Collapse

Collapse

Jim Kavanagh

Can we admit how completely fucked we are?

Donald Trump is destroying the American economy and the American empire. More precisely, the Trump administration is accelerating the demise of the United States, internally and externally, that's been underway for a long time.

We are truly at the end of the road. It’s a road along which we have been alternately force-marched and slow-walked for decades and we’re at the point where our toes are hanging off the edge of the cliff. The abyss beckons. No one is going to pull us back.

This is the culmination of capitalist decline, imperialist defeat, and Zionist fanaticism. It is the American answer to the question: Socialism or barbarism? It is the collapse of the post-WWII U. S.-dominated world order, of the American (and “Western,” Euro-Atlantic) project tout court, and of all pretenses regarding it.

Terms like “democracy,” “human rights,’ “international law,” or “peace and prosperity” are nothing but bad, unfunny jokes.

Donald Trump is an appropriate villain for this last act of the American tragi-comedy, which has always been plagued by a hubris based on ignorance and arrogance. But it’s a world stage, and he is just a crude personification and culmination of the domestic and global forces that have been at play. All the American and Western liberal and conservative actors have played their parts in setting the stage for the tragic dénouement we are living through.

The Trump administration is engineering the final collapse of the American economy and empire using aggressive, simplistic versions of bipartisan policy frameworks that have underlain American politics for a long time.

These have been combined with the exceptional decline in America’s economic infrastructure, the exceptionally sad state of American political consciousness, the exceptionally stubborn attachment to the atavistic Zionist colonial project, and with Trump’s exceptional narcissism, to create a perfect storm of aggressively stupid and self-destructive policies that will lead to a catastrophic collapse of America’s already fragile social economy and standing in the world, as well as all the fictions of exceptional historical and international virtue premised thereupon.

Z Factor

Let’s first consider the stupidest—because most unnecessary and gratuitously self-destructive—element that’s in play: The United States’s absolute commitment to participating in the Zionist genocide. This is also the clearest example of how Donald Trump bluntly embraces and realizes the goals of the Zionist ethnic-cleansing project that have been more subtly embraced and gradually promoted by presidents and politicians of both parties. I am going to harp on it, because we cannot overstate how destructive and self-destructive the U.S. government’s commitment to Zionism is, and how central it is to the demise of America. There’s no room for 25-hour “oppositional” monologues that don’t mention it.

All of Trump’s Zionist breakthroughs during his first administration — recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, abrogation of the JCPOA, the Abraham accords — were policies at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly supported by Democrats, and were all accepted by the Biden administration. Trump’s unconditional support of Israel’s present Gaza genocide is, of course, a continuation and intensification of Biden's.

In this case, as in every other, Trump has abandoned any “soft power” approach in favor of enthusiastically embracing—to the extent of offering to take responsibility for—the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. It’s the same project, as I argued, that Biden was implicitly but definitely supporting.

This is, as the saying goes, “worse than a crime; it’s an error.” Soft power is real power. The “mind-forg’d manacles” are the invisible but strong bonds that hold an empire of injustice together.

The persistence of American hegemony and Zionism over the past eighty years rests on the belief among so many people that each represents something good and virtuous. When the hold on the mind breaks, and the metallic manacles come out, the regime is in trouble.

That’s been particularly important regarding American support for Zionism, which has rested entirely on constant cultural repetition of imaginary narratives. These have been impossible to sustain in the face of the live-streamed Gaza slaughter, which has demonstrated the actual supremacist basis of Israel and the Zionist project since 1948 and which, I have been thrilled to note, has given rise to an unprecedented anti-Zionist movement in the United States.

That’s why the Trump administration, the American state, is, as I predicted it would:to an extent unprecedented in those prior protest cycles… 

unit[ing] to crush, criminalize, and forbid anti-Zionist dissent….I am certain the breadth and severity of the American state’s reaction to these anti-Zionist protests will be unprecedented.

The students will be expelled and arrested. Laws will be passed criminalizing criticism of Israel and Zionism. Censorship of social media will be tightened. No American anti-Zionist political movement can be allowed.

