Collapse and revival: 4 scenarios

The question of collapse/crisis comes up a lot in dissident/alt-right discussions, such as the likelihood of the US suffering a fate similar to to past empires, and if so, when and how.

In the past post, I eluded to the possibility of collapse, but not in the short-term future. Empires can last a very long time, even in a decayed state.See the Ottoman Empire, for example.

So what will be the trigger(s) for collapse? Or if not collapse, a cultural revival or reversal?

I have listed four scenarios arranged in decreasing order of likelihood.

1. Endogenous factors. It’s not news that the US has become more socially liberal over the past century, but the possibility of things reversing and going the other way, cannot be ruled out. There is no single cause of the rise of liberalism. It’s a combination of factors: women’s lib, civil rights, post-ww2 intellectual schools of thought (what some call ‘cultural Marxism’), Roe v. Wade, Hollywood and the entertainment industries, etc. So in theory, maybe such factors can be countered or reversed if the public grows tired of it, particularly Hollywood and the media. It’s not likely but it’s a possibility. Trump’s 2016 win and his enduring popularity despite losing in 2020, is evidence at least that there is a large market for counter-left ideas. Unfortunately, this is a long way from having such values represented in any significant capacity in government and in the courts. But obviously this is way better than nothing.

2. Major societal and or economic crisis. It is also possible that widespread incompetence and ineptitude in government and in the private sector will lead to economic collapse, although I think this is very unlikely. The private sector does considerable heavy lifting relative to the federal government. Amazon, Google, and other big tech companies, diversify initiatives notwithstanding, tend to be pretty well-run and are very profitable…way more so than governments. I do not predict that America’s major tech companies will suffer fates similar to the South Sea and Mississippi companies. Nor do I foresee a repeat of an economic crisis and market crash like the Great Depression either. The US dollar will remain dominant, allowing the Treasury to print trillions of dollars with minimal inflation. A crisis that destabilizes the US economy and society, overall, would have to be considerably worse than the attacks on Pearl Harbor, 911, or the Covid pandemic, in which the US recovered quickly from all of those and regained its dominance. Or things would have had to have decayed to such a great extent as to make recovery impossible.

3. War and conflict (including civil war). In the post Turchin is wrong: There will be no coming collapse of America I argue that the possibly America being conquered is exceedingly unlikely owing to America’s unrivaled, superlative dominance globally relative to competing foreign powers, almost unrivaled in history. There are no modern equivalents of the British, French, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman, and Russian empires that can post a threat or much of a challenge to the US hegemony, except for possibly China (but China does not have imperial ambitions). Second, few,if any, empires of the past had as much relative dominance as the US has now. Third, thanks to globalization, trade, and democracy, the imperial ambitions of foreign powers is gone. Germany went from being an aggressor in two world wars, to being passive to fault. Same for Japan. Russia, for much of the 50s and up until the 70s, was arguably a major economic and militaristic contender on the ‘world stage’, but since its collapse in 1992 has faded and never come back.

Although civil war is endogenous, I will list it here anyway. Vox Day for example has repeatedly argued and predicted that diversity will lead to civil war in the US. I argue the opposite, that although diversity may lead to reduced social trust and increased political division, it is not destabilizing. Elites know diversity is demoralizing, thus why they push it in order to weaken any opposition to it.

Vox Day and others argue that increased diversity will lead to unrest and the break-up of America, but I have argued it is a prophylactic against such unrest. Civil wars and revolution are typically engendered by homogeneous groups against a second group cut from the same ethnic and racial cloth. The Revolutionary War pitted New England against Britain. The Civil War pitted Anglo Protestants up North against Anglo Protestants from the South. The Iranian revolution pitted anti-Western Iranian religious fundamentalists against pro-Western Iranian rulers.

Rather than war, it is more likely that some states may peacefully secede or be broken up, but trying to quantify this as a probability seems hopelessly difficult. The events of 6th could be example of such a revolution but on a much smaller scale, analogous to the crossing of the Rubicon in which Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire. As shown by the indefatigable effort by law enforcement to track down Jan 6th Capitol infiltrators, the ‘deep state’ will obviously not go down without a fight, and do everything in its power preserve its existence. The NSA, CIA, and other 3-letter agencies pandering to trans rights and other left-wing causes should is no way be interpreted as weakness.

4. Political (voting out the ‘bad guys’). This is the least least viable, and hence at the bottom of the list. The reactionaries are correct that voting oneself out of the problem will not work. Rather, more subversive means are necessary, similar to the Frankfurt School and other intellectual schools of thought which covertly and subversively change the intellectual course of history and politics despite being largely unknown. Elected officials, particularly Republicans, have very little power do anything unless there is a crisis that necessitates action. The left has had considerably more success in the courts and in policy than conservatives. Even big Republican-led tax cuts/breaks benefit wealthy democrats and companies like Apple, that push LBGTQ+ values and stockpiling money abroad.