I think rarher than the end of history what we're witnessing is the end of morality. I couldn't have conceived of what is taking place in Gaza and the West Bank these past 3 years, that a whole world would stand by and watch it happen without sanctions that would literally shut Israel down until they delivered the leaders to the Hague. Most people don't care, Biden cared just enough to wring his hands in phony desperation and it is a little encouraging that enough Amerins did care to cause Harris to lose the election and send the USA to Hell. Because certainly Trump doesn't care at all. He's the most immoral person I've yet run across and worse comes out every day of a life of theft, lying, cheating, rape, pedophelia, and worse if we hold him resposible for the Venezuelan fishers. But stikl, Starmer and co. Stand by him and criminalize protest at the butchery in Gaza and morality is dead, and so is the last human.
All socialists are anti-fascists, which is what the term "antifa" stands for. I am a socialist and a supporter of the Socialist Equality Party, and I have been antifascist since I was a teenager in the 1960s and demonstrating against the imperialist war in Vietnam. Anti-fascists can be anarchists, it is true, but the majority of us are socialists and left-leaning.
I was a socialist since my teenage years in the 1950s! However, more recently, I came across Paul Cudenec writings and have become an anarchist; in the sense that humans are a part of nature (which I have always believed), therefore, anarchism is natural because, as Peter Kropotkin describes in Mutual Aid (1902), left to their own devices, people and other animals tend to cooperate with others for their collective benefit. In effect, he was echoing Paracelsus’s vision of nature as “a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselves”. (Paul Cudenec in Nature, Essence and Anarchy 2016)
All governments are socialist to a degree . Social security , government health care , government housing and even public transport are socialist policies . The issues are tied to accountability and society's ability to support these policies . The other issue (for me ) is the creeping changes that are being made to language . The meaning of "conservitive" , "labour" and "liberal" no longer apply , and politics has become weaponised . In almost all disputes the middle is uninhabitable and the extremists rule. "Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
"History will thankfully go on once we see the end of them and the work of repairing the mess they are making begins."
I found this a surprisingly optimistic ending to an appropriately gloomy assessment of the State of the Union. Back when Trump ran against Hilary, I wrote that voting for Clinton was like voting for cancer; voting for Trump like voting for a heart attack. Trump's first term was much less catastrophic than I had expected, but this time around the cardiac arrest is massive and undeniable. The point being, that cancer or heart attack, in my view the United States is terminally ill, collapse is inevitable. I don't think there is any real prospect of repairing the damage post Trump. The most we can hope for (and work towards) as the world stumbles towards some semi-stable multi-polarity is that the empire collapses in a way that doesn't end in some nuclear fiasco - a genuine end of history.
I really don't know enough about the UN. In principle a good idea, in practice too co-opted by Western agendas to function as it ought? Hopefully, if it can't be reformed it will be replaced by [a] genuinely multipolar institution(s).
Unfortunately, I am not too hopeful... I think we (the West = minority world) are on the road to perdition, but out of the ashes something good will emerge 🙏
The Christianity that the regime wants to protect is a folk-version of Christianity, not "orthodox Christianity" at all. In fact real Catholic and Orthodox Christianity would more likely to be in fascism's crosshairs. Fascist Christianity includes Christian Zionists and Evangelicals, which are perfect for the MAGA end times because they are all End Time, eschatological ways of being.
Surely there are Christians in this world who live moral lives and practice the Way of Christ. I just wish that all who call themselves 'Christian' would do so.
The Trump "regime"? Really? Was Biden's a regime or an administration?
I'm a former leftist who now identifies as MAGA living in the deep south. Where do you get your idea that MAGA is about hate? From Twitter, where NONE of my MAGA-supporting neighbors have accounts?
There's a way to talk about current events without furthering this deceitful narrative that ordinary Americans are hateful jerks. I am SO SICK of this false characterization of my kind neighbors. Y'all have no idea and that's why so many ordinary people have such negative reactions to leftists.
Why don't you come down to MAGA country and see for yourself before you assume we're all idiot racists who blindly support Trump?
Did you even read this commentary? Obviously not. Because it has nothing to do with the MAGA base. It's a critique of the Trump administration and its abuses of power. Trump and the Zionist neocon idiots he's surrounded himself with are shredding the constitution, as people like the conservative commentator Judge Napolitano daily report on. The role of journalism, as a reminder, is to expose the abuses of power and not pander to it. Now, if you were at all familiar with the work at The Floutist, you would know the scathing commentaries we published exposing the criminality of the Biden regime. We aren't political partisans at The Floutist. Grow up!
