When did America’s Decline end, and the Fall begin? Although future historians will debate, Tuesday November 5th 2024 will be as good as any other point to start from. For it was on this date that a concatenation of forces-economic, political, social-produced the re-election of Donald Trump, and all that was to follow. These forces included an irresolvable racial rancour dating back to slavery; a deep pollution of information in the public sphere; a chronic failing in public education and the ethos to support it. But above all it was the worship of money, and the catastrophic, merciless social and economic inequalities that this engendered, that brought everything low. Writing for The Nation, Tom McCoy details these rather well in the first part of his article [1] (Don’t read the second bit until we say you can) To cut a long story short, we could call this obsession with cash NeoLiberalism.

Let’s just jump across the Atlantic for a moment to say goodbye to Larry Elliott who quits his post at the Guardian after 36 years {2] He too is eloquent on the many things he has witnessed. Among them is this observation on this same cocky, self-satisfied NeoLiberalism

…… the free-market experiment has failed, as some of us said it would all along. Wealth did not trickle down, and instead the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened. The workers laid off when the factories closed in northern England and the US midwest did not find new well-paid jobs but were either thrown on the scrapheap or found low-paid insecure work …………

Financial speculation ran rife once controls on capital were removed, but growth rates in the west were slower than in the postwar heyday of social democracy. Warnings of trouble ahead were ignored until the world’s banking system came close to collapse in the global financial crisis of 2008. [2]

Producing an alienated and impoverished group of vast voting power) which was impervious to the imploring of reason, fact and education. And who could blame them? The exalted free markets have produced such insecurity that a nationalist backlash was inevitable. It is now tearing down every shibboleth that the neoliberals held dear. Low tariffs, free movements of capital and labour, cultural and intellectual exchange are going to the wall, and we can see nowhere that this process can now stop..

Except one. Because while Larry’s article closes with a final nod to the re-emergence of the Nation State, Tom’s goes further and look to the future.(OK, click on his article again) The problem with the Nation State is Pride. It is national Pride which will cause Donald Trump and his friends to start drilling for oil again. By which means all combined attempts to prevent global warming will collapse, as each nation looks to its own interest. Runaway global warming will produce such desolation that any economy and any body politic will become unsustainable, probably as early as the next decade. The resulting chaos will make a world Government essential for human survival. And tom details how this may come about, perhaps in the sixties or seventies.

The American hegemony is now certainly over, How ironic that this was hastened by an arch nationalist such as Trump!

[1]https://www.thenation.com/article/world/american-hegemony-climate/

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/10/from-thatcher-to-trump-and-brexit-my-seven-lessons-learned-after-28-years-as-guardian-economics-editor

#global warming #economics #climate change #donald trump #neoliberalism #free trade #protectionism