It must be said that the live-streamed, 18-month-long genocidal, exterminate-and-expel ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the holocaust and horror of our time. As one commentator put it: “Gaza is a live broadcast of humanity’s moral collapse.” The deliberate, proudly proclaimed targeting and mass murdering of children, journalists, doctors, and teachers rivals, if not outstrips, the vicious supremacist cruelty of the Nazis and King Leopold. It reveals and condemns the fundamental “Nakba” character of the Zionist enterprise and must be opposed by every human being with a shred of ethics.

America's bipartisan, indispensable, enabling participation in this enterprise is sufficient to damn this country to lasting historical ignominy. Trump, advancing along the road paved by Biden and every president since JFK, can say or do nothing to compensate for this crime against humanity.

Trump and most American politicians do not know or—such is their commitment to Zionism—do not care that the United States, though its sponsorship of Zionist colonialism, has become rightfully, and probably irretrievably, reviled, and is destroying the last shred of American credibility and hegemony in the world.

We are seeing clearly now how the United States In the world, and every political movement within the country, Is weakened in every way (but, for a moment, financially) and put on a path to self-destruction by its marriage to Zionism. You can’t be anti-racist and support Zionism; you can’t be antiwar and support Zionism; you can’t be a defender of free speech and support Zionism; you can’t be America First and support Zionism. Zionism corrupts and undermines all these ostensible political and ethical objectives.  

W and Barack put us into multiple wars on behalf of Israel. What good did that do for their political agendas or for the United States? To protect Zionism, Trump is deporting and forcing colleges to expel people who oppose Zionism and vows to criminalize anti-Zionism as—shades of Biden—"domestic terrorism,” and RFK, Jr. has proclaimed “antisemitism”—i.e., anti-Zionism—a major “malady that sickens societies and kills people…comparable to history’s most deadly plagues.” Trump has already put us into another unconstitutional, undeclared war against Yemen and is, as I foresaw, about to get us into an immensely destructive and self-destructive war against Iran.  All for Israel. What good does this do for any of their political agendas or for the country?

All of this only accelerates the world-historical collapse of U.S. power and standing. Not a bad thing from my point of view, but it will be a devastating process for the people of Palestine, the U.S., and the world.

Zionism is a tenacious parasite that is in the last stages of destroying its host. More and more people see that and are astounded at how difficult it is to stop it. In fact, I’m afraid there is neither the time nor political condition to do so. To be crystal clear: in this matter of Zionist parasitism, the Democrats, who paved the road to this catastrophe, are not, and cannot even pretend to be, the solution to this problem. A favorite Democrat to run against Trump in 2028 is staunch Zionist Rahm Emanuel, who held dual Israeli and American citizenship until the age of 18, volunteered to work with the IDF in 1991 at the age of 32, and whose father was a member of the Yitzhak Shamir’s avowedly “terrorist” gang that in 1948 assassinated Swedish count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine—none of which posed any hindrance to becoming the U.S. president’s (Obama) chief of staff. There is no overstating the U.S. commitment to Zionism.

Musk Rat

On another front, in an attempt to address the underlying problems of late capitalism that have been festering since at least 2008, Trump and his administration are using surprisingly aggressive and stupid tactics that are only accelerating the collapse of the American domestic economy and the American-dominated capitalist-imperialist world order.

In my How to Stop the Chainsaw video, I discussed the fundamentally destructive effects of the Musk-DOGE demolition agenda, based as it is on a complete misunderstanding of how our monetary system works that is shared by most people across the political spectrum. Trump, Musk, and Co, as well as every Democrat and most progressive leftists are operating within a framework of false assumptions about spending, taxes, debt, and deficit that poses false problems about the federal government’s need for revenue and the imperative to prevent bankruptcy by considering the false solutions of raising taxes or cutting spending.

I won’t go into all the problems with that framework here, but I consider it absolutely necessary for, I beg, everyone —especially leftists— who wants to effectively oppose the complete demolition of our social economy to learn what they are. You can start with my video and the sources cited therein. Bottom line: There is no problem here that needs to or can be solved by spending cuts or tax increases. 

The DOGE solution, of course, it to cut spending, radically, based on what we must understand as the utterly false premise that: “If there is not radical reduction of government expenditures, then, just like an individual who has taken on too much debt, America will become de facto bankrupt.”

These spending cuts, of course, mean putting a lot of people out of work. As I say in my video, Musk is all atwitter about the possibility that the government spends too much and that there may be more government employees than there have to be. We just have to fire them!  

