Lazy-Boy Decliner retweetledi
The United States of America were founded by wealthy slave owners and arch-Stuart reactionaries who rejected their monarch because he couldn’t prevent Parliament from taxing their colony, whose violent settler peasantry just wanted to continue murderously expanding their frontier.
They were one of the last countries to abolish slavery and didn’t become a formal democracy until the 1960s. Their advantage of being a freer and more open society was short-lived and their attempt to build anything resembling a social state crumbled. Instead of a society of mass affluence, they ended up with a barbaric carceral system of historically unprecedented proportions, a top-heavy rapaciously extractive economy, a state thoroughly captured by oligarchic interests.
The last decades have been marked by America’s centrality to nearly every damaging social, cultural and ideological trend. It continues to export its accelerating domestic psychoses to the world. It has become the ultimate destabilising hegemon, blundering around like dying ogre, ever swelling a mountain of rotting corpses.
American isn’t the cause of all ill in the world, but the increasingly nihilistic, zero-sum social culture of contemporary capitalism, that has ramified into every corner of society, is fundamentally American, and the umbilical chord is very much still attached. There is no Post-American world—but with a little luck there will be one day.
Happy 4th of July
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