The idea of America was always a sham. Its genesis is mired in the dishonorable realities of genocide, slavery, racism, capitalism, and the profound social inequities that existed within its original settler-colonial population. Now, a vastly more complex multi-racial society still shadowed by its origins, it has devolved into an oligarchy supported, for the sake of appearances and the amusement of the populace, by a Congress which pits libertarian Nationalists versus Imperial Globalists.
Almost half a century into the profound heart-rot that the neoliberal ethos represents, America is split between the nativist racists epitomized by their putative leader, the amoral Donald Trump, and the woke Russophobes, who remain locked in a time warp where they attempt to overturn the result of the 2016 election. Neither side has fully comprehended the nation's new reality. America is no longer 'Chimerica', the economist Zoltan Pozsar's geographic mythologizing of the economic marriage that consisted of China spending the proceeds of its massive American trade surplus on U.S. Treasury securities. This was a land in which cheap Chinese consumer goods hollowed out the U.S. manufacturing base while Americans were lulled into an entirely false sense of their prosperity bolstered by debt and a rapid expansion of the money supply. China's Covid shutdowns and the continued U.S. support of Taiwan have roiled that happy land which is now entirely doomed by China's recent alliance with Russia.
In Pozsar's mythical atlas, this latter alliance is writ as 'Chussia' wherein the two great powers construct a tentacular Eurasian grid that encompasses infrastructure, transport, raw materials, and energy over the entire Global South - widowing, in the process, Europe and the United States. While America remains substantially self-sufficient in energy, thanks to its fracking boom, Europe's loss of cheap Russian oil, gas, and raw materials will decimate its industrial base and pauperize much of its population.
In the U.S., radical restructuring of the global power structure, extreme weather and deep disparities of wealth now present a perfect storm into which the ship of state has sailed. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are remotely adequate to the challenges of navigating the country into a secure haven. The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, suggested that, "The only genuine ideas reside in the mind of the shipwrecked: all the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce." In this condition of desperation there is the possibility of rebirth of, perhaps, a revitalized America in a multi-polar world.
This nation's shameful birth has not been ennobled over time, but, up until quite recently, there have been historically significant moments of hope:
. The ending of slavery and the subsequent founding of Reconstruction (undone after fifteen short years, by unreconstructed racists).
. The Progressive era, when politicians, prompted by muck-raking journalists, successfully campaigned for the establishment of unemployment insurance and other social programs in housing, education, health and public safety.
, The New Deal, which introduced a range of government sponsored programs which ensured full employment (amongst whites) during the Great Depression, and which included passage of the Social Security and Unemployment Insurance programs in 1935.
. The Federal Housing Acts of 1949 and 1956, which mandated the building of subsidized low-income housing units throughout the nation.
. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
. The Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965, which ensured free health care for both the aged and low-income citizens.
In recent history, such hopes for an improvement in the general welfare have been consistently dashed. Although social services continued to be developed into the 1970's, as a legacy of Johnson's War on Poverty, Reagan foreshadowed their marginalization in his campaign speech of 1976, when he promised their elimination or restriction, based on his fabrication of the 'Black Welfare Queen'. In power by 1981, he followed through by reducing benefits and imposing Dickensian means tests. Later, George Bush Sr. proposed his 'Thousand-Points of Light' as a privatized, charitable alternative to federal programs. But it was left to Bill Clinton to begin the dismantling of a welfare system painstakingly developed over nearly a century. As a corollary to Reagan's creation of a new social class, the precariat, Clinton passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which developed vicious new police powers and sentencing rules that led to the mass incarceration of predominantly black and brown citizens.
Late in 1997, Clinton huddled with leading Republican Newt Gingrich to plan the privatization of both Social Security and Medicare. The American people owe a huge debt of gratitude to Monica Lewinsky, when early in January 1998, her affair with the president was revealed. Clinton then spent two years attempting to, at first, obfuscate his involvement with 'That Woman', and then defending himself against a bi-partisan Impeachment. During George W. Bush's two terms, Republicans' continued to threaten Social Security by claiming that it faced imminent bankruptcy. Similar scare tactics were applied to Medicare and Medicaid. Then, in his first term, Obama, working closely with private health-insurers, drug companies and for-profit hospitals, poured a great deal of energy into creating a rickety, stop-gap program dubbed 'Obamacare' that has now further delayed the creation of a federally financed 'Medicare-for-All' universal health insurance scheme.
Along with federal programs designed as a safety net for the welfare of the nation's more vulnerable populations, U.S. workers continued, throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century, to join labor unions which sought to establish the right to strike to gain improved wages, better work conditions, shorter hours, and free health care.
Labor first organized en masse in response to the nation-wide development of railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1880's organized strikes by labor unions had become routine. In the period between 1881 and 1905, there were 37,000 work-stoppages. Despite the federal government's use of U.S. troops as strike-breakers, epitomized by the 1894 Pullman Palace Car stoppage in which thirteen strikers were shot dead, by 1900, the standard of living for U.S. industrial workers was higher than ever.
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