 53% urban population in 1959 which is lower than the US) so it would make sense that their cultural halcyon moment was more recent. On the other hand, maybe it takes the generation who experienced it to die off before the hagiography can really be completed, since it makes it easier to burnish the memory without the pesky unpleasant details.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:43 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Although I think part of what drives the hagiography of that era (specifically, the immediate postwar period in the US) is the pace of change, which created a sense of optimism

Eh disagree. The pace of change hasn't slowed down, but our 'acceptance' of that 'pace' has changed, and I use 'acceptance' to mean a broad category of feelings. I mean, GMO foods making foods fresher longer for cheaper, preventative medicine should be basically free now, we should be moving beyond cars, vaccines are now seriously deemed unsafe, etc. Music/media/recording/film etc is amazing. Housing should be nearly free with construction advances.

I guess that is a definition of decline, in that change is no longer welcomed. But I'm pretty sure it's always been like that.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:56 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Umar Haique's piece is pretty weak, but I'm interested enough to read the others.

Seems like it's pretty well-covered above that this isn't new rhetoric. Hardly scientific, but Google N-grams shows pretty regular spikes of the term "Collapse of America" since the late 1920s. "Decline" would gets even more hits.

I recently (finally) read a couple books that were good companions to this conversation: Bowling Alone talks about American social collapse in terms of a widespread decline in connections to other people, The Way we Never Were breaks down the mythology of the "Ward Cleaver" single-earner home. Both published in the 1990s. Putnam was seeing something he believed was fairly new, Clifford was in many ways seeing improvement rather than collapse, socially (that's pretty reductive, read 'em).

I think it's quite debatable whether or not American society is undergoing any sort of noticeable collapse. American Global Hegemony is clearly waning. If we can e.g. get rid of a quarter of the idiots in Congress, we might be able to get rid of citizens united, throw half of the bloated military budget back into social programs and to combating the immediate effects of climate change, and survive it without too much damage. Otherwise I think it's gonna hurt.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:01 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


@Kadin2048, I couldn't help thinking of Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress and the "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" theme song.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:08 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Unless you define the state of "non-collapse" as "complete commitment to the precise concept of social democracy that prevailed in certain white-majority countries from 1945 to 1979" this argument is absurdly ahistorical. There is no good or service useful for human survival or happiness that is not more abundant or better in the US now than anywhere at any time in the history of the world. Most of them -- including such minor necessities as food, clothing and transportation -- are available far cheaper as a percentage of the daily wage than at any time or place in human history, and most of the rest are within shooting distance of that measure.
posted by MattD at 9:09 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


There is no good or service useful for human survival or happiness that is not more abundant or better in the US now than anywhere at any time in the history of the world.
What? Could I suggest healthcare? Fresh produce? Education? Public transportation? All of these are more widely available in many places across the globe, including in so-called third world countries.
posted by mumimor at 9:22 AM on March 26, 2018 [16 favorites]


Most of them -- including such minor necessities as food, clothing and transportation -- are available far cheaper as a percentage of the daily wage than at any time or place in human history

Food prices flattened around 2010 and are now increasing. Apparel prices have been rising for about as long. Public transportation does not exist and the ownership and maintenance of vehicles is a hell of a financial burden for many/most.

Just kidding, everything's great, nothing's fucked.
posted by Rust Moranis at 9:37 AM on March 26, 2018 [8 favorites]


Also the description of food, clothing and transportation as minor necessities is pretty mind-blowing. I mean I guess it's more important to have shelter and water than it is to have food, clothes, and the ability to go to a place, but it seems to reflect a profoundly privileged disconnection from people who have ever actually worried about getting these little luxuries.

(I'm just now realizing that minor necessities was probably sarcasm, but the fact that I actually can't say for certain says a lot about the current state of affairs.)
posted by Rust Moranis at 9:44 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


i think the first link dips a bit too deep into late night dorm room ruminations to be useful.

*rips bong*

Duuude, what if, like, we're the rogue nation and, like, North Korea and Iran are actually really cool?!?
posted by slogger at 10:10 AM on March 26, 2018


What does this have to do with collapse?

For there to be an economy, money has to move. If it's all locked up as zeros in some rich guy's bank account it doesn't move.


Money is like blood. It has to be in circulation to do anyone any good at all. Having it gather and pool in any given part of the body can become decidedly unhealthy for the body as a whole.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:34 AM on March 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


If the three guys who own as much money as the poorest 50% of the people are spending as much money every year as those people, it's not a problem. If they're spending a tiny fraction of that amount, then that money is lost to the economy; for practical purposes, it's like it doesn't exist.