Trump's administration is a cabal of fascists and criminals. They have taken over this country and are destroying it and everything it is supposed to stand for with ruthless abandon. ANYONE who supports Trump and his band of warmongering incompetents and liars is just as evil as he is. Fuck what Rachel, above, says. She knows NOTHING.
Carolyn, Thanks for your comment, as always. I mostly agree with you. Though to be entirely fair: Biden and his band of criminal incompetents paved the way for much of what's now happening. Were the warmongering Democrats not so thoroughly corrupt, had they not abandoned the working class, Trump would never have been elected. Also, I think Rachel does know some important things: She knows that many (most?) of Trump's supporters are not racist white supremacists, as the Democrats disingenuously accuse them of being. She knows poor and working class people are suffering in this country and have been thrown under the bus by the Democrats. That's not nothing, if you'll excuse my use of a double negative. Thanks for your support of The Floutist! We always value your comments. Cheers and a very happy holiday season to you, however you may celebrate it. Warm best, Cara
That's how I took it; not against individuals, but I do how it could be taken differently. You, yourself should carefully pull back alittle on the snideness of some of your comments. Hard to hear someone talking like that.
The article quotes somebody, so I assume the author agrees with the quotation, that:
<<Because the future MAGA wants cannot be attained, the movement has no constructive program. It cannot build anything, because nothing it builds would satisfy it. All it can do is destroy…. The rage that animates MAGA is the rage of impossibility—the fury that comes from wanting something that cannot be had…. This is what happens when a political movement promises to restore an irrecoverable past. Unable to deliver, it can only demolish.>>
You think MAGA are angry because black people are free or because trans people exist. You assume a helluva lot about people who don't agree with your social views. And in the meantime you completely miss that MAGA reminisces for the past because in the past, one salary fed a family.
Stuck-up leftists have a lot in common with MAGA. But they don't see it because they love the team sport of hate and refuse to look at working people as their equals.
Perhaps you miss the actual events in the world that are acted in the name of MAGA? What is there MAGA about kicking out some of the most hard-working people in the country? What is MAGA about brutalizing cities that don't conform with Trump's political ideology? What is MAGA about murdering thousands of Palestinians? Or wasting millions of dollars trying to force regime change on Venezuela?
Look the fact is that everyone wants to make America prosperous, and even 'great' as long as that greatness does not come at others' expense. But if MAGA means a white, Christian country that plunders the world, no thank you.
Just about to write a response, I was, but I see Cara M has more than adequately pointed out where you have not done a proper reading of the essay from Patrick L. Ordinary US people as hateful jerks - really? Deluded, not served well by Trump or Biden (two sides of the one coin) but Patrick - who has never sneered at ordinary folk. You are way off course here Rachel...
The theme underlying all of capitalist America's sick oligarch maneuvers in the world is a determination to prevent any serious good being delivered to the suffering supermajority of the world's people and the lunatic mania to hoard all benefit and privilege to a dirty, disgusting cadre of its monstrously evil and soulless elite.
There are two sides of the "resource curse" coin that must be considered whenever discussing geopolitics or US foreign policy. Obviously, the resources must secured for western consumption above all but the other side of it is "Demand Destruction". Resource rich countries must not be allowed to develop to the point where they start dipping into those resources for their own people's uses thereby speeding up depletion. This goes for other non-resource rich countries as well.
These twin axioms are the inflexible bedrock of all US foreign policy since 1950. The millions of deaths along with destruction of economic opportunities and ruin of quality of life for the vast majority of people everywhere the USA or their corporations have gone from Korea to Ukraine (and now on to Venezuela) aren't BUGS, they are FEATURES.
Right now, Europe is being treated to a drastic lowering of their standards of living, death of their (non military) productive industrial bases AND required to undertake the destruction of their few remaining socialist programs in order to divert whatever they have left into the coffers of the neoliberal heirs to the MIC.
Shortly after WWII, the Ford foundation paid for university and think tank studies on world wide resource availability, population and consumption trends determining that this MUST be the future for the whole world- Or the USA/"West" would not be able to maintain the power of corporations and wealth of their ownership.
This morning I quickly [too quickly] went through three economics talks: Hudson & Wolff, Alastair Crooke, Larry C. Johnson, and then a second run through of an article by Yves Smith. Trump campaigned on peace, but the fallout from his new economic contrivances AFAICS-or-guess may double the number of angry humans that, for example, Gaza has angered [yeah but I'm another one that keeps an eye peeled for false flags]. And too many of those people might end up in charge of nukes (the odds will increase IOW) in which case his fluky "sense" on Ukraine could end up cancelled.
