Category: American Decline

Are We Doomed?

By George Packer, The Atlantic To head off the next insurrection, we’ll need to practice envisioning the worst. A year after the insurrection, I’m trying to imagine the death of American democracy. It’s somehow easier to picture the Earth blasted and bleached by global warming, or the human […]

A Party, and Nation, in Crisis

By Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic The GOP’s leaders are ​​attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. In October of 1860, The Atlantic’s first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote of Abraham Lincoln that he “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough […]

The Socialism America Needs

By Joel Kotkin Clobbered from all sides by the pandemic, climate change and disruptions in virtually every industry by the rise of artificial intelligence, the capitalist dream is dying — and a new, mutant form of socialism is growing in its place. In the US, perhaps it’s no […]

Third Worldizing America

The weakening of the American regime provides many opportunities for anti-imperialist struggles and the creation of startup societies now that the global hegemon is in decline, and the domestic regime is experiencing decline as well. Meanwhile, I suspect the long-term effect of recent anti-police uprisings will be a […]

The Bush Restoration

Predictably, Michael Lind once again gets it right. 100%. Although the main negative inherent in his analysis is one that he doesn’t mention. The trends he describes open the door for a return to power by the neocons. I have been concerned that we are presently in a […]

Is America Becoming Rome Versus Byzantium?

By Victor Davis Hanson Independent Institute Our Byzantine interior and Roman coasts are quite differently interpreting their shared American heritage as they increasingly plot radically divergent courses to survive in scary times. In A.D. 286 the Roman emperor Diocletian split in half the huge Roman Empire administratively—and peacefully—under the control […]