While their rent/property payments are higher than the other people, they're not paying rent on 100 million properties, and while they may eat steak and lobster every night instead of rice and beans, they're not buying 150 million meals a night. They've pulled money out of the economy, and often, when they return it, they're only circulating it among a small pool of people who use it in ways that don't send it back into general use. (One guy buying a $10m building does not help the economy the way that 500k students buying $10m worth of school supplies does.)

We as a nation are poorer for all the money that sits in banks and does nothing but pull more money away from activity. It'd be interesting to see some numbers on our active economy, rather than total amount of money that exists in someone's ledgers somewhere.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:12 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


vaccines are now seriously deemed unsafe

Only by people whose opinions are not worth taking seriously.
posted by epo at 11:25 AM on March 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


There is no good or service useful for human survival or happiness that is not more abundant or better in the US now than anywhere at any time in the history of the world.

Housing isn't. The US, like much of the Western world, has been undergoing a slow crisis of housing supply for a decade, while prices have been increasing at a pace which vastly outstrips inflation for most of a century. Also, what about healthcare and policing? Education? Do you seriously imagine that these services are better and more abundant in the US than anywhere else in the world? Or do you see "goods and services" through such a narrow aperture that you consider things like basic shelter, safety from government tyranny and the ability to access education not even worthy of mention?
posted by howfar at 12:02 PM on March 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


Thing is that the housing situation is less an issue of supply than intentional policy driven largely by home "owners" to reduce the chance that their property may decline in value. Between overly strict zoning with height limits, large setbacks, and so on, occupancy limitations, and other policies, most cities are deliberately limiting supply.

Why are we surprised that property values and rents both rise when current law is written to have that exact effect? Is it because few people actually talk about it?

(I am leaving out some of the other things that are exacerbating the situation, but they wouldn't matter so much if we were setting policy in a way that didn't artificially limit supply)

The US may be in terminal decline, though I doubt it, but it's almost entirely due to our own choices, and not really the controversial ones. The stuff that gets argued about is mostly window dressing in the sense the post is talking about, though those things for the most part do certainly matter deeply to many people individually and as a subgroup within the US.

The funny thing is that if we'd stop being idiots the rest of the world has little problem paying tribute since our forebears were canny enough to make it more like the old saw about stealing a fraction of a penny from every bank transaction adding up to a huge amount than the obvious mercantile colonialism previous empires have used. There is still some of that, of course, but most of what funnels wealth into the US from the rest of the world is the dollar itself and the financial markets.

Even China is happy to pay that as long as we aren't being stupid about it. They and everyone else benefit from having a consumer of last resort among other things. Unfortunately, children have been running the country for much of the 21st century, so we are failing to hold up our end of the deal. It's no wonder they're upset and the winds seem to have shifted against us. Get some adults in charge who understand how and why the global system is the way it is and we will be fine. It's a lot easier to keep the status quo than pilot the boat straight through a hurricane, but the more we look like we are reneging on the deal the more likely the rest of the world will be willing to deal with the short term pain.
posted by wierdo at 12:42 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Only by people whose opinions are not worth taking seriously.
Agreed but they don't check for that on your card when you vote in an election or at a city council meeting.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:42 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The thing I dislike about the discussion about American decline is that it rarely contains discussions of ways to arrest and reverse it.

More importantly, it fails to consider the ways that wealth has been hoarded. Large companies and wealthy individuals sit on vast piles of wealth. There's an argument that almost all of the GDP growth for the last 35 years has gone to the top 10%.

I've yet to see an argument that says there would be a decline if GDP growth had been shared more equitably.

People act like the money isn't there. It's there, it's just difficult to extract. Wealth being difficult to extract hasn't stopped us from getting gold or oil or any other resource, I don't know why it should stop the country.
posted by gryftir at 3:49 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Better metrics that establish the cost of disparity or decline would be beneficial. If you can show a cost, you can show a return on investment.

It may require long term thinking or broader thinking about what an investment constitutes. Currently we have a market that rewards short term gains. Thinking about changing markets to reward long term gains, or gains by the community or country as a whole, might be a possibility.

I also think a lot about what motivated Carnegie to endow so much, and what might motivate wealthy people to endow more, and build other things to see their name carried on and serve the public good.
posted by gryftir at 3:50 PM on March 26, 2018


The thing I dislike about the discussion about American decline is that it rarely contains discussions of ways to arrest and reverse it.