This is real finger-on-the-pulse understanding. I certainly will never return to travel the US, to see kinfolk and friends and visit places as yet unseen - it is way beyond the pale in terms of the ugly paranoias and inhuman intent of these Trumpian times. The Handmaid's Tale is almost set in place. Thanks, PL.
Please understand it's just a question of time before the imperial country requires that ALL the vassal countries of the so-called "west" must implement this ageda.
Furthermore, for "Antifa", substitute "communist". Then think of the McCarthyism in the cold war era. Then review a previous bipartisan effort to export this abroad in a more brutal format during the cold war:
It's likely that what the current admin has in mind will make the McCarthy era seem quaint at home. And that is what they will be looking to set as the standard abroad within the rest of the eurocolonial empire, and they will be looking to impose it in the current day set of non-aligned countries. Basically torching the earth to avoid BRICS and the non-alignment concept from being established as an alternative approach.
"I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants… "
For a moment I thought you were speaking of the Dems who colluded with the Intel Community to undermine a sitting President with Russian Collusion baloney and who manned NGOs with the prior administrations acolytes to effect censorship of free speech including “malinformation”-true statements that undermine the government.
In effect, we have been growing Trump since the JFK assassination coup, and both political parties are complicit. Over the years, at least with Jimmy Carter, neoliberalism and its financial capitalism have given a series of presidents more corrupt than the one before. Trump is simply the last manifestation.
You may not be an American by birth. Unfortunately, most Americans cannot hold two seemingly conflicting thoughts or opinions in their minds at the same time. Dems were corrupt in trying to bring down Trump with the Russiagate BS (there were other legitimate crimes on his rap sheet that are essentially un-prosecutable because both "sides" are guilty of them), Trump won the presidency again, thus Trump is our savior and one must support him fully. I'm sure people in other countries are victims to this kind of thought as well, but it's a little bit different and more extreme in the US. Which is one reason that "the US" has endeavored to "Americanize" economies, politics, and journalism everywhere it can. The Borg is actually a very apt analogy.
Ever met a european? Americans are all about the practical, does it work and can I make a buck off of it? Europeans are all about groupthink and the done thing.
Apparently you not only didn't read the article above for comprehension, but also are unaware of the author's other work including "Death of the Liberal Class." I recommend picking up a copy if you really want to understand where people like Laurence (and his readers) are coming from. The world isn't binary and 'winner take all' or 'he who has the gold (or sits in office) makes the rules and that's the way it has to be' isn't a viable or morally coherent way to see things, let alone govern or be governed.
Fascism has a dictionary definition. That we have been so very afraid of 'hyperbole' has allowed fascism to take deep roots before any dare mention its name.
America was always fascistically inclined (I was born in the 60s. I knew the pledge of allegiance before I could read and the flag code before I could multiply.) But we tap danced and pussy-footed around this term, even as it ate the unions and destroyed any hope of a welfare state - all painted as sort of allegiance to a vague enemy influence.
Now, fascism in the US is in full flower, its garden hoed, fertilized and planted well before Trump by BOTH parties.
People: this is what fascism in full flower LOOKS LIKE. Stop worrying that fascism might arrive.. It arrived. It arrived a long time ago - with Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Obama... this is just its face with the mask of polity ripped off.
I think rarher than the end of history what we're witnessing is the end of morality. I couldn't have conceived of what is taking place in Gaza and the West Bank these past 3 years, that a whole world would stand by and watch it happen without sanctions that would literally shut Israel down until they delivered the leaders to the Hague. Most people don't care, Biden cared just enough to wring his hands in phony desperation and it is a little encouraging that enough Amerins did care to cause Harris to lose the election and send the USA to Hell. Because certainly Trump doesn't care at all. He's the most immoral person I've yet run across and worse comes out every day of a life of theft, lying, cheating, rape, pedophelia, and worse if we hold him resposible for the Venezuelan fishers. But stikl, Starmer and co. Stand by him and criminalize protest at the butchery in Gaza and morality is dead, and so is the last human.
All socialists are anti-fascists, which is what the term "antifa" stands for. I am a socialist and a supporter of the Socialist Equality Party, and I have been antifascist since I was a teenager in the 1960s and demonstrating against the imperialist war in Vietnam. Anti-fascists can be anarchists, it is true, but the majority of us are socialists and left-leaning.
