Our Broken Country

Whenever I see Zerohedge republishing an article by Charles Hugh Smith I typically at least take a look. This past week there were at least two such articles, and one in particular hits on topics that readers regularly bring up:

Our Economy And Politics Are Broken

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Awakening from the dream of painless financial / political solutions, we find the status quo is not the solution, it is the source of our decay.

It’s impossible to take issue with Smith’s conclusion. Later, I’ll offer a bit of a caveat—more really an expansion, perhaps—but the basic thrust of Smith’s argument is pretty inarguable. Readers can plug in whatever symptoms of brokenness they consider most compelling, but it all leads to the same conclusion:

Our situation as a society is akin to awakening from a dream of loved ones to the realization that they passed away long ago. Our economy and politics are broken, yet we continue dreaming that they are functional.

Let's start with politics. American politics now bears an eerie resemblance to pre-collapse Soviet politics: a geriatric, sclerotic, stuck-in-the-past leadership, five-year plans (four year plans in the U.S. with one goal--get re-elected) that do nothing to change the trajectory of social decay, and a populace increasingly opting out of political engagement as people realize the pointlessness of the entire charade: the commoners are powerless and the elites are incompetent and disconnected from reality.

Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

Is not this the point at which we’ve arrived? The majority are now woke to this reality.

Take a look at the charts below and tell me how transferring power from one party to the other changed the trajectory of social decay, kleptocracy, authoritarianism or the predations of the financial Aristocracy. You can't, as "business as usual" politics is incapable of changing the trajectory of inequality, debt and social decay.

The two-party "Business as usual" politics offers us a false choice, as neither party has the means to identify or address the fundamental sources of our decline as a society. What we're offered is histrionic claims that one policy or another will fix the symptoms of decay rather than the sources of decay.

At this point Smith quotes Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven. I’ve edited the quote to rephrase it as a positive assertion, while retaining Lasch’s actual words:

"The left and right share so many underlying convictions that the conflict between them, shrill and acrimonious as it is, no longer speaks to the central issues of American politics." (page 23)

In other words, Left and Right are stuck in the ideological box of Neo-liberalism. That ideology is blind to the reality of our decline as a nation and a society and the real causes for that decline. The reality of this analysis finds expression in the well known refrain that the GOP simply aspires to manage the decline of America that the Dem programs have advanced.

Smith continues:

Look at the charts below and identify the great sea changes in trajectory caused by changing the party in power. There are none. The Imperial Project continues apace regardless of what party claims power. This is the result of a broken political system that offers up a false choice while society careens toward a precipice.

Smith’s charts mostly reflect the financial chaos of America, sinking further and further into debt—that is his central concern. He adds additional pithy observations about the normalizing of pay to play in manifold forms at all levels of government, the corporate monopolization of the economy, “the monetization and commodification of addiction as a reliable profit center.” Toward the end he turns to American society, and he captures the hopelessness that afflicts so many—we see the need for fundamental renewal and change of direction, but despair at ever finding the means:

As for social decay, perhaps we can start with the reduction of all the bonds of an authentic social order to a series of "market transactions"--the sale of attention and engagement, the purchase of distractions, the endless scrolling and clicking, … as we drift into disconnected spheres of loneliness and anxiety as we sense, despite all the phony optimism and distraction, that our society is coming apart at the seams, and we're powerless to so anything but opt out of the madness.

Smith summarizes with a chart:

For a more general overview, check this article out, which emphasizes the society wide impact of a generation of failed ideology:

Western Economy Has Rotted Away To A Tipping Point By A Generation Of Neoliberal Economic Theory

This paragraph jumped out:

Can you spot the theme running through all of this?

How about a Western economy rotted away to a potential tipping point by a generation of neoliberal economic theory put into practice, and now experiencing simultaneous: failing ideology; failing infrastructure; failing institutions; failing national security; failing fiscal policy; failing demographics; a failing workforce (say small business-owners); failing society (say the Mounties); and failing global architecture? None of that suggests that we are heading back to a world of ultra-low rates and ultra-low inflation.

The truth of all this—the dissolvent effect of Neo-liberalism—is reflected in the decay of our constitutional order. It’s a commonplace observation that our national legislature has largely outsourced lawmaking to the Executive Branch—the Administrative State that writes the regulations that govern our lives. Legislation largely boils down to dividing the cake of public finance among interest groups, rather than addressing America’s very real political, economic, and social problems.

Instead, Americans now largely look to the federal courts to address their concerns about where the Uniparty Woke government is leading America. The result is that Americans now vote, in a very real sense, for control over the shape of the federal courts—little of effective change that addresses our problems is even expected of the national legislature. The obvious problem with this is that the court system is not designed to serve this function. As a process for either change or the preservation of rights that are under government attack, the court system is typically unwieldy and far too slow—as well wary of offending the political branches. The fact that this is now the reality of the “right to petition the government” that the American Revolution was supposed to be about (to simplify) is, of course, a symptom of systemic dysfunction in our constitutional order.

Another problem with this attempt at a judicial workaround to governmental dysfunction or malfunction is that federal judges, even at the lower levels, live in a rarified social setting that is often out of touch with societal realities and concerns. Exhibit number one is Neil Gorsuch. An admirable justice for the most part, he nevertheless saw fit to plunge American societal into sexual chaos with the Bostock case’s surrender to extreme anti-reality gender ideology. The courts have largely failed to safeguard the rights of citizens and even the national security, as witness the repeated

This appears to be where we are as a society. It’s not a situation that lends itself to high hopes. About all we can say is that the Trump court, while cautious about overstepping properly judicial roles relating to actual “cases and controversies”, has shown a willingness to address fundamental issues. They remain disposed to allow cases work their way through the lower courts and to accept only cases that frame the issues that they regard as the most important. Nevertheless, we can see an agenda aimed at clipping the wings of the administrative state and forcing the legislative branch to return to its proper role. Can this enforce a fundamental revival of our constitutional order? History would suggest that it can’t. But it appears to be all we have for now.