IN WITNESSING THE CRIMINAL insanity which would seem to have finally been the last straw for not only the free world but the world other than Putin's and some other dictator's domains, it occurred to me that it is supremely ironic but not in any way unsurprising that it was our own indigenous, imperialist, fascist party which ended what the putrid and putrefied Henry Luce coined a 'the American Century" about fifteen years short of a century. Looking to see if anyone else has expressed that idea, I found that someone noticed that more than eight years ago, Michael Pescoe in the Sidney Morning Herald said so on January 20, 2017 as Trump I was starting. Among the insights was this:
Yes, there was a false start to the American Century. Woodrow Wilson conceived and pushed the founding of the League of Nations, but couldn't carry the nation to actually join the thing. The man who narrowly won the 1916 election with the slogan "He kept us out of the war" only to go to war five months later, had to accept a return to isolationism.
And, yes, for those who have nominated all of the 21st century as Asia's, there is an overlap with the end of the American. As it turns out, there is a neatness about January 2017 - Trump's inauguration follows close on Xi Jinping's Davos speech, the moment China's president claimed global leadership on trade and climate in the vacuum of America's advertised withdrawal. As the China Daily puffed "the one major power with a global outlook":
"Ready or not, China has become the de facto world leader seeking to maintain an open global economy and battle climate change. In effect, President Xi has become the general secretary of globalisation."
In contrast, Trump has promised to shrink America with his mercantilist policies, his "border tax" and weird veneration of a manufacturing-based economy that doesn't really exist anymore.
It is the tragedy of liberal democracy, which I hold was always inevitably bound to fail, that it handed over such leadership to a brutal dictator. I won't go into why I think an egalitarian democratic United States may have done better if that vision of my country had won out over the Constitutional system as drafted by late 18th century aristocrats. But I will have a lot more to say about that in the future.
It is only superficially ironic that it was the jingoistic, once millionaire, billionaire servicing and after c. 1964 the ever more indigenous-fascist, i.e. white supremacist, dominated Republican-fascist party which did it through their Putin asset president, Donald Trump. The sheer arrogance of Henry Luce's "white man's burden" concept of "the American Century" (actually, Luce may have believed it was going to work out to be the equivalent of a "thousand year Reich") was bound to trip up American dominance, the world political dominance which was never achieved, though it was impressive right after WWII ended, its far more successful attempt at economic and military domination was bound to be successfully challenged by other countries and continents where white Europeans didn't dominate.
The biggest of those countries and alliances of smaller ones were almost certain to overtake that racist-imperialist vision dressed up like evangelical missionary work, such as Luce's parents engaged in in the very country which was always bound to resist and, through a mixture of wisdom, patience and rational calculation and a lack of western-male-testosterone driven arrogance, win in the end.
The inherent corruptions baked into the American Constitutional system by the slave-holding, Indian murdering, land stealing wage-slavers were bound to be an Achilles heel that would kill it off. The sheerest stupidity that is programmed into the modern American mind by media, advertising and propaganda has put the stupidest possible person in the most powerful position in the country, given unprecedented dictatorial powers by the Ivy Leaguer-Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, is a perfect head of a Satyricon level, eutrophic decadent American empire. One in which every single institution of any size and, so, financial basis is partially or wholly invested in either the Trump regime or the institutions and legal habit that keep him and his kind of indigenous-fascist type in power. Our legal system, our journalism, our Constitution have all failed, and I don't think the lawyers or journalists are all that bothered about it. Not enough to admit that this is a consequence of definitive and fatal flaws in our Constitution and the system of government it sets up.
As I have repeatedly pointed out that's as true for the supposed "left" as represented in the ACLU, the idiotically considered "left" of the New York Times and other media, and the lawyer and journalist peopled "opposition" that will, still, yearn for the return of some imagined status-quo of our past, when the system was not nearly as overtly bad or corrupt - that is only a desire to retreat into the same past that got us here. Their libertarian conception of freedom, their actual disdain for social and intellectual equality and their weak support of anything in the direction of economic leveling - you can read that "equality" - was bound to enhance their own opponents. They have proven to be the opposite of a successful opposition to American fascism, they've done far better at being their facilitators, especially the lawyers and journalists - and I include those on the would be far-left, such as at In These Times, the Progressive, even much of what's printed in The Nation.
This could go on for a long time but I've had an incredibly busy week in my personal life so I haven't had time to write more. I'll try to do better.