I was a socialist since my teenage years in the 1950s! However, more recently, I came across Paul Cudenec writings and have become an anarchist; in the sense that humans are a part of nature (which I have always believed), therefore, anarchism is natural because, as Peter Kropotkin describes in Mutual Aid (1902), left to their own devices, people and other animals tend to cooperate with others for their collective benefit. In effect, he was echoing Paracelsus’s vision of nature as “a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselves”. (Paul Cudenec in Nature, Essence and Anarchy 2016)
Carolyn,
All governments are socialist to a degree . Social security , government health care , government housing and even public transport are socialist policies . The issues are tied to accountability and society's ability to support these policies . The other issue (for me ) is the creeping changes that are being made to language . The meaning of "conservitive" , "labour" and "liberal" no longer apply , and politics has become weaponised . In almost all disputes the middle is uninhabitable and the extremists rule. "Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
"History will thankfully go on once we see the end of them and the work of repairing the mess they are making begins."
I found this a surprisingly optimistic ending to an appropriately gloomy assessment of the State of the Union. Back when Trump ran against Hilary, I wrote that voting for Clinton was like voting for cancer; voting for Trump like voting for a heart attack. Trump's first term was much less catastrophic than I had expected, but this time around the cardiac arrest is massive and undeniable. The point being, that cancer or heart attack, in my view the United States is terminally ill, collapse is inevitable. I don't think there is any real prospect of repairing the damage post Trump. The most we can hope for (and work towards) as the world stumbles towards some semi-stable multi-polarity is that the empire collapses in a way that doesn't end in some nuclear fiasco - a genuine end of history.
One of my concerns about mulitipolarity BRICS+ is it's adherence to the UN and its Agencies, such as, the WHO
I really don't know enough about the UN. In principle a good idea, in practice too co-opted by Western agendas to function as it ought? Hopefully, if it can't be reformed it will be replaced by [a] genuinely multipolar institution(s).
Unfortunately, I am not too hopeful... I think we (the West = minority world) are on the road to perdition, but out of the ashes something good will emerge 🙏
The Christianity that the regime wants to protect is a folk-version of Christianity, not "orthodox Christianity" at all. In fact real Catholic and Orthodox Christianity would more likely to be in fascism's crosshairs. Fascist Christianity includes Christian Zionists and Evangelicals, which are perfect for the MAGA end times because they are all End Time, eschatological ways of being.
I came myself out of a US-centric fundamentalist Protestant sect - which was - now way beyond a half-century away from it I realise - fascist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1wRwFAd1qI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXGZGs9zbMU
Surely there are Christians in this world who live moral lives and practice the Way of Christ. I just wish that all who call themselves 'Christian' would do so.
The Trump "regime"? Really? Was Biden's a regime or an administration?
I'm a former leftist who now identifies as MAGA living in the deep south. Where do you get your idea that MAGA is about hate? From Twitter, where NONE of my MAGA-supporting neighbors have accounts?
There's a way to talk about current events without furthering this deceitful narrative that ordinary Americans are hateful jerks. I am SO SICK of this false characterization of my kind neighbors. Y'all have no idea and that's why so many ordinary people have such negative reactions to leftists.
Why don't you come down to MAGA country and see for yourself before you assume we're all idiot racists who blindly support Trump?
Did you even read this commentary? Obviously not. Because it has nothing to do with the MAGA base. It's a critique of the Trump administration and its abuses of power. Trump and the Zionist neocon idiots he's surrounded himself with are shredding the constitution, as people like the conservative commentator Judge Napolitano daily report on. The role of journalism, as a reminder, is to expose the abuses of power and not pander to it. Now, if you were at all familiar with the work at The Floutist, you would know the scathing commentaries we published exposing the criminality of the Biden regime. We aren't political partisans at The Floutist. Grow up!
Trump's administration is a cabal of fascists and criminals. They have taken over this country and are destroying it and everything it is supposed to stand for with ruthless abandon. ANYONE who supports Trump and his band of warmongering incompetents and liars is just as evil as he is. Fuck what Rachel, above, says. She knows NOTHING.
Carolyn, Thanks for your comment, as always. I mostly agree with you. Though to be entirely fair: Biden and his band of criminal incompetents paved the way for much of what's now happening. Were the warmongering Democrats not so thoroughly corrupt, had they not abandoned the working class, Trump would never have been elected. Also, I think Rachel does know some important things: She knows that many (most?) of Trump's supporters are not racist white supremacists, as the Democrats disingenuously accuse them of being. She knows poor and working class people are suffering in this country and have been thrown under the bus by the Democrats. That's not nothing, if you'll excuse my use of a double negative. Thanks for your support of The Floutist! We always value your comments. Cheers and a very happy holiday season to you, however you may celebrate it. Warm best, Cara
That's how I took it; not against individuals, but I do how it could be taken differently. You, yourself should carefully pull back alittle on the snideness of some of your comments. Hard to hear someone talking like that.
