Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America's Decline
Change is in the air.
I’ve written previously on the panic currently effervescing through the global elites, made viscerally apparent at conclaves like the Davos forum earlier this year. But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse.
This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history.
The first and most prominent of these making the rounds is that of former speech writer and White House staffer to Obama, Ben Rhodes, entitled:
Rhodes remains among the political haute monde, having founded a thinktank alongside Jake Sullivan, which had many interlinkings with Soros’ Open Society organizations. That’s to say, Rhodes has his finger on the pulse of the ‘inner circles’ of the patriciate, which is underscored by the CFR’s journal offering tribune to his latest. And so it’s even more telling that he’s moved to sound the alarm against a country he feels is—as the cover art above obliges—stumbling headfirst into historic headwinds.
The article is actually quite long and detailed, so we have Arnaud Bertrand to summarize its finest points. The first bolded portion below gets to the heart of Rhodes’ startling argument—but read the rest of the bolded:
This is an interesting piece by brhodes, Obama's Former Deputy National Security Advisor
In an immense departure from US policy to date, he advocates that the US "abandons the mindset of American primacy" and "pivots away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors".
He writes, and I find this a very powerful sentence, that "meeting the moment requires building a bridge to the future—not the past." As in not seek to regain a lost hegemony, but adapt to the "world as it is" which he calls "the world of post-American primacy".
To be sure, the piece still has strong relents of the liberal instincts to remake the world in America's image - a leopard cannot change its spots - but at least he acknowledges the reality that the world has changed and that the US should view itself as a power coexisting with others, not THE power that needs to dominate the rest of the world. Which is a first step...
Also, significantly, he points out the insanity of "framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries" when the West's own democracies are in such sorry states today that they can hardly be called "democracies" anymore... He writes that instead of trying to constantly interfere in changing other countries' systems, "ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy".
The below encapsulates the core thesis, which is that America’s global primacy is over, and the only way for the country to stay afloat is to adapt to the new realities:
Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.
This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!
Publications like Foreign Affairs are where the elite address not us, but each other, in the long-standing tradition of euphemism as secret-coded language of their ‘interior world’ of the deepstate and outlying political class. Here Mr. Rhodes adeptly navigates the nuances of this privileged cant when he declares that the Rules Based Order has fallen:
But lodged in the creases of his appeal are the keys to the game: why is the Order dead? He answers: because countries previously vassalized by strict obedience to the Hegemon are now, for once, acting independently and making—quelle surprise!—sovereign decisions. And thus is translated the secret message of the inter-elite argot: the ‘Rules Based Order’ was nothing more than a veil for line-toeing slavery, and it’s now finished forever.
He spells it out even more clearly in a fittingly titled section toward the end:
Again the laundered speech; allow us to translate: “Our primacy has come to an end because the world has woken up to our sham. All the current conflicts we’re engaged in—are ones in which we have no actual legal justifications to be involved. Now our gig is up and the world has seen our blatant hypocrisy and double standards, including our own citizens, who now refuse to die for our globalist greed!”
Finally, in the end comes his reasonable surmise:
None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation.
Did you hear that? That’s the ghostly death knell of the U.S. establishment tolling in the night. For once, without uttering its repelling name, they have in essence invoked multipolarity as the sole workable solution going forward. They acknowledge America’s power has reached its natural end, its final logical conclusion, and only working together with other superpowers remains a viable policy moving forward.
In actuality, America has run face-first into a brick wall, finally meeting its match in two countries that refused to bow or break—I’m sure you know the two. And buoyed by their inspiring resistance, other smaller ones have redoubled their own defiance in ways that is cripplingly fraying the Empire at its most vulnerable edges; e.g. Iran, Yemen, North Korea, etc.
In the above piece’s footsteps comes the next related siren of alarm:
The article begins by astutely invoking the normalcy bias gripping the American consciousness in a state of frozen plight:
One of the most dangerous problems in the West today is its vulnerability to normalcy bias: the assumption that nothing will ever happen, things will turn out fine, and there’s nothing really to worry about.
It goes on to compare America to the revolutionary France of 1789:
The French Revolution happened not because it was inevitable, but because the political system proved completely incapable of curing its deficiencies.
Does this seem a bit familiar? It should, because that is precisely the situation in the United States right now. An unequal political system has essentially seized up and stopped functioning, and is now stumbling towards election between the most unpopular president in modern history and the next-most unpopular president in modern history. One of those men is clearly fading rapidly, prone to slurring his speech or forgetting where he is; the other just became the first president to be convicted of a felony. Just as in France in the 1780s, violence, protests and disenchantment seem the likeliest conclusion.
