The outlines of America’s future are coming into focus and it’s not pretty. Welcome to techno-feudalism, a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the new economic reality where the tech-lords that control platforms like X, Amazon, Meta, and Google, stand astride our economy, like the Robber Barons of the 19th Century.

And that points to a larger picture. The return to a pre-New-Deal economic order assisted by pervasive misgovernment is not an accident, nor the work of a few bad actors. The techno-feudalism, with its accompanying corruption and vast inequality, is a consequence of a triumph of a particular ideology–neoliberalism–that considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. Neoliberalism celebrates human capital and mandates economic concentration and the privatization of governmental functions.

Predictably, this state of affairs has a bi-partisan pedigree. It’s illustrative that the Silicon Valley billionaires were feted by the Democrats, who assumed they would remain loyal benefactors. Except they have now swung over to Trump and ripped off the faux woke masks and revealed the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital. The Democrats wanted a kinder-gentler neoliberal disposition but paved the way for Trump by largely pursuing the same policies over the years–just at a slower pace. There’s a historical reason that you don’t allow great concentrations of wealth. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out. “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

At this stage I think it’s safe to say that neoliberalism, for all of it’s dressed-up intellectualism and economic jargon, is simply a looting caper, with Trump and Musk presiding over the final stages. In fact, the looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street is going into overdrive under the Trump Administration and DOGE. True to form, rather than mounting a defense of core New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Democratic Party thinks criticizing Trump’s false statements and doubling down on support for Ukraine is a winning formula. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can profit off the pieces.

The larger reality is that the US is in irreversible decline. Everyone missed the key takeaway from Vance and Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, but the US can’t afford Biden’s Ukraine adventure and, perhaps, NATO any more. We should not be surprised. I’ve stated repeatedly that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. This dynamic is crystal clear in the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where the US weapons cupboard is bare because the geniuses decided to offshore our manufacturing.

Ian Welsh lays out the graphic details. “Just like the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was a sign of Russia’s decline, so is the ending of NATO. US carrier groups no longer have a full set of supporting ships: America can’t make them run any more. America’s flagship aircraft builder can’t make reliable planes any more. Trump is starting a crypto reserve. Social benefits are being slashed, yet again, in massive ways. America is behind in 80% of techs and at the same time launching a concerted attack on research universities. It couldn’t build enough weapons and ammunition to fully support Ukraine and in a real war against China or Russia would run out of munitions in about two weeks, then get the shit kicked out of it. It’s also destroying the WTO and other agreements created by it: it’s dismantling its Empire because, simply, it can’t afford it any more.”

The dirty little secret and the underlying reason for American decline is that our elite have become divorced from average Americans, thanks to the individualism and greed-is-good neoliberal-sociopathy coupled with broad political and media support. The American state can no longer reliably win its wars, or produce broad-based economic growth, let alone claim some normative global leadership role. All it can do is insulate its elites from accountability and protect them from the consequences of their extractive depredations. American elites assert their power by not paying taxes, and avoiding prosecutions. We only have to gaze upon our president to realize that to be a member of the elite is to not be held to account. The absence of pretense underlying Trump’s actions, however, suggests an exhausted imperial sovereignty.

Liberals love to associate Trump with Putin but the Yeltsin era in Russia, with the oligarchs, corruption and organized crime, is far more fitting, and appropriate, because what went on in Russia during the 1990’s was just a practice run. Now the show’s coming home, with an already-created oligarch class poised to assume their techno-feudal role.