I have been accused of doom blogging because all I ever write about is bad news.

But, in my defense, chronicling the implosion of the American empire is good news because this state of affairs has become intolerable for a majority of Americans. As we’ve discussed here before, the late-stage American empire uses neoliberalism as its operating system, where the benefits of empire flow exclusively to a small segment of feral elite, while the average American faces increasing costs.

It’s worth acknowledging that America’s historic rise to great power status in the 100 years after the American Civil War demonstrated the importance of building a healthy mass-market economy that rested on the foundation of an incredibly productive scientific-industrial base. This was the American empire in which the benefits were widely shared. Since then, the steady financialization of the U.S. economy, reliance on debt-financed consumption together with an increasingly militarized, interventionist U.S. foreign policy shifted the balance dramatically in favor of the military/industrial/complex, with the result being to severely weaken America’s standard of living. 

Let’s examine recent events to keep score. Biden has turned out to be everything we were warned Trump would be: a genocidal monster fueling racist violence and crimes against humanity while imperiling the world with insanely reckless foreign policy decisions, even after liberals insisted at the top of their lungs that the adults were back in charge.

It’s likely that the main reason Biden’s administration has been more warlike than Trump’s is by sheer timing and coincidence; the US empire is managed by a deep state that continues from one administration to the next largely uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office, with wars occurring not because of who happens to be president in any given instance but because of whatever the empire’s needs happen to be at that time.

The lesson of Joe Biden’s depravity is not that it would be better to have Donald Trump in the White House, it’s that it doesn’t matter which one gets in, because only sociopathic monsters are allowed to be president of the American empire. Anyone who isn’t willing to inflict enormous amounts of violence on countries and citizens around the world will ever make it past the filters that have been placed between that office and the contrived notion of democracy that the American people have been deceived into believing is real.

“Nothing will fundamentally change,” to borrow Joe Biden’s assurance to Wall Street during his 2020 campaign. And nothing has. For all the shrieking about democracy, the Democrats have a strange way of enacting it. Joe Biden and the DNC have simply decided to use every tool at their disposal to freeze Democratic voters out of the process. Their whole message amounts to “Orangeman” bad, and that he’s a “fascist” threat to democracy, never mind what they’re doing behind the curtain. Right now they seem to be hoping their voters don’t notice the contradiction. It’s hard to miss the implicit message that actual governance should be left in the hands of competent liberal technocrats, and the role of all of the right-thinking Americans is to show up every two to four years to re-elect them.

This state of affairs should not be surprising. Since the 2016 election American elite have refused to examine the serial failures that led to Trump’s victory. Here we are 8 years on and still no reflection on their responsibility for Trump and his continued appeal. Any student of history familiar with the dynamic of late stage empires is aware of the pattern of a strong-man or “Caesar” arising who appeals to the common folk who are impoverished by a greedy yet dysfunctional elite.

Sound familiar?

When it comes to doom-blogging the pertinent question to ask is doom for whom? I’ve already mentioned that the American empire has become intolerable for the vast majority of Americans while the benefits largely accrue to the billionaires and the technocratic-elite that manages the empire. Let’s call them the professional/managerial/class (PMC’s). That the PMC’s were the instigators of Russia-gate and the ones wailing about “fascism” and “protecting our democracy” is just one more of life’s little ironies.

Unfortunately, even though Trump talked a good game about the costs of American never-ending wars and vowed to end or reduce US overseas commitments he was ultimately unsuccessful thanks to the sabotage of the functionaries in his administration, personal that he nominated, I might add.

What this all means is anyones guess at this point. 2024 promises to be a year of turmoil like we’ve never seen and the way Biden and his team of ham-fisted neocons are going the American empire could be toast by the time Trump is inaugurated.

Buckle-up