We may want to believe that this is a glitch or a temporary fall. But we must be open to the likelihood that this is the end of the American-led world order.
I like the Gramsci quote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." This political decline from democracy is happening alongside other massive shifts: accelerating global warming that will lead to more and more deadly and expensive disaster, and AI, which may eliminate tens or hundreds of millions of jobs. The same tech overlords who created social media that contributed greatly to Trumpism are famously also believers in a coming collapse, building bunkers and obsessing about Mars. Right now the need for the better angels of our nature is greatest, but the demons of fear, leading to hate and violence, dominate.
70 years of dumbing down America through the shared circus of 50/60s television at the same time the white nationalists crawled out from under their log and fought integration morphed into a 70s fight against all civil rights in conjunction with a renewed fundamentalist and purity culture that welded itself to Reagan in the eighties with the rise of Fox and their own fear based NeoCalvinistic seven mountain ecosystem aided and abetted by algorithmic social media paving its way to an oligarchic takeover with their savior Trump and here we are.
Well, ok. But I am not assigning blame or being a snob. I am saying it all adds up to a populace used to an easy conformity (3 channels) that has the appearance of diversity that doesn’t actually exist (it is all fake choices) and that sets the stage for later easy indoctrination. These aren’t my thoughts. These are scholars like Richard Hofstader in The Dumbing Down of America; Oz Guinness’ Fit Bodies, Fat Minds; Neil Postman et al. that have made commentary on American TV culture of the 50/60/70s. I don’t know you from Adam but please, by all means, call me a snob for reading American sociologists and historians and trying to connect the dots. I’m one of those 60/70s kids who had a phone with a cord and a TV with 4 channels and a banana seat bike. I appreciate criticism. Anything else you want to tell me about myself and the culture I grew up in after having read one paragraph of my thoughts?!?!? Really, I’d like to know more about how much a snob I am about the culture I experienced first hand. Perhaps I am just imagining my whole childhood and how much TV shaped it.
Love how the complicit stations tend to bury the "bad." And they bury it with crap stories or distractions. True to 1942 in Germany. Kiss the ring and bury the TRUTH!
There's almost too much to comment on in this very comprehensive and no doubt hard to absorb piece, so I'll just vent my spleen by observing re the anonymous banker's glee about being able to say 'pussy' and 'retard' again--oh, yay!, that an implication of that is that the rest of us are now liberated to say 'dickhead', 'prick' and 'motherfucking asswipe.' I am planning to create a compendium of both hoary Anglo-Saxon cusswords and creative new expletives from which I can draw inspiration.
Mr. Kristol and Mr. Last, thank you for your honesty, your courage, your breath and depth of knowledge, and your demonstrated patriotism! God, these are the most terrifying times! Hopefully your alerts will get more Americans to get their heads out of the sand!
Great to have a President who is too busy sponsoring a golf tournament at one of his clubs so obviously making $$$$ off it, or to talk about or send his VP or SOMEONE to represent our govt to greet the bodies of our 4 soldiers who were killed in the swamp incident in Lithuania. The Lithuanian President showed far more respect for them than their own country. Is there nothing this absolutely disgusting man cares about? At an OvalOffice briefing, he casually admitted that he was not even aware of the incident. I am literally sick to my stomach?
And the Republicans in his administration and in Congress are in the contest with him to be the worst human beings ever? Why would anyone in todays world even want to enlist
DJT and his enablers propose that the US citizen will accept higher prices on products in an effort to bring back manufacturing (and other) jobs to the US. Well, I’ve heard a lot of complaints about how Walmart and other big box retailers have crushed local businesses, especially in rural areas. The reason this happened is because Walmart and others were notably cheaper. It was a family pocketbook decision. If communities chose to pay lower prices at Walmart and as a result, lost their local businesses, why would one think they/we would support the extra cost of products imposed by tariffs? More painfully, these increases come with the additional cost of giving tax cuts for the very richest among us. It just makes no sense.
