Regime Change

Regime Change 101 Signs and signals of a superpower in decline. D.K. Blaire Image: New York Times When historians reflect back on the past hundred or so years, it is clear that the twentieth century was indeed the American Century. Emerging from WWII relatively unscathed in comparison to Europe, the United States had enough to thrive, while simultaneously helping to rebuild the decimated cities of the European continent, as well as Japan. While countries around the world struggled to piece themselves back together in the aftermath of one of the most violent wars in human history, America began to enjoy what we can now retrospectively call one of the most economically prosperous periods of its entire existence. The 50s and 60s were truly the heyday of American capitalism. Most (white) men saw their wages rise exponentially and found themselves enjoying a standard of living that their forebears could have only dreamt of. This was the American Dream after all; decent wages, grand suburban houses, being able to provide for an entire family and send your children to school with only one wage; a strong manufacturing base, lifelong employment, social security benefits, very little debt, cheap college fees. The Baby Boomers really did have it objectively better than any subsequent generation. Is it any wonder that the “Trumpies” and the MAGA crew long to return to that time? An age they view as more simple, yet also more affluent and filled with possibility. A time when they and they alone remained steadfastly on top of the pile, while women, gays and blacks “knew their place.” As backwards and bigoted as it may seem, I believe that in order to understand America’s decline, it is important to examine this group without hatred or scorn; look past the xenophobia, misogyny and the rest to recognize the broken, angry, disenfranchised men devoid of chance or opportunity in a country that has abandoned its working class and enabled a plutocracy to rise over everyone else, crushing their hopes for a decent life. A Change in the Wind Two distinct events altered the fate of the US and of the American people in or around the 1970s. First of all, the rich declared war on the poor, the employers on the employees, the property-owners on the property-less. Corporations decided that they were tired of paying wages that grew on a par with inflation. They were fed up of handing over their ever-growing profits for healthcare and other benefits. They were sick of unions protecting their workers from the worst of their greed and excesses. So they made a decision. Emboldened by the decimation of the Left during the Cold War, they used their lobbyists to promote policies that would destroy unions, and broke the power of labour by moving their companies overseas to countries with a steady supply of cheap workers. This trend continued on well into the 80s and 90s, with Reagan initiating neoliberal policies which further decimated the working class and dismantled much of the social welfare protections that had been established by Roosevelt during the Great Depression. From there, things simply spiraled out of control. The financial and corporate sector were completely deregulated, ceased to pay wages on a par with inflation and, with the monstrous profits they garnered from exponentially rising productivity, seized control of Congress. What has become known as the “Wall Street-Washington corridor” was established, whereby government and the top 10per-centers became interchangeable and corporate power became entrenched. The corporatocracy was officially made permanent and the bottom 90% of Americans became merely indentured servants in a neofeudal system created by the wealthy for the wealthy. 2. Secondly, America declared war on the world entire. The military-industrial complex also grew much stronger within the corporatocracy and the importance of protecting Anglo-Saxon dominance over much of the globe seemed to gain evermore traction within the political elite. As the former colonial states of the United Kingdom began to break away from the 50s onwards and gain independence, the dawning realization that the Anglophone empire was weakening became undeniable. During the ongoing feud between communists and capitalists, the fear of the spread of communism became overwhelming for the elites, who could not bear the idea of losing their privileged position in the capitalist pecking order. As Rebecca Gordon writes in The Nation, ‘That post-World War II turn to anticommunism would be accompanied by a new kind of colonialism. Rather than directly annexing territories to extract cheap labor and cheaper natural resources, under this new “neocolonial” model, the United States — and soon the great multilateral institutions of the post-war era, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — would gain control over the economies of poor nations.’ Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US has had to spend trillions on military operations every year in order to maintain the hegemony of the dollar as reserve currency and sustain their dominance over various strategic parts of the globe. As suggested by Blake Stillwell (2022), ‘The United States military gets around. There are the countries with which it’s gone to war — Iraq, Germany, and Japan. There are countries it helps protect — Turkey, Poland, and Bahrain. And there are countries most people don’t even know that America sends troops to, like Thailand, Pakistan, and Antarctica. In fact, there are only three countries in the world America hasn’t invaded or have never seen a U.S. military presence: Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein. These perpetual military ventures have caused the US to get into serious debt, while also distorting the yearly budget so that other aspects of the country remain terribly deprived; such as infrastructure, education, mental healthcare etc etc. The average American’s standard of living has been drastically eroded as a result and forcing regime change around the world at the barrel of a gun has caused the image of the US as a peace-loving, democratic, liberty-endorsing nation to become all but laughable. Sliding into Chaos The two trends I mentioned, the creation of the corporatocracy and the endless military operations, have not actually abated, but accelerated as the US falls further into decline. Forcing citizens to saddle themselves with enormous amounts of debt in order to access the most basic resources, like education and healthcare, has fomented a righteous rage that elucidates itself in civil unrest, mass shootings and extreme movements like MAGA. At the same time, the pressure to remain as the world’s hegemon in the wake of China’s rise has caused the Neocons to ramp their military exploits up into hyper-drive, sending billions worth of arms to the Ukraine, while also provoking China with visits to Taiwan. The desperation of American elites to retain their dominance over the globe reveals itself in their increasingly unhinged and irrational behaviour, while domestically things are literally falling apart. But American hegemony, and the continued enforcement of the neoliberal capitalist system, is driving our species itself to extinction. In 2021, Vice reported that, ‘Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn’t a serious shift in global priorities….’ Citing the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth” , they explain that, ‘a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was bound to collapse if corporations and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth, no matter the costs. The researchers forecasted 12 possible scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and personal welfare would plummet.’ Unfortunately, I do not see a way to reverse this devolution, for this is the kind of collapse that has been years in the making and corruption has become so endemic and so integral to the American capitalist system that it’s difficult to imagine how it would be possible to make a course-correction. America, in the grand scheme of things, is coming down hard and fast and for all we know, it could take the entire human species down with it. It is truly frightening time to be alive.