The article quotes somebody, so I assume the author agrees with the quotation, that:
<<Because the future MAGA wants cannot be attained, the movement has no constructive program. It cannot build anything, because nothing it builds would satisfy it. All it can do is destroy…. The rage that animates MAGA is the rage of impossibility—the fury that comes from wanting something that cannot be had…. This is what happens when a political movement promises to restore an irrecoverable past. Unable to deliver, it can only demolish.>>
You think MAGA are angry because black people are free or because trans people exist. You assume a helluva lot about people who don't agree with your social views. And in the meantime you completely miss that MAGA reminisces for the past because in the past, one salary fed a family.
Stuck-up leftists have a lot in common with MAGA. But they don't see it because they love the team sport of hate and refuse to look at working people as their equals.
Perhaps you miss the actual events in the world that are acted in the name of MAGA? What is there MAGA about kicking out some of the most hard-working people in the country? What is MAGA about brutalizing cities that don't conform with Trump's political ideology? What is MAGA about murdering thousands of Palestinians? Or wasting millions of dollars trying to force regime change on Venezuela?
Look the fact is that everyone wants to make America prosperous, and even 'great' as long as that greatness does not come at others' expense. But if MAGA means a white, Christian country that plunders the world, no thank you.
Just about to write a response, I was, but I see Cara M has more than adequately pointed out where you have not done a proper reading of the essay from Patrick L. Ordinary US people as hateful jerks - really? Deluded, not served well by Trump or Biden (two sides of the one coin) but Patrick - who has never sneered at ordinary folk. You are way off course here Rachel...
The theme underlying all of capitalist America's sick oligarch maneuvers in the world is a determination to prevent any serious good being delivered to the suffering supermajority of the world's people and the lunatic mania to hoard all benefit and privilege to a dirty, disgusting cadre of its monstrously evil and soulless elite.
There are two sides of the "resource curse" coin that must be considered whenever discussing geopolitics or US foreign policy. Obviously, the resources must secured for western consumption above all but the other side of it is "Demand Destruction". Resource rich countries must not be allowed to develop to the point where they start dipping into those resources for their own people's uses thereby speeding up depletion. This goes for other non-resource rich countries as well.
These twin axioms are the inflexible bedrock of all US foreign policy since 1950. The millions of deaths along with destruction of economic opportunities and ruin of quality of life for the vast majority of people everywhere the USA or their corporations have gone from Korea to Ukraine (and now on to Venezuela) aren't BUGS, they are FEATURES.
Right now, Europe is being treated to a drastic lowering of their standards of living, death of their (non military) productive industrial bases AND required to undertake the destruction of their few remaining socialist programs in order to divert whatever they have left into the coffers of the neoliberal heirs to the MIC.
Shortly after WWII, the Ford foundation paid for university and think tank studies on world wide resource availability, population and consumption trends determining that this MUST be the future for the whole world- Or the USA/"West" would not be able to maintain the power of corporations and wealth of their ownership.
See linked PDF "Scarce Resources":
https://www.nefp.online/_files/ugd/63d11a_136d0855070647ba803e05cea0bc4c83.pdf
This morning I quickly [too quickly] went through three economics talks: Hudson & Wolff, Alastair Crooke, Larry C. Johnson, and then a second run through of an article by Yves Smith. Trump campaigned on peace, but the fallout from his new economic contrivances AFAICS-or-guess may double the number of angry humans that, for example, Gaza has angered [yeah but I'm another one that keeps an eye peeled for false flags]. And too many of those people might end up in charge of nukes (the odds will increase IOW) in which case his fluky "sense" on Ukraine could end up cancelled.
For sure this mess is in need of repair.
Link of Smith's article https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12/revulsion-la-grande-bouffe-and-the-spectacle-of-grotesque-elite-self-and-system-destruction.html
I read the first page of her 'thesis' and almost burst out laughing.
