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The end of the American empire is not up for debate. The timeline for this decline is also more or less agreed upon as less than a generation, at worst 15 years at best 25. The only thing that the corporate aristocracy and their political sycophants debate is how to ensure a soft landing for their class. It is not a forgone conclusion that it will be a soft landing for anyone, certainly not for the vast majority of Americans.
Even if you are loyal lever puller for the great machine, and accept your place in the hierarchy of power, your future is uncertain. Economic dislocation is something that happens to everyone who is not at the very pinnacle of power. It is a mathematic truth that a 40% reduction of net worth for a multi-millionaire is simply not the same as a 40% reduction for everyone else. In fact, it will be easier for the economic aristocracy to insulate themselves with a phalanx of hired help because unemployment will be so very high.
It must be remembered that wealth is not measured by accumulated possessions. It is the power to control your environment that is at the heart of wealth. A 10th century lord was not wealthy by a modern standard of possessions, but he was as wealthy has he needed to be to hold absolute power over landless peasantry. So too will the new aristocracy of wealth retain their power as the absolute net worth plummets.
While many might nibble at the edges of what would cause this massive economic collapse, it has already begun with the hyper-investment in security, both foreign and domestic, which is a hallmark of fading empire. The money sucked from the system by these expenditures will degrade institutions that help create the fiction of national identity. While unregulated capitalism will do its part in hastening the decline, it will finally arrive when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world.
That sounds much less threating than it is. It is because the dollar is the reserve currency that America enjoys certain benefits, chief among which is the ability to sell treasury bonds to the world and thus extend credit far beyond actual monetary worth. When that prop to our overextended military budget is knocked out a reckoning will arrive for which the nation is not prepared.
Most immediate will be the massive increase in cost for oil. America runs on oil. For all the fancy talk of renewable energy and future options, we will not be ready in 15 years or even 25 to be weaned from oil. Cities dependent upon oil for energy will be unable to compete on the open market to buy fuel and will sink into a marginalized status. They will sell off infrastructure to attempt to survive and such cities and towns will end as wholly own subsidiaries of Multi-national corporations. It will be a form of hostile take over that will dismantle civic life and sell off any valuable assets.
There will be work, but for the most part productive jobs will be done by automation, either actual robots or collection of algorithms. The one category of job that will last the longest and employ the most will be the Security Industrial Complex. The merging of Military and Police functions into a vast security apparatus to maintain the rights of the aristocracy that began in the last decade will be enhanced and strengthened. The process will take an ever-greater share of national treasure and become a feedback loop of decline.
The National Security Apparatus will ensure a soft landing for the privileged few as their enclaves are insulated from the restless multitude who are surplus to requirements. The cities who are crushed by corporate colonialism will sink into expanding slums. Cities who have no value to exploit may be left to wither. Cities who through access to resources or good planning might maintain a semblance of former normalcy, but in order to maintain that in the face of internal migration and hostile corporate aristocracy will mandate their own militarization.
The barbarians at the gates of the great cities, the last bastions of actual civilization, will not be flooding across national borders. The migrations of dispossessed people will come from within the empire. The very people who cheered the empire on to even greater military folly will find themselves in a migratory wave that will make the flight from the dust bowel seem like an extended vacation.
The America first brigade will be proven right. It will be the migrants who are the problem, but it will be they who are the migrant problem as they flee jobless wastelands and seek some safety within the shadow of protected enclaves. But the rules will have changed and they will not be welcome either by their erstwhile masters or by the few functioning city states.
Most consider this dislocation to take at least a generation of hardship before it stabilizes into the new normal, but that is based on comparisons to other 19th & 20th century empires in decline. A 21st century empire may dissolve by other rules. One new rule is the changing climate, that will create internal climate refugees and reduced crop yields. Another new rule is the dispensable nature of labor. The aristocracy gauges the worth of those below by how useful they are. In a world where labor is replaced with increasing speed by artificial means the value of human labor will be reduced below any meaningful value.
Of course, none of this precludes a soft landing for the current aristocracy of wealth. The only thing that can dent their plans for a comfortable post-imperial enclave of power and privilege is if the mass of people, currently enslaved by the robust corporate machinery of obligatory debt, revolt. Rise up and tear down the golden walls. Share out the final scraps of empire among the many to help ameliorate the coming decades of enforced austerity.
Will the empire crumble? It seems obvious that in the long run it will be unable to maintain the fiction that continued growth is possible. It may be able to obscure that reality from the vast majority of the population and thus continue to survive, exhibiting a gravity defining cloud of suspended disbelief for some time after the changes on the ground are manifest to anyone who looks with unfiltered eyes.
Of all the writers, thinkers and just plain folk who realize the current lifestyles of the rich and famous American bourgeois cannot endure forever, there is no consensus how long the dwindling will take, nor what the end will look like. From apocalyptic collapse to simple belt tightening the veiled future holds many possible outcomes.
Which do you wish for or expect? Do you believe that an educated populace will forestall the march toward an uncertain future? Will science reverse the centuries old dependence upon non-renewable resources? Will religion offer a palliative alternative to shrinking income and increased unemployment?
