A follow-up to the article that kicked off this thread: How America Collapsed. What Happens When You Replace a Society… | by umair haque | Eudaimonia and Co
Markets are seen to be the cure-alls for every kind of social ill, challenge, or issue — the last, best, and only ways to coordinate every last aspect of human thought, action, effort, or ideas.
I think it’s worth reading both, as the second seems to form a coherent argument as to where the collapse’s starting point is from the point of view of the author. The above quote is the thesis statement for where the collapse starts.
I think in putting it all on the markets, they’re putting the starting point of the collapse far later than most of us here would judge the starting point for the rot, but I can see where it can be folded in to some other perspectives, in both where the conservative side’s inflection point as well as the liberal.
The first step in American collapse was that the right gave up on entirely the idea of social order. Unpersuaded? Consider how in the 1950s, Republicanism believed in a social contract, taxes, and public goods — but by the 2000s, it believed in, well, none of these whatsoever. The GOP stopped offer people any active aspect of a social contract at all — its only agenda was to “drown government in a bathtub”.
I think that this view of the failures of the American right is generous, in that it’s just saying. “It happened” without a question as to why. It seems a decent furthering of the idea, since the author uses the 1950’s as a touchstone, to consider the fact that since the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s undermined the primary reason for supporting the social order for a number of right thinkers: they believed in the social order because the social order said they were better than brown people.
If the social order doesn’t promise you superiority, then why bother believing in any kind of social order at all?
How did the American left respond? Did it fill the vacuum left by the right? For example, with a vision for not just a “better” social order — but any kind of social order at all, not just the rule of the strong over the weak, which is the lack of a social order? One grounded in a functioning, real-world social contract? Not at all. It, too, gave up any interest in providing average, everyday people the basics of a good life, or of moderating the gain of winners — and hence, the bottom fell out of the social order, while the top floated off into another galaxy.
I think there’s a generous and cynical way to look at the left’s actions. The more generous one might be the belief that the problem is hard, and you can’t force the Klansman not to be a Klansman, so you just try and make the entire system “neutral” and “market-based” to make it harder to argue with than just telling people to stop being racist fucks and they and all their grandparents were fuckers for being racist fucks. And even that’s more than a little cowardly.
The more cynical take is the American left went there because it was easier to work together with Money because Money offered the honeyed words of “we want everybody to participate in the market.”
And yeah, I draw a lot of it back to race. But the past decade has seemed to only strengthen this argument at the reason why our system is falling apart so easily, because of that essential racist tribalism.