"Not only have capitalist economies succeeded in expanding internally,' ·out they have
observably not exploited market and investment opportunities in the :underdeveloped
countries. The feudal economic and politic.al structures of the Third world provide
neither purchasing power nor opportunities for investment in industry -and, liberal
disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, American policies are .directed at
maintaining such structures . 1 There has been no effort ·to duplicate the European
expansion sparked by investment in the industrialization of North America. "
Then I realized this wasn't a "new" paper. Pure fantasy. (Which is acknowledged on the final two pages)
This is real finger-on-the-pulse understanding. I certainly will never return to travel the US, to see kinfolk and friends and visit places as yet unseen - it is way beyond the pale in terms of the ugly paranoias and inhuman intent of these Trumpian times. The Handmaid's Tale is almost set in place. Thanks, PL.
Please understand it's just a question of time before the imperial country requires that ALL the vassal countries of the so-called "west" must implement this ageda.
Furthermore, for "Antifa", substitute "communist". Then think of the McCarthyism in the cold war era. Then review a previous bipartisan effort to export this abroad in a more brutal format during the cold war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method
https://archive.org/details/cia-stories-the-jakarta-method_202403
It's likely that what the current admin has in mind will make the McCarthy era seem quaint at home. And that is what they will be looking to set as the standard abroad within the rest of the eurocolonial empire, and they will be looking to impose it in the current day set of non-aligned countries. Basically torching the earth to avoid BRICS and the non-alignment concept from being established as an alternative approach.
"I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants… "
For a moment I thought you were speaking of the Dems who colluded with the Intel Community to undermine a sitting President with Russian Collusion baloney and who manned NGOs with the prior administrations acolytes to effect censorship of free speech including “malinformation”-true statements that undermine the government.
My bad
In effect, we have been growing Trump since the JFK assassination coup, and both political parties are complicit. Over the years, at least with Jimmy Carter, neoliberalism and its financial capitalism have given a series of presidents more corrupt than the one before. Trump is simply the last manifestation.
I presume you meant - with the exception of Jimmy Carter - ?
It's "smooth cop" "thumper cop", both work for the same boss.
Just because the russiagate conspiracy theory is crackpot to the point of insanity does not mean that one must support Trump.
Both can be true at the same time - Russiagate is lunacy, and Trump is a weak, stupid and easily manipulated clown.
You may not be an American by birth. Unfortunately, most Americans cannot hold two seemingly conflicting thoughts or opinions in their minds at the same time. Dems were corrupt in trying to bring down Trump with the Russiagate BS (there were other legitimate crimes on his rap sheet that are essentially un-prosecutable because both "sides" are guilty of them), Trump won the presidency again, thus Trump is our savior and one must support him fully. I'm sure people in other countries are victims to this kind of thought as well, but it's a little bit different and more extreme in the US. Which is one reason that "the US" has endeavored to "Americanize" economies, politics, and journalism everywhere it can. The Borg is actually a very apt analogy.
I am a cat by birth. We are naturally superior to humans, regardless of nationality.
That said, in my experience, Americans are no stupider than other humans.
Not "stupider" - More programmed and from an earlier age in life than most other people.
Ever met a european? Americans are all about the practical, does it work and can I make a buck off of it? Europeans are all about groupthink and the done thing.
"ever met a European" LMFAO hahahahha
Europe has long been "Americanized."
It's that - too! Democrats - MAGA/Trump Republicans - two sides of the same coin...
Apparently you not only didn't read the article above for comprehension, but also are unaware of the author's other work including "Death of the Liberal Class." I recommend picking up a copy if you really want to understand where people like Laurence (and his readers) are coming from. The world isn't binary and 'winner take all' or 'he who has the gold (or sits in office) makes the rules and that's the way it has to be' isn't a viable or morally coherent way to see things, let alone govern or be governed.
Fascism has a dictionary definition. That we have been so very afraid of 'hyperbole' has allowed fascism to take deep roots before any dare mention its name.
America was always fascistically inclined (I was born in the 60s. I knew the pledge of allegiance before I could read and the flag code before I could multiply.) But we tap danced and pussy-footed around this term, even as it ate the unions and destroyed any hope of a welfare state - all painted as sort of allegiance to a vague enemy influence.
Now, fascism in the US is in full flower, its garden hoed, fertilized and planted well before Trump by BOTH parties.
People: this is what fascism in full flower LOOKS LIKE. Stop worrying that fascism might arrive.. It arrived. It arrived a long time ago - with Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Obama... this is just its face with the mask of polity ripped off.
The near future Amerika you describe Patrick, reads much like George Orwells' Nineteen Eighty Four.
Here in Australia, I fear the same future is coming our way.
https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/publish/post/182835680 I have recommended youl