1) JVL’s second Triad yesterday pinpointed the end of Pax Americana as April 3, 2025 when Trump imposed his tariffs. And that might be a reasonably good date to use as perhaps the final nail in the coffin. But, really, we had gone a long way down that path on November 5, 2024 when somehow, inexplicably, the American people willingly elected someone who had tried to overturn the results of the previous Presidential election. And even that doesn’t go back far enough. Maybe it should be November 15, 2022 when Trump announced his candidacy, and the majority of the Republican Party didn’t either laugh, yawn, or run screaming from the room then. The idea that Trump was even a viable candidate shows how unserious we are as a people.
Sure, Trump 2.0 has been worse than anything anyone could have imagined. But after January 6, no one could truly say they were that surprised. Why would Trump feel constrained in the slightest way when he clearly broke the law and trampled on America’s institutions and his “punishment” was to be reelected? All the while enjoying seemingly undying levels of support from Republicans.
As I always say, if January 6 wasn’t disqualifying conduct, what would be?
2) I would like to retain some optimism about the immediate future. But it’s difficult given that what the American people clearly voted for (and many, many people still support). And it’s not really the tariffs, bad as they likely are. It’s Trump’s bludgeoning of the international order, and the disdainful treatment of our allies that bothers me more. You can have a disagreement and handle it like adults (well, really, maybe YOU can, but clearly Trump can’t). You don’t have to resort to name calling and sophomoric stunts like Vance did in his latest comments and trip to Greenland. Here is how I view Trump’s stance vis-à-vis Greenland: He wants something that doesn’t belong to him, the responsible adults in the room explain patiently (and probably with a great deal of exasperation) that he can’t have it, and his reaction is to pitch a fit. It’s the perfect example of the behavior of a spoiled child.
3) AE – thanks for covering how Fox is covering the tariff story (so we don’t have to). So Laura Ingraham believes that “shadowy multinational firms might be crashing the market on purpose to hurt the president”. Give credit to Fox – apparently, there’s nothing that they can’t make into a conspiracy theory.
This is prescient and powerful, Bill and JVL. Thank you for the historical context, Bill. Thank you both for being the Kassandras that the mainstream media hasn't the courage to be. The media are not meeting the moment. The media reminds me every day of the movie Don't Look Up.
I door knock for the Democrats. I have felt the moral collapse at the doors of voters for a long time now. It only seemed to worsen over time into a hard-hearted nihilism and escapism on the part of the average voter. I live in a middle class area. The people here are not poor in the economic sense, but they are poor in spirit, as JVL muses. I hope that the coming economic depression will wake them up, but I also hoped that about Trump's behavior during the pandemic. I'm not sure that anything less than a full-on catastrophe will make them face the reality that politics matters, their vote matters, and not all politicians are the same. And I live in Pennsylvania. Where their vote even matters to people in Europe and all over the world, yet they don't seem to know or care.
It's not so much the demise of the American Age that concerns me, it's the return to the pre-WWII outlook of conflict, hatred, militarism...with nukes...and an unstable felon and his minions who couldn't give a damn other than tRump Tower Moscow, Beijing, Tel Aviv, etc.
Yesterday, after reading JVL (and sitting in a prolonged trance), I glanced at the TV screen to see Josh Hawley racing as usual with a mike racing alongside his mouth, as he raved on and on about the unexpected super good jobs report. It was delusional of me to think that yesterday's global-quake might have been noticed by a Republican or two as a geological catastrophe but no, Hawley chose to comment on a patch of green grass growing somewhere, so is that it? The Republicans will focus on green grass somewhere and pretend our country is still intact? Heaven help us all.
Josh Hawley is “my” senator. He disgusts me. John Danforth, a former Republican senator who held the same seat as Hawley, said backing Hawley was the worst mistake he ever made. And that he knows how Dr. Frankenstein must’ve felt. And Danforth is responsible for Clarence Thomas being on the Supreme Court. That’s how awful Hawley is.
No reporter should give that banker anonymity -- customers have a right to know the kind of people who are overseeing their money, and move it out accordingly.
Doesn't it sound like sarcasm? Those are the words Trump used and still got elected. Wow, how great (sarcasm) that we are "liberated" to use those words (as the global economy is burned down by the malevolent clown who used them)!
What scares me is what the hell is going to move into the powere vacuum the uSA will leave behind.
Duh. This is EXACTLY what Putin had Trump do. Ask yourself, who benefits.
ONLY PUTIN.