Constrained as I am by my study of history, I see the changes that are looming before us not as an abrupt cataclysm but a long slow retreat from everything that defines the modern growth-dependent nation state. Post Modern political, economic and social changes will be fast, within a life time or so, but not so abrupt as to break a link to the past in the mind of those who live through the changes.
These changes have begun. Speculation on the end is fruitless, because there is no end as such, only the beginning of a different reality. However, speculation on the landscape of that new world is appropriate, if only to better prepare ourselves for the transition period we may be required to live through.
What will precipitate the fall, if fall is the right way to think about an inevitable change? Everyone has their pet problem that will lead to a less comfortable future, but just as no single event can be said to have brought down the civilization of ancient Rome, no single smoking gun will be found by historians for our demise as an empire and the decline of our living standard.
Yes Virginia there is climate change, but that will affect the poorer peoples of the world disproportionately, as rising food prices soar out of reach and populations collapse. Certainly crops will die, lowland regions will flood but the impact will first be felt by those societies less able to absorb the costs. This will result in undeveloped regions, which may contain much needed resources, being far too unstable to exploit effectively or within a reasonable cost structure.
The knowledge that it is mostly a looming third world crisis is what keeps the US from entering into any meaningful attempts to halt greenhouse gas emissions. The State Department and the Pentagon draw up contingency plans for the coming change and if it was the only threat on their plate, we could go about our business with little affect to the top tier nations.
Peak everything is shorthand for the fact that we have less of every important resource than we did yesterday. What’s more, today there are more people demanding those resources than there were yesterday. China, India and Brazil, to name a few, are demanding to be allowed into the club of the super-sized full-meal deal and we are no longer able to thwart their desires.
An economy built on cheap oil and raw materials will constrict as the reserves deplete and the competition for the remains intensifies. We have harvested the low hanging fruit of material resources so everything will become more and more expensive to extract. A constricting economy will mean less capital to invest in alternatives that might ameliorate the more dramatic effects of peak everything. On the other hand, a constricting economy might mean less pressure toward climate change as factories idle, so the race is on to see if the economy tanks before the lowlands flood.
Smart money is that both trends continue in a slow spiral toward worse weather for grain and more expensive energy. A sad comment on the knife edge we walk is that in the US we use 7 calories of energy for every 1 calorie of food we produce. Along with this is the fact that the very rare minerals that power our digital age are mostly controlled by China and you see a bumpy road ahead for business as usual.
Expensive food and fuel, idled factories and high unemployment can coexist with rising profit and the amassing of wealth, but will of course enlarge the gulf between those with and those without. It might be tempting to assume the class war declared by the rich upon the poor will stop short of dragging the middle class into the fray, but consider that real hardship is not needed for social upheaval. All that is required is a perceived loss of privilege, property or power.
It is more than likely that most the bourgeois will align with their masters in a vein attempt to hold onto their dwindling share of the loot as the plutocracy plunders the last of the movable wealth of the nation. Will they dare look behind the curtain before the kleptocrats decamp with their wealth to a new haven far from the turmoil their polices ensured?
Even if the middle class understands what is happening, their response may not be logical. Social upheaval is not known for its logical outcomes. As contending systems of beliefs will continue to vie for attention labels such a progressive and conservative will be shouted even louder. There is no way to predict that the people, once mobilized will follow their own best interests. The chance that their fear and greed will overwhelm collective action may mean that even if they realize the ship is sinking they will be unable to join together to bail it out and instead stomp on one another in their rush for the few remaining lifeboats.
What this will mean to the empire is that with income dramatically receding and people losing belief in the fiction of national unity the government will find it increasingly difficult to function. There will be no showdown merely a slowdown that leads to an atrophy of the machinery of the national state as the entropy of failed policy culminates in the beginning of an emergency in which each local polity will attempt, with more or less success, to forestall the change that is upon them.
Will conditions here degrade to the level of current failed states? That is an unlikely outcome, certainly in the short term. But how much of a reduction in your personal index of comfort will you accept before it seems unbearable? A restructuring of expectations will not be accepted, it will merely become real. How it becomes real might be very interesting.
That’s all well and good you say, but when will this happen? My response is to look around you. It is happening now, the question is how long will the transition take. It may well take decades to come to terms with the decline of living standards, absence of personal security and the sloughing off of a political structure no longer relevant to daily life.
What this transition will mean is general population collapse, not just in the third world. It will mean less globalization as energy costs outweigh the need to fly vast distances. It will mean more localization, less ready capital and that may mean a very marginal existence if you are unlucky enough to be stuck in a resource poor area.
It will certainly mean migration, and perhaps the wars of migration that such dislocation oft lead to. It may also mean most skills and professions we now take for granted will fade, but I doubt that technological society will utterly vanish. It will change, morph to new needs, as our horizons and options shrink. We will continue to use and use up the trappings of our modern life until they can either be replaced with local resources or done without.
Do I expect to see the real hard times in my life time? No. Then again, I had always assumed I would never live to see the beginning of the translation from empire to post-imperial disintegration and yet I have. It seems more than likely some of those alive today will witness the last good day for some decades to come. Of course if you ask someone unemployed for a year they may tell you they have already seen their last good day.