In contrast to the highly effective and efficient Chinese Party-state, the US Oligarchy-state has been rendered significantly dysfunctional through the very victories that it has had over the past decades. With the unions slain, the Black Power movement beheaded, huge numbers of church goers indoctrinated into the Prosperity Gospel and the worship of Zionism, and the Democratic Party successfully assimilating and disarming oppositional forces again and again, Occupy Wall Street now a distant memory, and the identity virus doing its job of sowing chaos on the “left” while averting the population’s eyes from the consolidating power of the oligarchy. With the external threat of the Soviet Union imploding in the 1990s and the Chinese communist threat more focused on its peaceful rise than threatening the Western oligarchies; at least in the short-term.
The problem for any group that has thoroughly vanquished its external enemies is one of hubris and division. We are living in that period of US oligarch hubris as it increasingly strip-mines the US national power upon which its riches and power depend. From Carter in 1978 to Trump today there is a continuum of immiserating the majority, partially hidden by manipulated inflation and growth and unemployment statistics, as well as a prison population that has quadrupled compared to 1980, and enriching the oligarchy. The eight years of Clinton opened the floodgates with the “End of Welfare As We Know It”, a massive “crime” bill, the removal of what was left of the 1930s state controls upon the financial system, and the free trade agreements of NAFTA (US, Mexico, Canada) and the WTO (World Trade Agreement); with China joining the latter in 2001. With Obama being a good Democrat by rescuing the financiers from their own follies, showering yet more subsidies on the utterly corrupt and profiteering US health care complex, and embedding the extended Bush/Cheney extended security state, while dumping the costs onto the general population. Also, continuing to drag out the costs of the US wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq (with the former finally ended by Biden in 2021).
Project 2025 is a testament to the US oligarchy’s hubris and division. Driven by a fraction of the US oligarchy that has coalesced around energy (fossil fuel) nationalism, tariff and other trade protections from increased foreign (e.g. China) competitiveness, the extraction of more tribute from the imperial vassals and the downloading of imperial costs upon them, and a deepening exploitation of the domestic population facilitated by greater and greater levels of authoritarianism and deregulation, propaganda and censorship. The state removing its mask of democracy to fully reveal its Oligarch-state reality. The US successes of the post-WW2 years had been built upon the state capacity developed during that war and the New Deal compromise required for the oligarchs to survive the Great Depression and enlist the general population into the world war. But a growing fraction of the oligarchy revolted against the New Deal compromise, wresting control from the “liberal” fraction in the 1970s and gaining greater and greater strength over time. By the 2010s, the split in the oligarchy was between the “liberals” who would have been considered Reagan Republicans in the 1980s and the increasingly extreme “right”. The 2016 election represented the loss for those “liberals”, with the Biden administration serving to consolidate the changes of the first Trump administration. The 2024 election represented a further rightward move in the US oligarchy.
Every domestic pipe-dream of the US oligarchy extremists is now on the table. The destruction of Social Security (state pensions), the start of which was delayed by a soiled dress in the late 1990s, the ending of Medicaid (state healthcare for the poor), and the dismantling of Medicare (state healthcare for pensioners); the three Great Society “entitlement” programs that the new Robber Barons so detest. But, as the few state programs that directly benefit the many, they are overwhelmingly supported by the vast majority of US citizens. To facilitate their destruction the last tenuous links between US politicians and the people who voted for them had to be cut; with the US Supreme Court obliging through its legalization of the buying of politicians. Also needed was a deepening of the security state and a move backward toward the McCarthyism of the 1950s to denigrate those that have the temerity to publicly, or even privately, resist. Hence the massive increases in the funding for Homeland Security and especially the now para-military Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the latter paralleling President Wilson’s war on non-citizen dissidents from 1917 onwards. Together with the deepening of relations between the security state and the internet and communications corporate behemoths.
