Why Is America Destroying Itself?

Influential ideologues seek to profit from our ruin

comiclonilove

A post shared by @comiclonilove

Trump’s tariffs seem insane: A massive, completely unnecessary, utterly self-inflicted wound against American interests and the economy, particularly destructive for middle class and working people here. According to The Yale Daily News, James Surowiecki, a former New Yorker writer on economics, “found that the administration had simply divided the trade deficit — the goods the United States imports from a country minus the goods it exports to that country — by the total goods the United States imports from that country. Then, to arrive at the “reciprocal” rate … this figure was halved.” Apparently, Chat GPT was used to arrive at the final figures — because, why not?

Surowiecki believes the tariffs are a result of Trump’s irrational hatred of trade deficits: “Trump, whenever he sees a trade deficit and I mean with any country that we have a trade deficit with… he basically says to himself we're getting ripped off … and so what he wants to do is find a way to basically stop that because he hates getting ripped off in his own mind.” A lot of journalists think that this is an example of Trump being deranged or stupid. I don’t agree, entirely.

I consider Trump’s tariffs part of an intentional, ideological effort to destroy the American middle class and working class. Part of the goal is to further centralizes wealth and control in the hands of Trump and his co-conspirators, who want the U.S. reduced to the tragic conditions we find in Russia and North Korea. With the tariffs, Trump also gets to force companies and countries to grovel for a reprieve, which gives him a sadistic thrill. But much of the impetus for this destructive assault on America and the world comes from the ideologues of the “Dark Enlightenment or “NxReactionary” movements, which Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, and Elon Musk openly support.

At first glance, we might find a bizarre contradiction between Trump’s arrogant projection of America as a unilateral power that can stride across the world, punishing or demoting its former allies and trading partners at will, and the future predictions made by Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Svrinivisan and William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in The Sovereign Individual (1997), which Thiel and Andreessen see as a guide to our future.

“The cyber economy will dissolve the nation-state just as surely as the nation-state dissolved the Church,” Rees-Mogg and Davidon write. “The ability to charge income tax will vanish, and with it the revenue base of the modern state. Governments will be forced to operate like businesses, competing for customers, or they will go bankrupt.” What’s amazing is that the tech oligarchs actively seek this outcome. They can now undertake this experiment through their control over the government — although nobody voted for these kinds of policies or radical experiments.

According to their own statements, the extremist libertarian NxReactionaries actively want Trump to accelerate the destruction of the U.S. economy and the administrative state. This will bring about a more savage, Hobbesian or Nietzschean “state of nature” where the strong “sovereign individual” will be totally free, while most people get reduced to a destitute condition of enslavement or serfdom (fuck em!) before they are replaced by robots and turned into biodiesel.

Yarvin “jokes” about this, as Gil Duran reports in “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas” (The New Republic, July 22, 2024):

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

To quote The Sovereign Individual once again: “As revenues shrink, states will be increasingly unable to sustain the bloated entitlements and bureaucracies of the mass-democracy era. The entire structure of the welfare state will unravel. Many people will find this terrifying, but for others, it will offer unprecedented opportunity.”

Thiel wrote the introduction for the reissue of this book, while Andreessen cites it as his major influence. What’s extraordinary is that the NxReactionary tech oligarchs are now actively seeking to bring about this dystopian condition, with the support of Trump, MAGA, and every Republican in Congress (apparently many of them receive regular death threats to their families, warning them not to step out of line), despite the devastating effects it will have on the people who vote for them and use their products. At the same time as they want to destroy the nation-state, schizophrenically, the tech magnates also boost American patriotism. America will become a super-potent “Tech Republic,” according to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, in his new book. Apparently, futuristic weapons and military surveillance technology can bring us a shiny, happy future.

Yarvin envisions a fragmented future of "patchwork states"—a global archipelago of city-state-like entities, each run by a sovereign CEO or “corporate monarch.” Yarvin — JD Vance’s main theoretical influence — sees democracy as an obsolete operating system riddled with inefficiencies and moral decay. Yarvin proposes that governance should be modeled on the tech startup: streamlined, authoritarian, optimized for performance, with residents as "customers" who can opt in or out. Yarvin’s vision overlaps with Balaji Srinivasan’s concept of the "network state," which imagines cloud-based communities forming around shared values, eventually manifesting physical territory and achieving diplomatic recognition. Srinivasan has a vageluy affable, libertarian, techno-utopian vibe. Yarvin wants Carl Schmitt-like dictatorial control and an elite hierarchy supporting his White Supremacist agenda, as Nafeez Ahmed unpacks in “How Nazi Race Science Conquered the White House, and is Coming for Your Democracy”. Both converge on the idea that digital technology impels the breakdown of traditional states and the rise of new, post-national forms of sovereignty.

