By Steven Yates
December 22, 2023
Sidney Secular’s short piece last Friday brought forth a few thoughts, in light of items I’ve encountered recently about Rome’s long and painful decline.
The Roman republic ended with the rise of the Caesars. That was shortly before the time of Christ. The empire expanded and continued, lurching from crisis to crisis, for almost five more centuries. Contrary to some Hollywood-esque depictions, Rome did not undergo a sudden and relatively unstructured collapse, so much as fade into irrelevance (except for the Vatican in its midst, of course). Its eastern offshoot, based at what is now Istanbul (originally Constantinople), continued for several hundred more years.
While comparisons between Rome and the U.S. are a dime a dozen, the question seems salient: will America’s decline be similar? Or that of Europe, since as should be clear from events there, the confrontation shaking America extends well beyond our shores.
It’s common to picture a violent confrontation coming between left and right. A civil war, in other words. Or an economic collapse.
Probably Hollywood stuff. Because Mad Max movies attract audiences.
What we can say for sure: two broad factions are battling for control over narratives as well as political-economies: those who want more global consolidation, versus those who don’t. Calling this a battle between leftists and rightists oversimplifies this. There are people “on the left” who don’t want global consolidation; there are people “on the right” who quite comfortable with it so long as they are the ones running it.
Those who want global consolidation are globalists, obviously; those who don’t are localists (one might call them, although globalist-controlled corporate media prefers for the latter terms like nationalists, nativists, xenophobes, white supremacists, racists, etc.).
Writers who support global consolidation have spoken quietly of “the hard road to world order” and advocated stealth in eroding national borders for a very simple reason: almost no one outside elite inner circles shares their goals. A few naïve academics see the sort of “global governance” the UN advances as akin to a natural evolutionary process. Globalists don’t care what their agenda does to common people.
Most want economic stability, cultural normalcy, and border security. They don’t want chronic disruptive change, instability, chaos.
Big Tech doesn’t get this. Silicon Valley is full of geeky types who follow the adage, “Move fast and break things.”
And naturally, most people don’t want war. Unlike the elites, they have no psychological need to support wars on the other side of the planet which advance only elite interests.
As I contended last week, a desire to rule all of humanity is not normal!
The problem now is, the agenda is so far along that not only is stopping it proving very difficult, but even if that agenda disappeared completely, nations and communities restoring the political values and cultural norms that originally built them is not going to be easy. They’ve been destroyed in all but a few of us, a generation that is rapidly aging (the youngest of us are in our 60s). The unsettling fact is, we’re not going to be around that much longer.
Meanwhile, two generations, Millennials and Gen Z, have grown up / are growing up never having known a world without political correctness, now called wokeness.
Many of their number take, e.g., “group rights,” for granted, and react angrily against attempts to curtail them.
Meanwhile, there are a few younger folks who never had anything specifically ideological in mind, just a desire to be left alone. They don’t appreciate being told they are racists when they express this desire as best they can.
It’s not hard to see more militant subgroups within the two, those who want to be left alone and those who won’t leave them alone (e.g., by moving illegal aliens into their neighborhoods, or by forcing “transgenderism” on their kids in government schools) coming to blows in the near future.
These, as Mr. Secular observes, would be skirmishes. Not a civil war.
He’s right: very, very few of us are up for that. Too many Boomers and Gen Xers are spoiled, distracted, lethargic. And speaking of distractions, too many Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t likely to put their smartphones down long enough to fight a civil war.
The latter are far too entitled.
I recall when I was teaching, especially in “flagship” universities, the students who believed themselves entitled to good grades just for showing up.
We live in an attention economy, moreover. Leviathan corporations control it, and they know more about you than you know about yourself, because their algorithms track your online activity. They automatically construct your feeds accordingly, to keep your attention as long as possible, advertising along with it, so you’ll be likely to purchase the goodies tailored to your interests they put in front of your eyes.
We’re easily thrown off track by email, messages, notifications, etc. Thanks to smartphones, we’re literally on call 24/7.
Small wonder many of us are lethargic mentally.
We’re also lethargic physically. Bad food is a massive contributing factor. The nutritional content of what is to be had from grocery stores has been dropping for decades. Don’t even get me started on processed foods filled with mildly-addictive flavor-enhancers and preservatives. Why preservatives? So they could be transported over sometimes thousands of miles in accordance with globalist political economy, as opposed to being grown or raised locally.
Many people have poor time management (i.e., self-management) skills and an inability to focus on what we can control, as opposed to what we can’t control.
Small wonder we’re easy prey for the corporate state.
Moreover, as Mr. Secular also observes, both “reds” and “blues” are too busy squabbling amongst themselves over priorities to organize in a fashion necessary to fight a civil war.