The most efficient version of bourgeois capitalism is one that operates within a societal reality of capitalist class cultural hegemony, as in the post-WW2 period within the non-Black population. The increasing use of coercion (e.g. the massive expansion of the prison population) and violence serves to hamstring the productive forces. After a burst of state violence and coercion in the late 1960s and 1970s, a new neoliberal cultural hegemony had been established but as the depths of oligarch exploitation have deepened that cultural hegemony has been significantly lost. With the Republican and Democratic ongoing support for the Zionist state and its genocide further weakening it. The oligarch-owned duopoly that has functioned so well since the Civil War is starting to come apart, as the MAGA constituency increasingly sees the Republicans for their war on the general population and the progressive voters see the Democrats for their war-mongering, oligarch-serving and genocide-denial. There may be a few more years of attempts to “change from within” but the possibility of a general radicalization of the population against the capitalist cultural hegemonic project is growing. The answer will be greater coercion and violence, with Democratic presidents perhaps repeating the Obama years during which only the messaging changed. A collapse in the general welfare of large chunks of the population will also not be good for consumption, with 50% of retail consumption already dependent upon the top 10%.
In the 1990s the ideology of a “victorious” liberalism swept through the courtier class, with those that specialized in the knowledge of other societal systems cast aside and/or not replaced. The Arab specialists, the China-hands, the already small group of Russia-specialists disappeared as all the world was assumed to become a lesser and supplicant mirror image of the West. With the Global War on Terror, some knowledge of the Middle Eastern societies was built back, but not that much. The numbers of people that could even speak the languages of non-Western nations dwindled. At the same time, the ruling aggression and corruption toward the administrative state both stopped the more able from joining and facilitated the rise of the more corrupt and ideologically pure careerists. Trends driven to further extremes by the Trump administration’s very open corruption and slashing of the staff numbers and funding of the administrative state; with the lack of competence of senior officials reaching quite astounding levels. The Oligarch-state has become somewhat like the blinded Polyphemus, thrashing around with no vision of its reality. This has been made worse by the thrusting out of the builders and technocrats of industry, and their replacement with the financiers, lawyers and Barnum and Bailey-like fraudsters. With many of them finding themselves in influential positions within the senior levels of the state, together with competence-limited careerists within the armed forces and security services.
In contrast to the efficiency, effectiveness and societal legitimacy of the Party-state, the Oligarchy-state provides ever decreasing levels of efficiency and effectiveness while enjoying little or no societal legitimacy. To make matter worse, the US oligarchy has managed to utterly neuter the enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation; resulting in a colossal level of corporate concentration that has been freed from effective regulation. The Party-state recognized the need for highly competitive markets, but backed up with state planning that does not pick favourites, to drive the productive forces. As the US becomes more and more monopolized, with “free markets” only a pipe dream within the addled minds of mainstream economists, the Party-state enforces a somewhat brutal level of competition; as seen within the Chinese domestic vehicle market. Truly productive markets, those made free of monopolists, oligopolists and price-fixers by the a state practising a non-clientelist industrial policy will be the most efficient while driving the productive forces forward. A society wrought with extensive corporate concentration and an utterly corrupted state will deliver quite the opposite. As we see with the colossal malinvestment of the US “AI” bubble, the widespread waste, corruption and incompetence of the US Military Industrial Complex, and the disgusting levels of profiteering in the US Health Care Industrial Complex.
In many ways, the current US is akin to Wiley E. Coyote, who has run off a cliff but is held in mid-air for a little while, with the US being held up by the disintegrating pillars that were built up in previous decades. Now down to such things as its elite capture of its vassal states, and the perquisites of owning the global reserve currency. But the Oligarch-state termites are slaking their greed upon the remaining parts of those rickety pillars. With Iran displaying to the world how far the US has already fallen, stripping away the veil of US military “invincibility”. A major reason why the US oligarchy finds it so hard to retreat is that such a retreat would force the acceptance of the reality of a much reduced US military power; especially against greater opponents such as Russia and China.
Into this maelstrom of decline comes an accelerating anthropogenic climate change which is fighting for recognition against the desperate attempts of the US oligarchy, and now even its vassals, to ignore it. What position will the US Oligarchy-state and US society in general, be in by the time the facts on the ground and in the seas and atmosphere force their way through the denial driven by ideology and greed? The probability of actual real conflict within the US, which I have considered previously as hardly probable, is now becoming a real one. Not between the people and the oligarchy, but as with the Civil War, between capitalist class fractions. On the one side those that see the need for real action on climate change and on the other the fossil fuel and other elements of the oligarchy that would lose the most from such action. The Oligarchy-state may decline into internecine conflict while the Party-state continues to go from strength to strength; including as the leader in climate change action. Such a turnaround would remove whatever would be remaining of Western legitimacy in the non-Western world and quite possibly within the Western world itself.