The history of empires, combined with current environmental and resource issues, suggest there is no way to reverse it. (Note: this is "decline of American empire," not "decline of the US as a functional country," which is a separate issue.)

There's plenty of evidence that decline of the US as a country is also not changeable, because it doesn't matter if our problems could be fixed by taxing the top 1% at 75%, or by removing all deductions beyond operating expenses for companies and taxing them at 50% for all income gained in the US - those changes aren't going to happen.

It is possible we can get socialized medicine and gov't paid education, but the government isn't going to step in and regulate the workplace at a level that stops killing people. It isn't going to subsidize the kinds of neighborhood programs that build communities (because why should the gov't fund a park that's only usable by a few thousand people and really only will be used by a few hundred?) The government isn't going to confront the individual auto industry by refusing to subsidize any aspect of that, and instead creating massive public transit systems.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:27 PM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Besides the above responses about the abundance of goods and services in the U.S. not always measuring out as too superlative on a global scale, that also does not seem like a very good metric by which to evaluate collapse. I think if you were to examine the GDP and availability of goods and services within the territory of the Spanish Empire at its maximum extent, those things would seem stratospheric in magnitude at, say, the beginning of the Spanish-American War compared to what was in the same areas before Spanish conquest. And now it's even better, of course; yet it's incontrovertible that the Spanish Empire is long since pining for the fjords.
posted by XMLicious at 7:51 PM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


But I suppose even the most pessimistic Americans find it impossible to put aside the idea that their country is special and represents the future, or a future, to the rest of the world.

Yeah, but how many non-Americans can you find that'll buy into that? Sure, it may represent A future, but not one that the rest of the world wants any part of.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 9:27 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Quite so. From the outside, America looks like a kid who ran off the rails after acquiring a serious cocaine habit.

None of us are inherently any better than America, it's just that we've never been able to afford anything like that much cocaine, so we lucked into not fucking ourselves up quite so bad. But we're all feeling trepidation about having to be roomies with an America that can't afford it any more either and is on the meth instead.
posted by flabdablet at 10:12 PM on March 26, 2018 [17 favorites]


The thing I dislike about the discussion about American decline is that it rarely contains discussions of ways to arrest and reverse it.

That's missing the whole point of these "inevitable decay and collapse" threads. It's not to provide guidance but certainty and a sense ofcommunity superiority in seeing the coming disaster better than others. It's the text version of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting.

As already said, it's inevitable, nothing can be done. There's no sense in voting, or activism, or doing anything but sitting back to watch and wait. The prideful nation will fall, and it's citizens will look up pleading for help or mercy. And the denizens of metafilter will look down and whisper "no."
posted by happyroach at 11:41 PM on March 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


> But I suppose even the most pessimistic Americans find it impossible to put aside the idea that their country is special and represents the future, or a future, to the rest of the world.

I think that in fact here is a good number of Americans who think no such thing, who think that it’s just a country. Some even might be aware that the gap between the fairytales we tell ourselves about being somehow special or blessed or the future or #1 and the reality of our past—much less the present—is probably the basis for the recurring political and social frenzies we cough up when we get a glimpse of it. We leap for a comforting vision of past golden eras when the mask slips.

With the nonsense that is “taught” and reinforced by vapid electronic media, there is little sign that America will get its history right—right enough to put aside Roy Moore dressed up like a cowboy or our fallen heroes or whatever BS we conjure up and think and talk like a society of self aware adults.

Alas.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 4:21 AM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


fwiw, i like to think of 'collapse' more as 'phase transitions' of political units -- tribe --> fiefdom --> nation --> ??? -- associated with the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions writ large! ernest gellner writes about this wrt how institutions of production, coercion and cognition ('plough, sword and book') shift under these transitions :P
posted by kliuless at 5:41 AM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yesterday I was walking on the street in my poor neighborhood which is always presented in the media as a very dangerous with shootings and foreign people and maybe sharia law, but which is actually a fairly nice and very child-friendly place. And there was this family of four who were very clearly from out of town and the little girl was so scared it would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad. The media gives a distorted view of reality. And it's just a fact that a lot of Americans haven't been outside the US, which is completely OK and fine because the US is so huge. But it does let both politicians and media get away with distorting the reality out here in the rest of the world even more extremely than the media and politicians here who had scared the wits out of that little girl.
I don't know if MattD was joking up there (in that case: remember the hamburger), or they literally don't know how the world looks outside of the US or even inside the poor parts of the US. But I've seen it even here on the blue during healthcare debates where some very intelligent and well-read mefites claimed there was no better healthcare than in the US, that the NHS or Canadian healthcare were irreversibly broken.
I really love the US, and almost immigrated after my stay for university ran out back in the nineties. But I think we all wear a sort of cultural blinders unless we can get out of where we were brought up and see other ways of doing things, and that's just more difficult when your own country is huge.
I've googled but I can't find a study that showed that when conservative people from small towns or suburbs move into a city, they become more liberal, so even when you move inside your own country, you learn from moving. Moving further, you learn more, I believe.
posted by mumimor at 5:43 AM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]


