On the positive side, Trump is so unstable that he'll trash your business one day and then the next day he'll reverse course. So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.)
I'm 90% sure it will lead to America's ruin, but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. Hey, at least it looks more entertaining! :/
> but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin.
The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was:
a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders
b) the 'free market liberalization' reforms passed overnight, with minuscule oversight that predictably led to the open looting of the nation's resources by well-connected elites who quickly absconded abroad with their riches, leaving the country at the mercy of international creditors looking for deals heavily tilted in their favour
c) multiple economics crises triggered by a loss of confidence in the country's currency and ability to service its foreign debt. The Russian bond default of 1998 famously led to the collapse of the American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
Present circumstances in America aren't that different. All it's currently missing is a civil war to call its own, like Chechnya.
Yeltsin was the strongman ruler of the 90s. When parliament wouldn't kowtow to him, he launched a bloody coup and then rewrote the constitution to consolidate power in his office.
The only thing that he was truly unsuccessful at as a politician was failing to shrug off some bullshit credit card bribery scandal.
When you've deployed tanks and mortars against the lawful government, and everyone's fine with that I can't understand why you'd let a few thousands dollars that you put on a company credit card bring you down.
> Present circumstances in America aren't that different.
They are different, in the sense that all the damage happening right now is both unnecessary and self-inflicted. Russia needed to do something to transition from the USSR. Shock therapy was a terrible 'something', but it's at least possible to see how it got there.
> an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders
Probably can't mention Yeltsin in the context of strongmen without mentioning the shelling of the parliament building.
If you really want to find out the reasons why USSR failed I suggest reading “Collapse the fall of Soviet Union” by Zubok or “Collapse of an Empire” by Gaidar. They are easy to read books. Said reasons are quite different from what is going on in USA at the moment.
You are completely missing Gorbachev, the fall began with him. He was a good guy, but a bit naive within soviet situation. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY hated russians. That's where brutal oppression came from for rest of soviet republics, that's where eastern Europe satellites were invaded and controlled from via strong firm hand (and many military bases). I know this damn well as I was raised thre and saw first hand the continuous destruction of what we would call normal society that russians brought along with them everywhere they went.
When the soviet empire twitched a bit and seams became just slightly more loose, everybody run the fuck away from them. You can't be literally enslaved for 2 generations and ignore whats around you and whats happening to all your citizens, family, friends, yourself. Not when you clearly see how west has technological, moral and societal advantage in its approach and its getting bigger every year. The only exception is Belarus, and the only reason is that the dicktator there needs desperately strong continuous backing or he would be brought down in quick coup.
The fall didn't begin with Gorbachev, it began with the communist party being clueless at adapting to new situations, essentially what China managed to do after Mao, the Soviets didn't after Stalin and the rest. The regime ossified and fell apart, at first slowly and then rapidly.
Gorbachev just refused to spill even more blood.
Present circumstances in America are very different. When Putin took power, Russia's economy had been declining rapidly for a decade; then over his first decade, the GDP dectupled. If the US were to somehow achieve $600,000 GDP per capita by the end of Trump's current term, yeah, Americans would probably want to reevaluate their conventional wisdom about what good governance looks like. But I'm pretty confident that won't happen.
The GDP rise your talking about is to some extent an exchange rate phenonomena. Russia's currency collapsed in the early 90s, by the 00's it was able to strengthen and stabilize. Quality of life went down, but it was not proportionate to the collapse in GDP. Thinking about similar phenomenon occurring in the United States is kind of pointless, that would require a collapse in the dollars reserve currency status which would have dramatic ramifications world wide. The Dollar is the yardstick, if another currency became stronger, it would be the yardstick, and that's an entire regime change kind of for everybody. While Russia's currency can collapse in strength vis a vis the dollar, and then increase a great deal, but it was weaker than the dollar at every point. The collapse in its strength meant that it was difficult for the country to trade in that period. But Russia still had its domestic industry through the entire period, which wasn't affected to the degree that the collapse in trade and currency value would suggest,
Also the volatility of economic growth of smaller countries tends to be much higher than anything experienced by developed countries. When you start from a small scale, GDP jumps of 10x are hardly unheard of. While increases of such magnitude in an already developed country would be unprecedented.
