The Empire State
I know I’m old and will sound exactly like my parents when I say that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and they lived through World War II. But, my God, you can’t help but be alarmed when you look at the state of this country, at the state of the world, and the decidedly blase and insular attitudes of the elites running things today. Fascism, (or autocracy, if you prefer), is on the move seemingly all over the world, and here in the US it is marching in double time.
The latest independent analyses shows that we are no longer a liberal democracy. It is the openly stated policy of the government to ethnically purge one-third of its inhabitants, including millions of current citizens. The Department of Justice has been so thoroughly corrupted that it now targets the President’s political enemies, lies to courts on a regular basis, and ignores court orders repeatedly. It protects the President’s supporters from prosecution and pays off others via bogus settlements. Corruption is rampant. Policies and pardons can be purchased and personal business interests intertwine with policy decisions. The scale of insider trading and personal enrichment driven by the President has no precedent in American history. A thoroughly captured and corrupted Supreme Court invents legal doctrine, applies existing doctrine based on the plaintiffs before it, and immunizes government officials from their criminal activity. Congress has effectively neutered itself, ceding much of its power to the executive branch and permitting the judicial branch to reinterpret the clear meaning of the laws it passed. Our civil service has been politicized to a degree we haven’t seen in a century, and governmental capacity has been so thoroughly gutted that we have just a single air traffic controller for one of our busiest airports and are running out of weapons to fight the illegal and disastrous Iran war. Tens of thousands of scientists and other highly qualified specialists have left government service or been fired and the best and the brightest are leaving, not coming, here. Governmental health policy has been taken over by a bunch of quacks. Cabinet secretaries’ and Republican leaders’ strained and sycophantic “Dear Leader” praise is not just reminiscent of but indicative of totalitarian governments like North Korea and the Soviet Union.
The administration has circumvented the prohibition of using the military in the country proper by turning ICE, which does have a broad internal remit, into the President’s personal paramilitary force with greater funding than most other countries’ militaries. ICE has deported hundreds of immigrants in violation of judicial orders. It has detained thousands illegally, including nearly 200 US citizens, often without legal warrants and based on racial profiling, and invades traditionally safe spaces like houses of worship, schools, and courts. It is running a vast network of concentration camps where detainees are held incommunicado, abused, and denied basic services like proper sanitary, food, and medical services. The courts are inundated with habeas corpus petitions from people held illegally, with many detainees held for over six months only to be finally released. Many are released thousands of miles from their homes with no documents, money, or proper clothing. Dozens of people have been killed by ICE or died under its “care”. Over 10,000 children have been separated from one or both of their parents. Some are just left on the street or in the home to fend for themselves after their parent(s) have been detained.
Academic freedom has similarly declined precipitously. States are banning books, even words, and dictating curriculum. Schools are firing professors and expelling students who exercise their free speech rights. Universities are abandoning the humanities and repositioning themselves as essentially expensive tech trade schools. Ignorance and anti-intellectualism are paraded as a badge of honor. The corporate and oligarch-controlled media pushes administration propaganda in order to advance their own business interests, which requires constant sane-washing of a narcissistic, demented, convicted felon President whose sole talent is providing them with easy copy. Business leaders who once whined that a small tax hike was society-eroding “socialism” remain silent in the face of this authoritarian onslaught.
The ruling party is incapable of challenging its putative leader and is relying on various electoral shenanigans to remain in power beyond its traditional tactics of gerrymandering, racism, and xenophobia. Those efforts are focused on three fronts – judicial, legislative, and physical. In the judicial arena, the attempt involves having the partisan Supreme Court further gut voting rights, change how votes are counted, and perhaps even revoke birthright citizenship. The legislative effort requires passing some version of the SAVE Act that would potentially disenfranchise more voters than since the end of Reconstruction 150 years ago. Finally, there is also the possibility of the President’s paramilitary force being deployed strategically in Democratic strongholds to intimidate voters. The leaders of the putative opposition party are decrepit and sclerotic, totally out of touch with their base, and seemingly incapable of confronting the realities they face.
