this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren't crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.
I can't think of much that hasn't gone downhill since 2016. the world isn't ending, but it's ahistoric to claim that history is the steady march of progress. dark ages happen. empires decline. democracies wither.
America is in decline, yes, but all of those things that america is losing, other countries are gaining. Most countries in the world got better and are still getting better. The first world/america is getting worse, but, as you said, it is just part of the cycle. The world is not ending because US is going downhill.
I agree with the sentiment as to the futility of the doomer/nihilist mindset, being a reformed (or rather, being in the process of reforming) doomer nihilist myself, I know the call of the void all to well. However...
It's not just the USA declining - it's really everywhere. Call it whatever you want, late-stage capitalism, the rise of the techbroligarchy and fascism-adjacent currents, etc...
But there's stuff going on. It's harder to get a job, harder to get an education, harder to earn a living wage, harder to get ahead in general. And it's everywhere.
Yes, these are troubling times for many places since these fascists seem to wal together whenever they show up. But I see a much sharper decline in freedom in the last 10 years. Even so, let's look at other numbers I'll use Brazil as an example: poverty reduce from 68% in 1970 to 10%. There were 450.000 thousand university students in 1970, now 8.4 million. 28% of houses had access to sanitation in 1970, now it is almost 80%.
This improvement happened and is still happening all around the world. We save so many kids lives that we overpopulated the world. We just have to be careful now to not let the assholes undo this
For Middle Income White People in Certain States
But we also had the hanging threat of nuclear war, leaded gasoline in the air and painted all over the walls, Satanic Panic, an AIDS epidemic killing millions of people, several large market crashes that deindustrializee the Midwest, and $7/gal, and a Global War on Terror.
None of this was indicative of better economics or a functional political system.
mRNA technology premiering on the eve of a killer pandemic leaps to mind.
that's fair. progress in medicine more generally has been good. we've started curing fatal genetic disorders, we found the cause of multiple sclerosis, there's a new antipsychotic with a novel MoA for the first time since chlorpromazine..
Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren't fascists. even Trump wasn't a fully-fledged fascist in his first term. he is now, and what's happening to the Federal Government is unprecedented.
look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems, but you can't claim Hitler was just more of the same. so it is with the US in 2025.
Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.
Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren't strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.
The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.
Shark Island concentration camp
This is more than just "Pobody's Nerfect". It's marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don't like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.
The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.
Trump didn't invent any of this.