Also, the Russian economy is just a series of frauds run by lawless oligarchs stacked on top of each other. The only limiting factor on them is when Putin randomly decides to throw one of them out of a window. It's a pure patrimonialist system, which is a system sustained by lawlessness, manipulation, and fraud. This is of course the truth of the fascist system itself, its simply an attempt to wrap the whole of society in one big patrimonialist network. There's a reason they had to invade Ukraine - the bills were coming due, and they knew the only way they could make good on promises they otherwise couldn't keep was a sustained program of national subjugation and exploitation. This was inevitable from the moment the system was set up. This system is inherently unstable.
The words of the participants in the system while it is ongoing are meaningless. They are wrapped in some kind of patrimonial network or another, supporting some kind of overhyped fraud or another that represents all their dreams and aspirations. They are censored, subject to constant manipulation, and deliberately manipulated with false flags and psy ops. Their whole society is designed as a giant cartwheel to shove people into various frauds. I can be sad for victims of fraud, yes, but that doesn't make them any easier to deal with before they give up on their expectations and stop believing the lies of the one who is defrauding them, who frequently sicks them on anyone who attempts to combat the fraud, telling them that "Actually that person is the one who's keeping you from getting your money!" Hitler arrayed millions of German youth upon fields of slaughter with such tactics once before, why would we expect any different outcome now? We should've known better.
You’re not wrong but those all happened _after_ the fall of the USSR. They weren’t the cause of its fall they were the cause of post-USSR Russia becoming an oligarchy.
By 1998 the shit had already hit the fan big time for the common people in Russia, all "thanks" to Shock Therapy (which you allude to at your point b)). That was the real tragedy, nothing a more "experienced" president could have fixed (other than doing what Putin ended up doing, which is trying to reverse some of the craziness of said Shock Therapy).
I write this from direct experience, as I grew up as a kid/adolescent in nearby Romania in the '90s, where we had our very own Shock Therapy. In fact my present political stance (a return to nationalism and a reversal of what globalisation has brought about) is heavily marked by that very traumatic period in my life (and the same thing is valid for many of my compatriots).
So you want to reverse the development in Romania over the last 3 decades [1] ? I agree that the way the transition from the Ceauşescu regime was handled was less than ideal to say the least. But let's not forget that rampant nationalism and isolism was what got Romania into the mess in the first ace. I would even argue that every time a government/regime is bringing out the nationalism card it is to cover up for rising inequality, decreasing quality of life and all sort of other issues. An appeal to the "nation" is just not necessary otherwise.
> So you want to reverse the development in Romania over the last 3 decades [1]
Not sure that "reverse" is the best word for it, but, yes, I want the huge societal inequalities that have been created during the last three decades to be "levelled" again. I know that this will probably suck (to use light language) for the winners of those last 3 decades, but that is life.
He's first and foremost a narcissist (strongly grandiose subtype, and all over the place on the communal/malignant axis).
That condition should make him ineligible for any position of power. This is what a society gets when it elects someone mentally ill (in the harmful-to-others rather than the typical harmful-to-ill-person sense).
I am continually astounded by how many people, even if you explain the symptoms to them, will be unable to see it - not just in this one case but in general. There is something in many people that makes them attracted to those who treat them awfully and consider them only slightly above things.
People can just listen to his biographer or many former aides, but they choose to believe what they want. Many religious supporters still think he's a Christian.
In order to see it, you must recognize the ways in which he fooled you. People would generally rather be fooled again than face the thought that they were fooled at some point in the past. And the more that they have been fooled, the stronger this bias is.
Trump is an absolute genius at fooling people in small ways, then over time ratcheting up the cognitive dissonance until he fools them in big ways. See https://specialto.thebulwark.com/ for a detailed explanation of how he did this with one of the many people that he has turned into puppets.
This is a good observation, but I think causality is reversed: narcissists by nature develop whatever skills will attract the most adoration.
Trump plays the strongman / oppressed white man card. If the populace valued different things he would happily parade around in negligé. He’s just playing to the audience, and it’s not narcissism so much as bullshit archetypes that they want.
Corporate politics doesn’t adequately punish the traits narcissists and sociopaths present. Quite the contrary, those traits can easily become assets in their careers.
Exactly. It's an evolutionarily beneficial trait. We're no longer competing with other species (why social traits developed), we're competing against each other (where the right amount of anti-social traits works best).