So what happens next?
I’ve sketched over a dozen scenarios. Some I’ve discussed, some not. Curiously, the outrageous ones (e.g., this) received the most responses.
What happens long term might be far more mundane, and look more like Rome’s long term fade-out than something Hollywood might concoct.
I’m unconvinced, first, that Trump will be allowed to win again.
I hope I’m wrong.
But the leftist-globalist alliance has learned from the results, so far, of three years of lawfare machinations that its loyal servants in both corporate media and government can demonize election critics, imprison stolen-election protesters most of whom were peaceful, and financially destroy those who refuse to shut up.
This militates against the likelihood their being another January 6 — even if the election is stolen in broad daylight!
The Establishment plan is to tie up Trump’s schedule next year with court dates, and try to drain his finances.
Meanwhile, controlled media are frantically demonizing him and his associates as hatching a plan to “end democracy.”
Sadly, by calling leftists “vermin” and saying he’d be a dictator “only on Day One,” in the present environment he’s not helping himself.
And whether Biden is somehow able to continue as president or the Democrat Party puts someone else in there (Gavin Newsom is the obvious choice), the left will continue its path of domestic destruction, as open borders policies allow more illegals who do not share American values or speak English to enter and colonize the country. Education will continue to unravel at all levels, although a few parallel institutions (e.g., the University of Austin, scheduled to begin offering courses next fall) will strive to educate a small community to maintain sound values.
The foreign wars will continue, and further drain American resources. Among the most disruptive scenarios I can imagine is if the idiots in the Asylum on the Potomac invent some pretext to launch a war against Iran. Teheran responds by mining the Strait of Hormuz. The price of oil immediately skyrockets. Gas in the U.S. shoots up not to $4/gallon but twice, three times, or even four times that!
Instant economic paralysis!
Not to mention the likelihood that among the migrants leftist policies have allowed to enter the U.S. are networked with Hezbollah, backed by Iran, who would start launching terrorist attacks in American shopping malls and sporting events!
What would happen next probably wouldn’t be pretty!
Another national lockdown! For your safety, of course!
Fortunately, common knowledge that gazillions of barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day probably saves us from this scenario, however badly neocon hotheads might want a war with Iran.
That brings us back to … America doesn’t collapse catastrophically but simply fades out, long-term. As did Rome.
Bottom line: unless there is a massive turnaround in America, a spiritual revival and recovery of the values that built the country, America’s standing as a world power is finished. It won’t take a civil or any other kind of war.
All it might take is the gradual end of the dollar hegemony, via an end to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.
The prevailing standard of living, depending as it does on this status, would drop. There would be nothing to sustain it.
The U.S. government would be seen for what it is on the world stage: a parade of clowns overseeing dysfunctional institutions.
We might find out how bad the Executive Branch might get if Kackling Kamala ever becomes president. At this point, I would not regard her chances as zero. Especially if the Democrats really do keep Biden where he is.
All that has to happen is for him to “win” next November, and then die in office.
President Kamala Harris!
Excuse me while I run to the bathroom!
It has been “a hard road to world order” by the elites — because it was hard to build the kinds of systems the globalist project required and keep it under wraps. There were always a few smart people out here in the hinterlands who figured out at least some of what was going on, articulated clearly what they saw, often naming names, with a few able to mount some level of resistance even if they couldn’t stop the process.
The Internet made that road harder … suddenly, defenders of alternatives to official narratives in every field or endeavor had a means of getting the word out to as wide an audience as they were able to reach.
When Trump upset Hillary in 2016, the globalist-leftist alliance panicked and scrambled to get control over information back. On social media platforms, they called this content moderation. We entered an era of censorship and gaslighting. The wealth consolidation of left-leaning Big Tech corporations helped this process immensely.
A road away from “world order”?
It’s likely to be even harder — harder for us than building “world order” has been for them. The political system may be corrupted beyond hope. Mainstream education is equally useless. I would place what hope exists in homeschooling and in emerging parallel institutions, which may function as monasteries once did during medieval times. They preserved values gleaned from the ancients through the dark years precipitated by Rome’s fade-out. If America fades out and does not flame out, we’ll need institutions able to do the same thing.
We have to know where we’re heading. There’s much to be gained in asking: (1) What kind of society do we want? and (2) What are we willing to do, and perhaps go through, to build it?
We need an account of what a healthy advancing civilization looks like … versus the causes of instability and deterioration. This goes beyond what I can do in this piece, and beyond what I’ve said previously about collapsed credibility of dominant narratives (“Globalization will make us all rich” “Diversity is our strength” etc.). I hope to pen some proposals early in the upcoming year. I can only pray to our God they amount to more than shouting in the wind.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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