• BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure how useful parallels with Roma are

      I agree, i think in general people make too much out of percieved historical parallels. Thie point i was trying to make was more about how difficult it is the create a timeline of decline and/or collapse even in history, where we already know what happened, let alone when trying to predict the future.

      I don’t really see the US state collapsing

      I agree with this in the sense that i don't think the Balkanization will take place in the US in the way its traditionally concieved of, with US states breaking off and forming their own countries. In a sense the state would still be intact - collecting taxes, dispensing money to the states, and operating the military. But i do think tge federal gov has shown a trend of doing nothing on what should be national problems (pandemics, environmental disasters) and i think that will continue.

      Without UBI or some kind of concessions to the working class, the state probably will collapse,

      I'm not as optimistic about concessions generally, but i could see what you're talking about, and if anything remotely approaching a concession happens it would probably be the kind of UBI you're talking about. It feels less like an outright concession than a necessity to make the kind if society where "you will own nothing and like it" work the way the ruling class want it to, but thats probably me splitting hairs over the term concession.

      The other possibility is outright fascism, although I think the demographics of the US make a fascism based in white supremacy or Christianity basically impossible now.

      I hope you're right about that. I think we could see some states have christo-fascist governments in the kind of soft Balkanization i think is most likely. Minority rule in the US is the norm, not the exception, and there have been conscious moves on the stare level for over a decade to strengthen minority rule byvthe right in every state with a Republican government. The repeal of the protections imposed on firmer Confederate states by the Voting Rights Act by the Sumpreme Court opened the floddgates after they were already pushing legislation to promote minority rule.

      Like i said I'm not as optimistic about concessions happening at this point in the US, and i think that a lack of that, plus the ruling class's insistence on confrontations with China and Russia say a lot for the possiblity of seeing fascism rather than concessions.

      It's really hard to predict. It will probably he slower, more boring, and far worse than whatever our best preductions could possibly be.