I like the Gramsci quote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." This political decline from democracy is happening alongside other massive shifts: accelerating global warming that will lead to more and more deadly and expensive disaster, and AI, which may eliminate tens or hundreds of millions of jobs. The same tech overlords who created social media that contributed greatly to Trumpism are famously also believers in a coming collapse, building bunkers and obsessing about Mars. Right now the need for the better angels of our nature is greatest, but the demons of fear, leading to hate and violence, dominate.
70 years of dumbing down America through the shared circus of 50/60s television at the same time the white nationalists crawled out from under their log and fought integration morphed into a 70s fight against all civil rights in conjunction with a renewed fundamentalist and purity culture that welded itself to Reagan in the eighties with the rise of Fox and their own fear based NeoCalvinistic seven mountain ecosystem aided and abetted by algorithmic social media paving its way to an oligarchic takeover with their savior Trump and here we are.
All it took was three generations.
Sorry but blaming 50's and 60's TV is a bit much.
I smell more then a little "THe stupid proles have such poor taste" snobbery in this post
Well, ok. But I am not assigning blame or being a snob. I am saying it all adds up to a populace used to an easy conformity (3 channels) that has the appearance of diversity that doesn’t actually exist (it is all fake choices) and that sets the stage for later easy indoctrination. These aren’t my thoughts. These are scholars like Richard Hofstader in The Dumbing Down of America; Oz Guinness’ Fit Bodies, Fat Minds; Neil Postman et al. that have made commentary on American TV culture of the 50/60/70s. I don’t know you from Adam but please, by all means, call me a snob for reading American sociologists and historians and trying to connect the dots. I’m one of those 60/70s kids who had a phone with a cord and a TV with 4 channels and a banana seat bike. I appreciate criticism. Anything else you want to tell me about myself and the culture I grew up in after having read one paragraph of my thoughts?!?!? Really, I’d like to know more about how much a snob I am about the culture I experienced first hand. Perhaps I am just imagining my whole childhood and how much TV shaped it.
Love how the complicit stations tend to bury the "bad." And they bury it with crap stories or distractions. True to 1942 in Germany. Kiss the ring and bury the TRUTH!
There's almost too much to comment on in this very comprehensive and no doubt hard to absorb piece, so I'll just vent my spleen by observing re the anonymous banker's glee about being able to say 'pussy' and 'retard' again--oh, yay!, that an implication of that is that the rest of us are now liberated to say 'dickhead', 'prick' and 'motherfucking asswipe.' I am planning to create a compendium of both hoary Anglo-Saxon cusswords and creative new expletives from which I can draw inspiration.
Mr. Kristol and Mr. Last, thank you for your honesty, your courage, your breath and depth of knowledge, and your demonstrated patriotism! God, these are the most terrifying times! Hopefully your alerts will get more Americans to get their heads out of the sand!
Great to have a President who is too busy sponsoring a golf tournament at one of his clubs so obviously making $$$$ off it, or to talk about or send his VP or SOMEONE to represent our govt to greet the bodies of our 4 soldiers who were killed in the swamp incident in Lithuania. The Lithuanian President showed far more respect for them than their own country. Is there nothing this absolutely disgusting man cares about? At an OvalOffice briefing, he casually admitted that he was not even aware of the incident. I am literally sick to my stomach?
And the Republicans in his administration and in Congress are in the contest with him to be the worst human beings ever? Why would anyone in todays world even want to enlist
DJT and his enablers propose that the US citizen will accept higher prices on products in an effort to bring back manufacturing (and other) jobs to the US. Well, I’ve heard a lot of complaints about how Walmart and other big box retailers have crushed local businesses, especially in rural areas. The reason this happened is because Walmart and others were notably cheaper. It was a family pocketbook decision. If communities chose to pay lower prices at Walmart and as a result, lost their local businesses, why would one think they/we would support the extra cost of products imposed by tariffs? More painfully, these increases come with the additional cost of giving tax cuts for the very richest among us. It just makes no sense.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Or … maybe history does repeat itself.
Stay steadfast, stay strong, be the light.
A few comments...