It escapes his brilliant mind that, in our late capitalist economy, the federal government hiring as many people as it can is an end in itself—a necessary and beneficial objective, a feature, not a bug. That’s because, in late-capitalist America, the private sector is a playground for profit-maximization and financial games, and cannot employ enough of the workforce in jobs that provide a decent living. If Musk fires half of the 2.4 million federal employees because they are not needed—well, where will they go where they are needed? Good private sector jobs don’t exist anymore in the private sector, in the new gig economy.

All those unemployed federal workers, along with all the recipients of federal research grants and contracts, are not going to become Shark Tank entrepreneurs. They won’t be able to pay their mortgages or car payments or medical bills, or buy things at Walmart or the local bakery. Suddenly, you’ve got millions of people who have lost the “middle class” life they thought they had achieved. You’ve got an increasingly impoverished and infuriated populace, a collapse in demand, and a depression.

Guess what, Elon? Employing a lot of people is a necessary policy of the federal government—necessary to maintain a society that provides enough material benefits for enough people to maintain social stability, which the late capitalist private sector cannot do. The federal government has taken up the task of employing a lot of people, implicitly and very partially becoming—what it should become fully and explicitly—an employer of last resort, in order to save the capitalist economy as a whole. That’s what you’re destroying.

 

Depressing

This is all a regression to pre-New Deal economics that caused the depression. Hare-brained laissez-faire American libertarians have forgotten there was a depression—because capitalism produces crises—and, all atwitter over Jaiver Milei and cryptocurrency, are busy creating another one.

To this, Trump adds his own pet peeve: tariffs.

Whether he, his working-class MAGA followers, or those who have been disgusted by the Democrats and bewitched by his “anti-establishment” persona (that the Democrats so assiduously created) understand it or not, the Trumpian socio-economic agenda has nothing to do with populism or with abolishing “left-right” distinctions. It is, for the most part, the standard right-wing American laissez-faire capitalist program, promoted for decades from the Powell memo to Project 2025: smaller government, deregulation, privatization, reversal of New Deal social welfare policies, open field for profit maximizers and austerity for everyone else. That definitely right-wing agenda is what Trump is being used to achieve. Add in tariffs obsession, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for mass impoverishment and depression.

Trump presents his program as the antidote to the pernicious effects of globalization foreseen and despised by the working class—the deindustrialization of America. He blames that on the U.S., under the leadership of weakling Democrats, being “taken” by other countries, when it was, in fact, the result of decisions made by profit-maximizing American capitalists to offshore production for lower labor costs and to asset-strip what was left behind.

The "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot and American labor unions heard was American capitalists’ standard vacuuming of wealth from social labor, extended worldwide with fewer restrictions by the neo-liberal “globalization” program initiated under Clinton but definitely accepted and extended by Republicans. It’s the American working class that was “taken”—abandoned, actually—by American capitalists and their hired politicians of both parties, not by foreign governments.

American capitalists and politicians did not foresee the extent to which they were weakening not only their working class but also their own position in a changing global economy. While they turned the U.S. economy into a playground of financial speculation, the world’s most populous, resource rich, socially planned economy focused on building infrastructure, ending poverty, enabling widespread social prosperity, and developing the most advanced means of production of real goods, overtaking the U.S. to become the most powerful economy in the world. You can’t foresee what your ideology tells you is impossible.

For jingoistic Americans like Trump, if China (or any country) could surpass us, it must be because they cheated us, took advantage of us, and because other politicians—especially Joe Biden—were too weak to push back. China cannot be seen as the most successful actor within the economic world order we created. It must be seen as the sneaky enemy.

In response to this process, which did have disastrous effects on the American working class that smug globalists dismissed, Donald Trump has, uniquely, taken up the cudgel against the international regime of “globalization” and is, tariffs and all, demolishing it.

He doesn’t seem to realize that, when the president of the bullying country that solicited, cajoled, and pressured every country into swallowing the “free-trade” neoliberal flavor of world capitalism now insists on gagging them on his version of the mercantile, protectionist flavor of capitalism, those countries are going to be pissed off. Especially when his country is no longer the biggest kid on the block/. (We won’t even get into the effect of his unhinged rants about annexing Greenland and Canada.)