The author equates France’s dire economic straits at the climactic moment to the egregious conditions currently strangulating the U.S. in misery: mountains of unserviceable debt and economic malaise.
In every respect he finds America worse off than its historical French counterpart at that critical pivot. For instance, when it comes to industry:
On top of this already miserable situation, the US has to contend with another problem not faced by early modern France: deindustrialisation. On the eve of revolution, France was remarkably self-sufficient, which is why it could so easily go from a political and economic basket-case in 1789 to dominating most of Europe in 1812. By contrast, America in 2024 is not self-sufficient; the old industries that allowed it to dominate following the Second World War have now been sold off for scrap, and the US today is dependent on exporting dollars and importing physical goods in return.
Comparing the military situation goes the same way, according to the author. The rapidly shrinking U.S. military faces a historic recruitment and morale crisis, as well ammunition and materiel tied to the above deindustrialization woes.
Example:
He concludes that America’s situation is far worse than France’s in 1789, but leaves the answer open-ended as to whether a revolution will take place this time around. One thing that’s certainly obvious is that much of the country is infact suffering a severe case of normalcy bias—which includes the leadership and elite class. Sure, there are a few bellowing bellwethers, but they’re drowned out by the corporate-press-amplified peddlers of the status quo.
This view was echoed by acclaimed historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson’s latest piece, which envisions the U.S. not as pre-revolutionary France, but as pre-dissolution-ary USSR:
Perhaps it’s most fitting to lead the analysis of his piece, by first quoting a pithy description made in another article entitled Late Soviet America, which Ferguson links to in his own introductory sentence:
Like the Soviet Union in its final years, the United States is reeling from catastrophic failures of leadership and long-suppressed socioeconomic tensions that have finally boiled over. For the rest of the world, the most important development is that the hegemony of the US dollar may finally be coming to an end.
He goes down a laundry list of comparisons between the U.S. and ailing USSR. The one that struck me as most poignant was the Soviet economy purportedly being grossly “overestimated” by American ‘experts’ in the 70s and 80s. In parallel, today the U.S. economy is billed as world-beating, yet increasingly more people are attuned to the rotten truth: the Potemkin economy is nothing more than a house of cards of financialized asset-bubbles.
The other puissant point is one I myself harp on constantly—the geriatric nature of the ruling class as fateful red flag:
Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men.
He goes on to compare:
Brezhnev: 75
Andropov: 68
Chernenkov: 72
Biden: 81
Trump: 78
Pelosi: 84
et cetera.
Likewise, Ferguson notes societal morality had plunged in late Soviet times. Woefully is the case in the U.S., which has devolved into a bacchanalian orgy of rank degeneracy, with mental illness and youth suicide at particular all-time highs. Despair runs rampant, only second to a vast drug epidemic claiming more lives just in 2022 alone, he writes, than American soldiers killed in the three major wars of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The life expectancy slump in the U.S. is likewise so drastic as to suggest the country is skipping 80s USSR and going straight to the post-collapse 90s version.
The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries.
Ferguson even later appended with a chart showing, for the selected age group, American male mortality is even worse than its late-Soviet counterpart:
While some of the figures may paint the U.S. in a fairer light comparatively, the truth is we can no longer trust the regime’s “official statistics” about anything related to its own failings or downfall. For instance, it was just revealed recently that major Democrat-run cities no longer report crime statistics to the FBI, resulting in hilariously fraudulent “historic lows”, ironically dubbed ‘Soviet-level’ in propaganda terms by social media pundits:
In "2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI (including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York)," and for other jurisdictions, like Baltimore and Nashville, crimes are being underreported or undercounted. This leaves a large gap; by 2021, the real crime data collected by the FBI represented only 63% of police departments overseeing just 65% of the population. When compared to pre-2021 data, the result is a questionable "decline" in crime.
As can clearly be seen, this is end stage terminal decline level stuff from a regime hanging over the cliff—and I, of course, don’t mean the Biden regime particularly, but rather the embedded deepstate that comprises the entire perennial ‘ruling class’.
When you compound this with the general blight of rampant crime and lawlessness in Democrat-run cities, it more than evens the argument. Though the late USSR may have had a worse demographic problem to an extent, there was nothing approaching the lawlessness and moral turpitude inherent to the diseased American urban culture; no daily mass shootings in the USSR, nor Soviet children snatched up by the gov’t because their families ‘dead-named’ them or refused to fund their transgender reassignment surgery. America’s decline is a far more frightening one, full of freakish horrors that recall the wild flights of episodes of the Twilight Zone.