Unfortunately that is way outside too many people's Overton window. And, also unfortunately, I don't think the average human is sufficiently intelligent to understand why he should care.[note 1]
Throughout history, we see cycles of freedom and oppression, separated by either collapse or revolt.
- Collapse happens when anti-socials gain so much power in an organization (whether it's a corporation or state) that it starts to function so poorly that it's overtaken by competitors (or even destroys itself).
- Revolt happens when they gain/use that power too blatantly and people notice. Peaceful revolt is possible on the surface but ultimately, all true power is backed by violence - sometimes that violence is just thinly veiled behind multiple steps of action and reaction (unarmed protesters attacked by police will bring rocks and Molotovs next time which will cause even more attacks from the police which might escalate into civil war).
But right now we're at a point where oppressors have enough history to learn from. They don't care about collapse and revolt only happens when people are willing to act. So what they're doing right now is conditioning everyone that violence is wrong. This comes in many forms: bans on social media (every TOS forbids promoting violence these days), forced self-censorship (just watch a couple youtube shorts, good luck finding one where "kill" isn't spelled "k*ll" and bleeped out), zero-tolerance policies (school will punish both aggressor and target when they get into a fight), ...
Trump is a fascist (https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...). Last time people like him got into power in the civilized world, one was shot and hung upside down from a gas station, the other killed himself in a bunker. But this time when people reached for the 4th box of liberty, they were almost universally shunned. So he got into power, elected by the stupid people, and to nobody's surprise immediately started dismantling the system which exists to keep him in check.
He will do it slowly enough that each time he takes a step towards his goal, he will only piss off a small portion of the people and there will never be enough organized opposition at once. At least this time the dictator-elect is so old he might snuff it from natural causes before he does too much damage.
But the average person will not learn from it. The idea that a group of people as large as tens or hundreds of millions needs one special individual at the top is the peak of human stupidity.
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[note 1]: Some people see this as too arrogant to be said openly but them it becomes just an excuse for them to shut down their logical faculties and reject what I say based on primitive instincts, proving my point.
- Anyway, look at how many democracies use the plurality/FPTP voting system which is known to be pretty much the worst possible (https://rangevoting.org/).
- Look at how many people in the west will say that democracy is obviously good and dictatorship obviously bad but don't question why nearly all corporations have hierarchical (dictatorial) power structures.
- Look at how many people are OK with spending a third or half of their salary on rent, which is just free money that goes to people who contribute nothing to society.
- Look at how many people are unable to differentiate between morality (what is right) vs legality (what the state will penalize you for) and how even the language is warped to mix them (people saying "I did nothing wrong" when they are talking about breaking the rules, whether they are laws or whatever screed a subreddit mod came up with).
Like of the Nietzschan philosophy? So in the case of trump the idea is that his voters like him because he’s different from the “evil” aristocratic class that trump claimed to oppose (eg “drain the swamp”)?
I just think that most people (on both political sides) are not really better. If they would be given the position of power they would be corrupted and incompetent too.
So in a sense you got what you deserve - and your democracy is working.
That’s the key right? It’s world as content. Nothing means anything anymore as long as it gets spread on media platforms. The easiest way for the US to get out this downward spiral is to just ignore the medias coverage of ”politics”. But that’s not gonna happen is it? Gotta se what happens next!
If you truly believe that, the fix is the opposite of what the GOP is proposing. Freeze spending at today’s levels, raise taxes (uncap SS, add higher tax brackets, add a wealth tax, etc…), then let the economy grow naturally.
This wouldn’t be possible as the world’s reserve currency and provider of political stability. At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.
But by destroying the US’ position as reserve currency and establishing the country as too untrustworthy to do business with, Trump has made your statement true.
We can’t afford what we spend without those special economic benefits. And we just threw them away for no reason.
Trump and Republicans had a great hand in this (Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, Bush tax cuts, Trump tax cuts, PPP helicopter money for the rich), and are looking to double down with their current disaster of a bill. Hope you're opposing that.
> So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.)
But Musk initiated it, by going against Trump's bill. The new conclusion is "to get contract, you must kiss ass so much and you can't say anything bad, ever"
I'm 90% sure it will lead to America's ruin, but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. Hey, at least it looks more entertaining! :/