When you, as president of the United States, upend the economic framework your country insisted upon for a global network and for every country therein, when you do that contemptuously, without any “soft power” sweetener, and when you—either personally or as a country—are not as strong as you think you are, you are creating enemies. You are making yourself weaker, and you are going to lose. There are too many independent, economically powerful nations who will help in ending the U.S.’s management of the world’s economic affairs—de-dollarization and all. Donald Trump just cannot believe he’s not the strongest kid on the block, and his unmerited arrogance is hastening the demise.

He doesn’t, either, seem to realize that there were good reasons why capitalists came to reject the economic strategies that Trump is promoting, not the least of which was the Great Depression. Trump is removing safeguards that have enabled capitalism not only to avoid another Great Depression but also to hide what Michael Roberts called the ongoing “long depression.”

He claims to be reorganizing the economy on behalf of American workers, while promising to increase elite wealth. He will end up both increasing unemployment and threatening capitalist profits and fortunes. Reviving American manufacturing is a fine idea, and there’s a place for tariff policy in that. But Trump’s ridiculous algorithm, imposing a 50% tariff on Lesotho and 10% on the penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands, can hardly be called a “policy.” It’s hard to find a more tariff-friendly organization than American Protective Tariff League which, in 1903, denounced the Trumpian “reciprocal tariff” policy thusly:

Reciprocity in competitive products by treaty is unsound in principle, pernicious in practice, and is contrary alike to the principle of protection, to the fair treatment of domestic producers, and to the friendly relations with foreign countries.

Trump is trying to solve the problems of 21^st-century capitalism with a simplistic version of 19^th-centrury capitalism that didn’t even make it past the early 20^th century.

In 2025, neither Musk’s spending cuts nor Trump’s tariffs are going to reshore the manufacturing of all the products and all the elements and components thereof—which, like it or not, are thoroughly “globalized.” The only thing that’s going to be reshored is cheap—indeed, child—labor. An invigorated productive economy for the benefit of all requires a well-articulated, state-directed policy with massive social planning and investment—i.e., modern socialism, not 19th-century capitalism. (See China.) Trump’s blunderings are going to bring the same result that 19th-century capitalism did: 20^th-century depression. It’s hard to overstate how stupid all this is.

Trump’s foolish economic notions are demolishing the American-sponsored and dominated post-Cold War order politically as well as economically. He really is reducing geopolitical relationships to financial accounting: Will this policy make or lose money? He thinks our relationships with Europe, Russia, Ukraine, et. al.. must and can be structured around transactional deals that financially profit the U.S.

First of all, please note that this is again based on the notion that the U.S. government, which creates money (U.S. dollars) at will, needs some exogenous source of revenue. The same wrong and widely accepted notion that motivates Musk’s shredding of the domestic economy underlies Trump’s radical disruption of the U.S.’s international economic policy. There can be no effective resistance to this from the left unless it understands and rejects the false framework that the U.S. government loses money by spending at home or abroad and must “balance its books,” if not make a profit.

This also completely mistakes the point of foreign policy, making the pursuit of peace, economic stability, reciprocally respectful and beneficial relationships, and even national interest, subordinate to numbers in a ledger, substituting imaginary financial profit for substantive political purpose. No country does this. Every country has existentially important interests that have no price.

In the Ukraine conflict, for example, neither party is going to sell away what it considers its existential stake, however Trump deludes himself into thinking otherwise. He has no leverage over Russia and will be frustrated and angry that Putin won’t bend under threats of more sanctions. He may be able to browbeat Ukraine, which is an entirely dependent client of the U.S., into signing away all its future mineral wealth as compensatory payment for aid the U.S. already gave. That would be a) historically unprecedented thuggery—turning what the U.S. claimed was a gift in support of a necessary and virtuous fight for democracy and independence into an opportunistic, retroactively defined debt, an offer-you-can’t-refuse plunder of national wealth, and b) delusional, since it’s worthless—Ukraine will never be able to pay it. All things like this achieve is to demonstrate how clueless and selfish the U.S. is. It’s impossible to overstate how self-ridiculizing this is.