All in all, this sentiment is increasingly felt throughout the entire corpus of the ruling class and its adjacent spheres. Articles like those above, and the one below, now crop up with daily regularity:
But what’s interesting is, just like Martin Wolf’s above piece, they all single out a “divided bloc” as the responsible factor for the West’s decline. You know what another term for ‘divided’ is? It’s called: sovereignty. The selfsame hubris behind the ruling class’s de rigueur imposition of political conformity at the expense of national citizens’ rights or concerns is precisely what has driven them to their demise. The stodgy apparatchiks simply cannot bear a world left alone to its devices, without the meddling anti-democratic centralized governance they so crave. At this point, they have lost all fundamental ability to even comprehend what democracy or sovereignty actually mean.
Now they sit whey-faced with fear as the plaster molders and crumbles in the walls around them, and they’re beginning to panic. The entire Western ruling class has been left in shambolic disarray, barely able to keep up the charade any longer as the curtain detaches over the scattered wreckage of their stage. The production is quickly becoming a disaster, and only the strongest case of normalcy bias can possibly refute what the common eye can see.
The realization has grown to a deafening chorus within the establishment, and as seen from the selection of articles above, the saner heads are attempting to steer the ship away from calamity by advocating for a sensible new course: drop the gung ho maximalist pretensions of the post-Cold War primacy pump, and acknowledge that the world has changed.
The last vestiges of the fusty neocon class that has dominated American politics for decades now clings on tooth and nail, but it’s finally losing grip. Can America be saved? I’ll give two thought-provoking answers to conclude. The first is that, if we continue the earlier comparisons with the waning USSR, we can extrapolate that a potential for a rebirth exists, if in the current agonal throes America is able to shed its diseased old skin and reconstitute a leaner, lighter version of itself the way that Russia managed to do. You see, many people consider the USSR’s dissolution to be a historic tragedy, but I’ve always held to the notion that, for Russia, it represented the offloading of a crushingly onerous burden which allowed a newly svelte and trimly independent state to retool itself from the ground up without being suffocated by the millstone of a vast, byzantine bureaucracy and subsidization of dozens of other republics.
Here too the U.S. could stand a chance to start anew by extricating itself from the leeching bureaucratic Leviathan of global governance institutions which now control every aspect of American life, just as Trump has vowed to do. Not that he can actually do it, but if he could—that would be one of the U.S.’ only chances. Back to national sovereignty and protectionism as a stake through the heart of parasitic globalism. But of course, that would have to include extrication from Israel, which is nigh inconceivable, given the current climate.
However, as to the second less optimistic answer: for all the things the USSR had going against it in its final years, Russia itself had one major strength: the potential for a demographic cohesion. While it’s true that Russia is known as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state, the fact remains that ethnic Russians still remain by far the dominant modality:
And the ~72% above is actually higher in practice given that much of the “unreported” and “other” ~24% is attributable to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other ethnicities which are essentially synonymous with Russians. That means it’s fair to say at least 85% or more of Russia is ethnically and culturally uniform. This has allowed the country to quickly rebuild a national character, rooted in remembered tradition and harmonious cultural values.
The U.S., on the other hand, is in a state of dangerous flux veering on disaggregation owing to a campaign of social and demographic engineering whose scale is almost unprecedented in history. The forced migration now being artificially imposed on the country has totally off-kiltered its demographics, unity, and social cohesion in a way that is not feasibly remediable.
Given the scale of such demographic subversion, even if the “good guys” win in U.S. politics, the country will simply never be the same as before. Any future ‘rebirth’ in the manner of post-90s Russia will have to take into account and be contingent on an entirely different societal fabric—for better or worse. That’s not from a standpoint of one race being better than another, but simply from the understanding that no socially and ethnically divided and incongruent country can ever compete against the advantages of a country with a singular national identity and resultant unity. Yes, the USSR itself was very ethnically diverse, but they managed to find a way to unite the ethnicities under the common cause or metanarrative of Soviet socialism that was religiose in nature, not to mention a single political vision; the same goes for China.
Owing to that, there is little chance the U.S. can ever be truly competitive in the long term against countries like China or Russia, which to a large extent maintain cultural and social cohesion; that is simple sociological reality, hard as it may be for some to digest.
Of course, Trump does plan to “deport” millions of immigrants, and hypothetically speaking, were he to actually accomplish that long shot, it could perhaps tip the calculus—but the big question will remain: if by that point it will simply be too little too late.
In spite of that, China stands to become a benevolent ‘hegemon’ when it inherits its natural mantle as global economic superpower. Contrary to what would happen if things were reversed, the fact that the U.S. will be weaker will not mean its total subversion and destruction by the ascendant power. As long as the U.S. can get its political act in order, and recognize the realities of the new century, it can continue a modest existence as a contributing Great Power, while still retaining a good deal of global influence. It will just have to learn to undo generations of reflexive hubris and take a seat at the table, as an equal, in the coming new world. -