As I have proposed previously, the plan is to gut the U.S. economy by creating a recession or depression. This will give the transnational oligarchic elite their opportunity to buy up bankrupt companies and public lands that creditors will force the government to sell to the highest bidder (Yosemite could be a nice place for a Saudi golf course). Naomi Klein covered this in The Shock Doctrine, calling it “disaster capitalism.” This is what the West inflicted on Eastern bloc countries after the fall of the USSR, when American economists (such as Jeffrey Sachs) rushed in to compel these countries to privatize all of their socialized institutions and public goods as fast as possible. This was a disastrous policy that led to the rise of Putin and kleptocracy in Russia. Now Russia is getting its revenge on us.

As people lose their wealth, their retirement savings and social security, they will become more scared and reactive, less able to organize, reflect, and resist. They will be forced to use most of their energy to fight for bare survival. That’s the plan.

I realize some of my readers are cryptocurrency enthusiasts who hope for a huge bump in their investments due to Trump’s pro-crypto policies. My theory is that crypto will turn out to be the subprime mortgage disaster of 2027-ish. With little alternative as the markets sink, people will desperately move their financial resources into unregulated or poorly regulated exchanges. Trump and his tech broligarch advisors are systemically removing fraud and consumer protections, closing the agencies that helped people retrieve funds from fraudulent and deceptive financial service operations. The whole idea is to “pump and dump” the U.S. economy so we end up with a serf society similar to Russia or North Korea.

The idea that the U.S. is going to recreate a vast manufacturing infrastructure here like we had in the 1960s, and that millions of MAGA devotees will be re-employed turning the tiny screws on iPhones is just a ridiculous pipe dream. Andreessen and Horowitz are boosting this:

The supply chains for manufacturing are distributed all over the world now, and we will not be able to reconstitute those industries here successfully, as The New York Times reports. The Trump regime also ignores the reality of “limits to growth,” approaching resource shortages and energy supply limits, not to mention the catastrophic impacts of global warming which will reduce world GDP by over 40% by 2100 as temperatures spike to 3 degrees Celsius past pre-industrial levels. Biden’s plan to build a renewable energy infrastructure with the Inflation Reduction Act was the right plan for the U.S., but Trump has dismantled it.

Unfortunately, the oligarchs are utterly out of touch with the planetary realities we face. Insulated by their vast fortunes, they promote the fantasy of America becoming a world industrial powerhouse again while, at the same time, they believe the U.S. as a nation will collapse and the time is nigh to strip-mine it for spare parts and cash. While some “regenerative” social thinkers are intrigued by the prospect that the tariffs may force the relocalization of production that has been part of degrowth ideology, this will be happening in a toxic climate of maximized wealth extraction, ecological disregard and corporate deregulation.

While plunging the entire U.S. into an entirely unnecessary recession or depression should ensure massive midterm losses for the Republicans, Trump is suspiciously totally unconcerned about this as he thinks about a third term. Why is he so unconcerned? Perhaps he doesn’t believe we will have elections at all or, if we do have them, the Right will have tilted the system so far in its favor that there will be no possibility of regime change. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act is one avenue for accomplishing the second goal, while calling a state of emergency or martial law to stop elections would be a straightforward way to accomplish the first goal.

The SAVE Act is a bill that would require people to show official documents proving they’re U.S. citizens—like a passport or birth certificate—before they can register to vote in federal elections. Supporters, mostly Republicans, claim it’s needed to stop non-citizens from voting, even though there's almost no evidence that this happens. If passed ,the bill will make it much harder for many eligible Americans to vote—especially married women whose IDs don’t match their current name, older voters who may not have easy access to documents, and lower-income Americans who can't afford to track down or replace lost paperwork. The House passed the bill in July 2024, but it’s currently stalled in the Senate. Opponents warn it could block millions of citizens — something like 54 million American women changed their names after marriage — from voting.

Thiel has stated in the past that he believes women should not have the right to vote. ​In his infamous essay “The Education of a Libertarian”, Peter Thiel expressed skepticism about the compatibility of freedom and democracy, stating: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.” For Thiel and his acolytes, young tradwives are better off creating lots of (white) babies, I suppose, as we slide back to a new Gilded Age.

Most Americans continue to be asleep and detached, ignoring the severity of what’s happening. As a society, we have lost our habitual practice of moral courage and mass resistance as we see in other countries around the world right now. It is also the case that as many as five million people went to mass protests around the U.S. last weekend and the establishment media barely reported on this. Among the best things we can do now is to build local community networks and organize face to face meetings for people — Blue, Red, Purple — to process what is underway, and the ideologies behind it. Ironically, all of our social media use has left people dreadfully uninformed. Despite our communications tools, we remain alienated and disconnected from each other as rapacious forces decimate our country based on truly horrifying ideologies. But at least it’s almost Spring.