The last few months, I've started to really notice how shit the quality of most buildings and infrastructure is in the US. I know a lot of people in the construction industry and grew up in it, and it's really just amazing how everything is built to maximize short term appearance and minimize cost. EVERYTHING, even ostensibly "luxury" housing, is built this way. I used to live an apartment building that was only a few years old but when you looked at the details you could already see the thing was falling apart. I've seen roads get resurfaced only to see a bunch of cracks and pot holes show up the next winter.
So as America enters terminal decline, I fully expect the buildings and infrastructure around us is just gonna fall apart and look hideous. Especially the suburbs. I feel like most suburbs are held together with paper mache and veneer. And of course Americans will deny it's happening and pretend it's totally fine.
I would argue that the PMC always existed in some capacity at least slightly separate from the broader labor aristocracy, but that's a nitpick given that the PMC has been expanding as of late in the wake of the collapse of the traditional labor aristocracy. However, even with that expansion it's still significantly smaller than the labor aristocracy at it's height. During the peak of American social democracy/social imperialism, a comfortable majority of the white population, and non-trivial sections of everyone else, were labor aristocrats. They made up quite possibly a numerical majority of the people in the US. This is absolutely no longer the case, the PMC can at most claim to represent around 20-25% of Americans, and even that's a very generous assessment. Obviously there are still people the system works for, but their numbers are shrinking by the day, and this trend shows no sign of stopping