(e.g: sanctions against Russia backfiring, Ukraine being a US quagmire, or a fantasy that decline will mean a great awakening of the masses to seize the moment for a second Civil Rights movement or even revolution)
A state of decline can still be kept afloat through debt and intimidation. With receding rewards and profits of being the imperial core, this system of domination and exploitation can , like a dying sun, become more intense, destructive, and normal.
Think of how much in the past twenty to thirty years has been normalized in the US: school shootings, police shootings/murder and abuse of power by police, state, and federal government. Spying on its own citizens, extrajudicial assassinations and black sites. The list goes on.
A state of decline can find a new grounds of sustainability for its capitalist engine through more overt adopted fascist strategies and tactics against labor and enemies, foreign and domestic.
Is decline a good thing in this context? Would a state of decline transmute the volatility of the state to revolutionary moments seized by a neo-nascent American communist front?
These are just some background thoughts I've been having in my mind when I skim the website, forgive me if the tone comes off as :reddit-logo: :debate-me-debate-me: but I found the insight of some of the posters here quite helpful and astute and was hoping for some of thst collective wisdom.
Have you read 'Hinterland' by Phil Neal? His analysis really resonates with yours. The big thing is an analysis of the decline and effective departure of the State from rural and disinvested areas, and why the right is able to thrive in that context by taking on some of the necessary community work like disaster response. As things get worse, that will describe more and more of the country I think.
There is a pattern throughout history of the state retreating and being replaced by warlord gangs
just look at Northern Mexico
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it's very short too!
That explains the Cajun Navy rescuing all those people after Hurricane Harvey. They were abandoned by the government and they had to do it on their own dime and they were so proud of it. "You can piss on our heads and tell us it's raining and we'll smile!"
Given how infantalizing and top-down federal disaster response is, who wouldn't be proud? Even if it is fascist, what organization is going to see the profound suffering of the people (it considers 'the people'!) and sit on the sidelines?
Because they're doing the government's job? At their own expense? It's deeply humiliating.
It's humiliating to be abandoned or treated like a non-entity, but I don't see how it's humiliating to take care of people?
The government fobbing off its work onto you and you doing for them with a smile is humiliating. No compensation, no acknowledgement, all they got were cops and national guard trying to get them out of the way and stop them because they were making them look bad.