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.
