America’s death rattle

By Pete North - January 14, 2021

A while back I happened upon a TV series called Luke Cage. I forget the premise but it’s a vigilante super hero type thing based in Harlem. What stuck me about it was that it was leaden with nostalgia for the good old days the “the struggle”, lamenting the gentrification of what was an exclusively black culture – now diluted by modernity and diversity. I don’t think I got all the way through it because it was too preachy and smacked of an attempt to keep the black victimhood flame alive – passing the grudge on to the next generation.

A lot of film and TV of the time reflects that mourning for the golden age of America. Gran Torino charts the last days of a white man who’s seen his neighbourhood turn from a respectable white enclave into a post-industrial gangland slum, while The Wire, laments containerisation and globalisation.

Essentially the West is mourning the end of the twentieth century – the latter half of which was a period of relative economic and political certainty, and prosperity which is now brought into question by the internet upending everything.

In the context of The Wire, the white working classes are to be pitied, except for when they vote, whereupon they are despised. They are instructed to “learn to code” whereas the black struggle still carries currency. Keeping the black victimhood narrative alive is politically useful to the Democrats thus everything hinges on painting the white working class vote as a demonic manifestation of white supremacy.

That is not to say that blacks in America do not face legacy issues, but this is largely a consequence of maintaining the victimhood and for as long as it is politically useful to the Democrats they will fight tooth and nail to ensure black communities stay enslaved. Thus when something like the murder of George Floyd happens, tensions are easily enflamed, and the fallout can be exploited.

In this instance it was taken as an opportunity to advance communist ideas masquerading as racial justice, resulting in a right wing backlash, with the far right highly visible, making it easier for the Democrats to paint Trumpism as a white supremacist movement, weaving further the narrative that America is a racist country and blacks are the victims of structural racism. They then take that as licence to dismantle capitalist America one piece at a time. There is a coup happening in America but it’s a slow motion communist coup. We are then to expect domestic terrorism from the right.

The problem I see in this is that the American political system is there to constrain power. When the Dems control the White House, the GOP controls Congress and vice versa. Nothing ever gets done except by consensus, and votes are only won through horse trading, backroom deals and mutual back scratching. That’s how politics gets done in the USA. Not unreasonably this is seen as a nest of corruption – which is within tolerance just so long as the economy continues to function. Except that it no longer does.

This sees demands for more radical actions whereby the White House increasingly employs the Executive Order which effectively turns the US into an unchecked no-so-benign dictatorship – where the main check on power is now the courts. Increasingly America does not look like a functioning democracy. Two political tribes compete for power, doing so by setting the people against each other.

We’ve seen this emerging over the last twenty years but it has ramped up ever since 2008, not least by way of a hyper-partisan activist media – exacerbated by the emergence of social media, turning politics into an all out propaganda war. And that’s the danger. Because sooner or later propaganda wars turn into shooting wars – and America has stepped up to the brink.

Though Trump lost the election and will be gone in a matter of days, that won’t be the last of it. Trump was only a symptom, nothing is resolved and at most the Trump era was a pressure cooker letting off a little steam. But it’s still boiling and it’s not going to improve.

The main reason it won’t improve is because the Democrats will spend the next term prosecuting the previous four years. They will do all they can to once again paint the right as deplorable racists while stoking divisions with identity politics. Instead of unifying America, they will further divide it, and progress on race will go into reverse.

American left wing intelligentsia hates America. They don’t care if they destroy it and they may already have succeeded. Politically the country is shattered and economically it’s not far behind. I don’t think it can any longer function the way it does and we should not be surprised if we see a ramping up of secessionist movements. To avert a complete breakdown would require the type of leadership America is no longer capable of producing. Events over the last week created a window for leadership but there is none there to step up to the plate.

More to the point, the battle has now shifted. The social media barons are now the power brokers in America, and while there is a sense that the right is being silenced, the discontent will fester. The war for internet neutrality has only just begun and one suspects that political norms cannot reassert themselves until there is an equilibrium in the information wars. This then becomes a wider war across the anglosphere and we on this side of the Atlantic are involved whether we want to be or not.

I suspect, though, that there is hope. It think the Luke Cage series gave the game away. In the same way that my nephew does not share mine and my father’s fascination for WW2, having lived in the long shadow of it, the black struggle doesn’t have quite the same meaning for the next generation, particularly having grown up in an era where no ethnicity in particular has any particular privilege. Boomer privilege exists but if you’re white and broke, you have no particular advantage, not least as a combination of factors is wiping out the American middle class. Leftist attempts to stoke racial division will eventually run out of steam. Looking at the way minority blocs voted for Trump, you can tell the norms are gradually evaporating.

The game changer, of course, is Covid. There is a depression to come – one which will see even the comfortably off making hard choices. It has already changed the course of American events and may do so again. Trump was on course for a second term until the deaths started to mount. It is unlikely the Democrats will fare any better in the aftermath. With nothing settled and with economic conditions set to worsen substantially, and a global shock on the horizon, the situation is unpredictable and anything could happen. It’s too early for America to breathe a sigh of relief.