1) JVL’s second Triad yesterday pinpointed the end of Pax Americana as April 3, 2025 when Trump imposed his tariffs. And that might be a reasonably good date to use as perhaps the final nail in the coffin. But, really, we had gone a long way down that path on November 5, 2024 when somehow, inexplicably, the American people willingly elected someone who had tried to overturn the results of the previous Presidential election. And even that doesn’t go back far enough. Maybe it should be November 15, 2022 when Trump announced his candidacy, and the majority of the Republican Party didn’t either laugh, yawn, or run screaming from the room then. The idea that Trump was even a viable candidate shows how unserious we are as a people.
Sure, Trump 2.0 has been worse than anything anyone could have imagined. But after January 6, no one could truly say they were that surprised. Why would Trump feel constrained in the slightest way when he clearly broke the law and trampled on America’s institutions and his “punishment” was to be reelected? All the while enjoying seemingly undying levels of support from Republicans.
As I always say, if January 6 wasn’t disqualifying conduct, what would be?
2) I would like to retain some optimism about the immediate future. But it’s difficult given that what the American people clearly voted for (and many, many people still support). And it’s not really the tariffs, bad as they likely are. It’s Trump’s bludgeoning of the international order, and the disdainful treatment of our allies that bothers me more. You can have a disagreement and handle it like adults (well, really, maybe YOU can, but clearly Trump can’t). You don’t have to resort to name calling and sophomoric stunts like Vance did in his latest comments and trip to Greenland. Here is how I view Trump’s stance vis-à-vis Greenland: He wants something that doesn’t belong to him, the responsible adults in the room explain patiently (and probably with a great deal of exasperation) that he can’t have it, and his reaction is to pitch a fit. It’s the perfect example of the behavior of a spoiled child.
3) AE – thanks for covering how Fox is covering the tariff story (so we don’t have to). So Laura Ingraham believes that “shadowy multinational firms might be crashing the market on purpose to hurt the president”. Give credit to Fox – apparently, there’s nothing that they can’t make into a conspiracy theory.
<very sad face with tears in eyes>
This is prescient and powerful, Bill and JVL. Thank you for the historical context, Bill. Thank you both for being the Kassandras that the mainstream media hasn't the courage to be. The media are not meeting the moment. The media reminds me every day of the movie Don't Look Up.
I door knock for the Democrats. I have felt the moral collapse at the doors of voters for a long time now. It only seemed to worsen over time into a hard-hearted nihilism and escapism on the part of the average voter. I live in a middle class area. The people here are not poor in the economic sense, but they are poor in spirit, as JVL muses. I hope that the coming economic depression will wake them up, but I also hoped that about Trump's behavior during the pandemic. I'm not sure that anything less than a full-on catastrophe will make them face the reality that politics matters, their vote matters, and not all politicians are the same. And I live in Pennsylvania. Where their vote even matters to people in Europe and all over the world, yet they don't seem to know or care.
It's not so much the demise of the American Age that concerns me, it's the return to the pre-WWII outlook of conflict, hatred, militarism...with nukes...and an unstable felon and his minions who couldn't give a damn other than tRump Tower Moscow, Beijing, Tel Aviv, etc.
JVL and Andrew's Bulwark Take on this was very, very powerful.
You must go watch if you haven't.
Yesterday, after reading JVL (and sitting in a prolonged trance), I glanced at the TV screen to see Josh Hawley racing as usual with a mike racing alongside his mouth, as he raved on and on about the unexpected super good jobs report. It was delusional of me to think that yesterday's global-quake might have been noticed by a Republican or two as a geological catastrophe but no, Hawley chose to comment on a patch of green grass growing somewhere, so is that it? The Republicans will focus on green grass somewhere and pretend our country is still intact? Heaven help us all.
Josh Hawley is “my” senator. He disgusts me. John Danforth, a former Republican senator who held the same seat as Hawley, said backing Hawley was the worst mistake he ever made. And that he knows how Dr. Frankenstein must’ve felt. And Danforth is responsible for Clarence Thomas being on the Supreme Court. That’s how awful Hawley is.
No reporter should give that banker anonymity -- customers have a right to know the kind of people who are overseeing their money, and move it out accordingly.
Doesn't it sound like sarcasm? Those are the words Trump used and still got elected. Wow, how great (sarcasm) that we are "liberated" to use those words (as the global economy is burned down by the malevolent clown who used them)!