also btw! (fwiw ;)
World After Capital: Laying a Foundation (Optimism) - "to argue that capital is no longer scarce and that attention now is, I provide a definition and an analysis of scarcity that are not based on money and prices, but rather on needs..."
posted by kliuless at 6:24 AM on March 27, 2018


I don't know if MattD was joking up there (in that case: remember the hamburger), or they literally don't know how the world looks outside of the US or even inside the poor parts of the US

There is a more recent thread with a comment that I think is arguing that if the US loosens its zoning regulations (they are ever so perfect!), apartments in NYC will be built without bathrooms. Like Mexico City, Tokyo, and apparently every city more populous than NYC is filled with apartments without toilets.

The thoughts that everything that is done in the US is perfect and no-one has figured anything else out is endemic.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:49 AM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


Add: my point is not to make fun of that person, but just to say that at a level that fundamental - that low on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - you can't fix that person's feelings with data, or with experience outside of the US, or with anything. It's pure fear of something they just don't fundamentally understand.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2018




None of us are inherently any better than America, it's just that we've never been able to afford anything like that much cocaine, so we lucked into not fucking ourselves up quite so bad. But we're all feeling trepidation about having to be roomies with an America that can't afford it any more either and is on the meth instead.

That is a wonderful analogy. Thanks.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:42 AM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


There is a more recent thread with a comment that I think is arguing that if the US loosens its zoning regulations (they are ever so perfect!), apartments in NYC will be built without bathrooms. Like Mexico City, Tokyo, and apparently every city more populous than NYC is filled with apartments without toilets.

Umm? The existence of toilets or not would be a building code issue, not necessarily a zoning one? Like, you can have an area be mixed use rather than strictly commercial/industrial/residential, but still require residences (and indeed businesses as well) to have bathrooms, same as you require them to have running water or electricity. You can even have (or more accurately, introduce as there are already flats with only access to shared bathrooms in NYC) such a requirement while loosening HOA-style restrictions on height, blocking views, etc, etc.
posted by Dysk at 10:37 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


Thinking more about the cocaine-meth analogy--I think the U.S. switched to crack in the 1980s, hit meth in the 2000s, and now we're gently oozing into a fentanyl sludge.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:33 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


fwiw, i like to think of 'collapse' more as 'phase transitions' of political units -- tribe --> fiefdom --> nation --> ??? -- associated with the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions writ large!

See, that's why it's useful to have definitions stated. From my educational background, "collapse" to me looks more like Chaco Canyon, Harada, Teotihuacan, and Mycenia. Residual Mycenia. I can't help but feel the shadow of the Bronze Age Collapse in these sort of conversations. Especially when one considers how interlinked our economies are...

Also, growing up with 70s dystopias and Cyberpunk didn't help much. "Collapse" just brings to mind the idea of driving your armored dune buggy through the barren deserts of Ohio. People I guess tend to like to seeing it in terms of Mad Max and not Grapes of Wrath.
posted by happyroach at 1:14 PM on March 28, 2018


So per your definitions, would the Soviet Union not count as having collapsed? Because that's the most obvious contemporary non-fiction parallel to me for the other 20th-century superpower, and would appear to be the sort of process Osama Bin Laden &co. would have been interested in tipping off—prompting us to embroil ourselves in an interminable war in Afghanistan, for example, to repeat the perceived success of the mujahideen against the Soviets there.
posted by XMLicious at 5:43 PM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


(Also, what is "Harada"? Is it the location from the Book of Exodus? I recognize all the other ones but my googles are failing me on that one.)
posted by XMLicious at 9:50 PM on March 28, 2018




late to all of this, but seriously ...

"the World’s First Rich Failed State"

first of all, America, wake the fuck up -- you're an Empire not a state, and empires fail ALWAYS (thank fucking God), or so say the history books.
posted by philip-random at 12:23 AM on April 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


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