Tuesday, May 27, 2025

The War on Us

 From James Howard Kunstler:

This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion.

MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure up the image of humming factories, good pay for honest work, and a well-ordered, content, patriotic populace grateful for their prosperity, in other words, something like the America of 1958, when Mr. Trump was entering puberty.

It’s a comforting vision. Parts of it seem possible to achieve. Maybe we can rebuild an industrial infrastructure of up-to-date factories. Didn’t we voluntarily deep-six all the old ones only a few decades ago? And for what reason? So that faraway nations rising out of darkness could make all the stuff we wanted at a fraction of the cost? Turned out to be a bad bargain based on supremely foolish short-term thinking.

It also came with a set of very corrosive financial arrangements based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These are pretty abstruse, but suffice it to say they enabled us to rack up phenomenal debt that we will never be able to pay off. We even fooled ourselves into thinking that we could replace that old economy of factory production with financial games based on jiggering interest rates and innovating ever more complex swindles. That merely produced a fantastic divide between the financial gamesters raking in billions while the former factory workers were left broke, demoralized, sick, and strung-out on drugs.

As a basic proposition, it’s doubtful that we can return to anything like a 1958 disposition of things based on rising continental-scale enterprise, as in the Big Three automakers and General Foods. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and the zeitgeist pushed it, but we can see where it landed us: in the ghastly suburban sprawl clusterfuck and the overall ill health of the people. Also the scale of things is done rising; is, in fact, contracting. (Read more.)

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