The military collapse in Afghanistan is being explained away in Washington as an inevitable policy move. The withdrawal was begun by the Trump administration and, anyway, the nation’s longest and costliest war had to come to an end at some point.
But America’s allies, with whom the flight from Kabul had not been coordinated, see this as a major milestone in the collapse of the American empire. And the events of the past month in a faraway land are especially important for those who are fighting the war on the frontiers of the crumbling American world order, notably for Ukraine.
Foreign policy is always an outgrowth of the state of affairs at home, which in the U.S. has been in flux for over a decade and is now moving in a truly troubling direction.
Karl Marx believed that economics is the basis of social development — and Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics is the key to what is happening in the U.S. today. For four decades the American government has been pumping ever cheapening money into the economy and cutting taxes on the assumption that while the rich will certainly get richer, the wealth will, like water, drip downward along the social ladder, with diminishing portions reaching all of its rungs.
The result has been radically different. Over the past 20 years, the two distinct economies have emerged: one highly dynamic and prosperous and the other backward, disorganized, depressed and full of uncertainty.
One economy has plenty of money churning around, high savings and valuable assets, as well as unlimited cheap credit. Growing prosperity has led to a very high rate of inflation for the upscale goods and services consumed in that economy and rapid degradation of money: pretty much everyone in that economy is now a millionaire.
The other American economy is not so much poor as left behind. Instead of inflation, it is experiencing deflation as outsourced production, advances in technology, box stores and online shopping keep bringing down the prices of generic goods and services ordinary people consume—so that they can now buy more stuff than their parents even though their incomes have stagnated for decades. It is a stuck-in-the-rut economy without careers, satisfying jobs or something to look forward to.
As Marx would have predicted, the two economies have given rise to two different societies in the same country— or even two different nations. There were the rich and the poor in the earlier postwar decades, but their lifestyles were fundamentally similar. They shopped in the same supermarkets and department stores, vacationed in the same places and drove similar cars—with a degree of difference afforded by disparate incomes.
Now the two nations’ lifestyles are different in a fundamental way. The prosperous nation takes full advantage of the globalized consumer economy, jetting around the world, eating exotic and healthy foods and consuming sophisticated international cultural products, driving foreign cars and watching the English Premier League. It is a world of prestigious education, quality health care and expensive hobbies.
The division roughly runs along the God-and-guns line, with the left-behind embracing a kind of charismatic mega-church Protestantism and unbridled right to own guns.
The country is divided with approximately one-third of the population deeply rooted in each of the two economies and another third in the grey area between them. Each nation believes they are the real America, the repository of its true values. One simply does not understand the other.
Economic divisions have widened the existing rifts between various groups: whites and people of color, natives, and immigrants, secular and religious, Christians and non-Christians, LGBTQ and straight, North and South.
Naturally, the winners are liberal-minded and compassionate, while the losers are resentful and angry. The winners like America as it is, the losers don’t and want to change it. They want to return to some pure homogenous prelapsarian version of the United States.
These economic divisions have now upset America’s social contract, undermining the legitimacy of the ruling class and casting into doubt its right to govern. It is what Lenin defined as a revolutionary situation: when “the lower class doesn’t want to and the upper class cannot live in the old way”.
The election of Donald Trump was a revolutionary event in the sense that it marked the end of the previously existing social arrangement. Trumpism questions all the axioms of American foreign and domestic policies developed by the ruling elites over previous decades and generally accepted by society.
At home, Trump attacked immigration, the cornerstone of American self-image, stirred white racism implicitly glorifying the Confederacy and attacked most respected American institutions, including not just the military but fallen heroes as well. He rejected science, called the independent media enemies of the people and questioned the validity of free and fair elections.
Internationally, he embraced Vladimir Putin and other dictators around the world, picked fights with NATO allies, railed against free trade, attacked the European Union and suggested that America won’t fulfill its international commitments.
Trump has been voted out but trumpism endures and is likely to thrive and be strengthened in opposition. Things almost got out of hand during the pandemic and all that is required to light the fuse is a good old economic crisis. The Federal Reserve, which has been pumping free liquidity into the economy, is very likely to oblige. Or rather, it is no longer able to change the course charted by its presidents Alan Greenspan in the 1990s and by Ben Bernanke in the early years of this century.
The inflows of free cash inevitably create a bubble economy, in which speculative bubbles have to burst regularly. Each crisis, caused by a surfeit of liquidity, has been doused by infusions of even more liquidity. After each crisis financial speculators who had been responsible in the first place were not punished but, on the contrary, bailed out and then rewarded. The socio-economic divisions after each crisis became deeper and more pronounced.
Each new crisis, moreover, has been more severe than its predecessor. The 2008 mortgage debacle was worse than the 2000 dot.com bubble and the pandemic crisis was worse than 2008. Each new crisis required more money so that now the count has reached several trillion. Like any other pyramid scheme, this one is not going to go on forever — but the longer it goes on the greater the eventual disaster will be.
In any revolutionary situation, as Vladimir Lenin knew well, the most committed and extreme radical minority has the best chance of seizing control and subjugating the rest to its will. This is what the Jacobins did in France after the French Revolution and Lenin’s Bolsheviks were able to do in Russia in 1917. This is exactly what right-wing radicals are hoping to do in the US now.
Radicals always have their own agenda. Many of those who made the French Revolution then perished on the guillotine. Russian revolutionary sailors who stormed the Winter Palace and peasants who burned their landowners’ estates were eventually shot or starved to death. There is no reason to think that America’s radicals will do differently.