The disaster domestically is potentially dwarfed by the crimes against humanity committed overseas. The destruction of USAID will result in millions of preventable deaths. The assassination of a foreign political and spiritual leader actually returns us to the dark day of the Dulles brothers in the 1950s but at least they usually used cutouts to do their dirty work. Similarly, kidnapping a foreign leader to stand trial opens up another Pandora’s box not seen since Bush the First’s Noriega debacle in the late 1980s. The President advocates war crimes with his threat to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure and his strangulation of the Cuban economy. We violate human rights on the high seas with regularity, illegally blowing up unidentified boats or unarmed enemy vessels and again commit war crimes by leaving their survivors in the water to die. Our Secretary of Defense has zealously protected convicted war criminals. The President’s two big buddies in Moscow and Tel Aviv are indicted war criminals with outstanding arrest warrants. His Board of Peace is entirely filled with leaders who have a history of human rights violations. At the same time, the President seems intent on destroying relations with virtually all our previous allies with his constant threats against them and willingness to interfere in their domestic politics to benefit far right extremists.
His insane, ill-conceived war with Iran is causing global disruption not seen by any other military action since World War II. The markets and the world seem to vastly underestimate how much lasting damage had already been done and how long-term repercussions will increase the longer the conflict continues. That is even more true now that the war is expanding, with Israel invading Lebanon and the Houthis entering the conflict. Southeast Asia is already running out of diesel, oil, natural gas, and jet fuel, with some countries implementing new levies on exports, price controls, and/or rationing. Qatar has already declared force majeure on some of its natural gas contracts. The destruction and disruption of Gulf oil facilities will mean higher prices for months or years. The global availability of fertilizer, 30% of which travels through the Gulf, has been seriously disrupted. It will potentially take years to recover, probably resulting in a global food shortage that will fuel inflation like it, and oil, did in the 1970s. We have not yet begun to see the impact on other products like pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, which are already facing pressures from AI demand, and plastics, but it will be coming. We are staring down the barrel of yet another global economic meltdown that will rival the stagflation of the 1970s, the Great Financial Crisis, and Covid.
Rather than weakening the Iranian regime, the war has made it stronger, entrenching the hardliners. Provoking Iran to actually take control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it more geopolitical clout than all its proxies ever have. The US, by contrast, looks far weaker. Tactical military superiority only highlights the strategic impotence and ignorance of the current administration. At the moment there is no good endgame for the US and Israel and therefore the world. Either we live with the constant threat of attacks on shipping in the Gulf and perhaps see the end of the era of free passage for global maritime trade, or we endure a brutal and costly ground war that probably results in lots of lost American lives and another failed state, or we declare defeat, leaving the Iranians more powerful, or, God forbid, Trump goes nuclear. In any case, it seems rather obvious that all this will eventually blow back on America and its citizens at some point in the future.
This is the end of empire insanity, the death knell of Pax Americana. We have become the Axis of Evil, the new rogue nation. As the Singaporean Foreign Minister puts it, “[T]he underwriter of this world order [the US] has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone…Big powers and even lesser powers have a more narrow definition of national interest. [They] are willing to weaponise all levers in their hands…You end up with a world in which strategic trust has dropped. Everyone has to assume the worst.”
Although most Americans have probably not yet realized it, the world that we have all known is gone, forever. It will be a far more dangerous and fragmented world where our international standing and sway will be as weak as we’ve ever known it. We will poorer than before, more isolated, and have less capacity to do deal with supply chain disruption caused by other nations’ nationalist interests and by having ceded so much technological and manufacturing processes to China and other low-wage countries. The battle now is to simply to survive the impending economic catastrophe and save ourselves from fascism here at home. This weekend will see the largest demonstrations in American history. The war is already unpopular, the President and his policies even less so, and the economy is cratering. The fascists are not yet fully entrenched, and protests of this magnitude usually are able to overturn authoritarian regimes. We have the advantage of merely having to repel the wannabe fascists and somehow limit our President’s increasing insanity over the next two and a half years.
But looking ahead, repelling the fascists will not be enough. We are an aging superpower, overextended fiscally and militarily, with aging and outdated infrastructure, suffering from decades of underinvestment and destabilizing economic and, accordingly, political inequality, and the collapse of the rule of law. Our political and electoral systems are structured to maintain the status quo and are resistant to reform and radical change. But we desperately need another era of American renewal like Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the expansion of rights in the 1960s. Without it, the fascists will always be there close to power, offering the most vulnerable up as the cause of our malaise.