Of course, there is one instance where Trump understands and commits himself totally to a virtuous and priceless existential interest: Zionism. Trump, like all his predecessors, will give unlimited, uncounted amounts of money to Israel and the Zionist project, never dreaming of asking for any compensation. It’s impossible to overstate how exceptional and self-abasing the U.S. government’s fealty to Zionism is.

It also seems impossible that Trump is unaware that, historically the United States embraced the opportunity to support initiatives like the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, the formation of the European Union, the reunification of Germany, etc., no matter what the financial cost, because these things served the overriding, priceless purpose of protecting and extending the capitalist world order.

Donald Trump, whether he realizes it or not, is abjuring what has been the U.S.’s essential role since WWII—to be the guarantor of not just American, but also capitalist, hegemony in the world. It’s nice to see him undermining all that, though no one should imagine his radical program will bring anything of value to the American working class. And if he doesn’t understand the immediate and long-term effects this might have on American imperial and capitalist hegemony (and I really don’t think he does), smarter American capitalists surely understand how dangerous it is to them. They are likely to be the quickest to take him down. They’re good with the regression to child labor, not with the plunging stock market.

No Way Out

The horrible thing about this collapse is that there is no way out. Trump is a product, not the cause, of the long-term degradation of American economic and political life that the Democrats and the mass media have done a bang-up job advancing. Trump did not invent, and the Democrats will not end, the USraeli Gaza genocide, the succession of wars for Israel, the Patriot Act, indefinite detention, “domestic terrorism,” censorship, the fall in real wages relative to productivity, the inability to afford housing or medical care, the disappearance of family-wage jobs, etc. He is just exacerbating them in his own way.

The vaunted constitutional order—Congress, the courts, etc.—is not the democratic force people like to think and will not stop the destruction in progress. Nor will elections. There is, unfortunately, no left-populist force presenting a coherent alternative, and it would have no possibility of advancing in the electoral and media space if there were. The populace will be faced with the option of either swinging back on the see-saw to the rightfully despised Democrats, who created the conditions for Trump and will not undo the destruction he wreaks, or further swelling the ranks of the largest party—the stay-at-homes. It’s getting hard to believe it’s worth pointing this out again and again.

Here's what I said about the notorious January 6^th, 2005 protest:

Excuse me, but while I was watching January 6^th unfold, my overwhelming thought wasn’t: “How terrible that they’re breaching the security of our sacred institutions!” It was: “Why aren’t we doing that?” By “we,” I mean the people who need healthcare, jobs, homes, and a decent and secure social life, mobilized by a theoretically and organizationally prepared left leadership; by “that,” I mean every tactic of militant protest we saw on January 6^th and many other times in the United States—including forcing our way into government and legislative buildings (Wisconsin, 2011), fighting the cops (George Floyd protests last summer and too many others to count), and (the best so far) making them cower under their desks.

Similarly, now, watching Trump do his thing, we should realize that, if we had a left-populist movement that elected a president on a serious social democratic program (universal healthcare, job and housing guarantees, public banking and interest caps, a highly progressive income tax, etc.), that person would have to do at least as radical an overhaul of the federal government as Trump is doing. Not mass firings for the sake of saving money, but s/he would have to use every ounce of executive power to purge the bureaucracy of obstructive personnel, upend our foreign policy, push the limits of defiance of Congress and the courts (which exist to prevent any radical change), use his/her political support to force through disruptive progressive policies quickly, making them difficult to reverse and using them to increase popular support, and not giving a damn about, snapping right back at, what the right-wing and centrist media say. Plow right through the parliamentarian

It's a shame that Donald Trump is the only political figure who’s been willing to push through a radical—radically reactionary—agenda, based on a pseudo-populist movement.

When he was elected in 2016, I wrote:

Ironically, it is Donald Trump who has demonstrated—albeit in a Bizarro, demented way—the political truth of the old May '68 slogan: Demand the impossible…

America is now a ship of fools, with Donald at the helm.

We have to watch this simulacrum of radical change unfold because, in the rigorously controlled, stupefied political atmosphere of the United States, he won a political battle against his politically stupider, reactionary liberal and centrist antagonists who spent decades getting people to despise them for their deceit and betrayal.

Trump will end up despised himself. But where is the left movement that can, that knows how to, fight and win the political battle?

It is a ship of fools, and it’s sinking.

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