The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization.

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Rime posted:

Things have been getting pretty bad worldwide for about 17 years. Some would say that it really started as far back as the 1980's, and has only gained speed since then. I initially started this post with a huge bullet list of everything that's gone wrong in the past 40 years, and especially the past ten, lost it in a browser crash and goddamn it's just too much to type again.

Shits hosed. You know it, I know it, lets talk about how it's going to play out. So far we're tracking the Roman Republic pretty good, but we've got a lot more crazy technology this time around and our Caesar is a demented oompa-loompa.

Imagine that this is the climate change thread, except rather than moaning about how we're all very much going to die, we're moaning about how the fabric of our entire society is unraveling at the seams.

Good topics:
-> Rise of Authoritarianism in the west.
-> Decline and Vilification of Social Welfare.
-> Formation of international ultra-wealthy elite class with absolutely no geopolitical allegiances.
->Corporate conglomerates with no geopolitical allegiances.
-> Potential Balkanization of the USA & UK along ideological lines, and ramifications thereof.

I'll add more if anyone has suggestions.

WWI and WWII were bigger material threats to western civilation that any bullet point on this list.

In general there is always going to be a bullet-point list of what seem to be almost insurmountable problems (name a time period in the past that was actually 'better'). The issue now is the potential death spiral of dysfunction, distrust, polarization and ideology that's choking off the system's ability to correct.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 15:33

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 22:59

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Pembroke Fuse posted:

I think you guys are saying the same thing, more or less. Economic failure of the capitalist system for some segments of society and betrayal of the working class by their supposed center-left defenders contributes to racism. I guess I would say on Nov. 8th, the actual support for racism came from a variety sources however, most of them being lower middle class.

But a large percentage of poor and working class people supported Trump who has zero to offer them. That's the thing to look at. The particulars of the problems we face aren't anywhere near as interesting as they seem because problems are inevitable (and especially problems of power concentration).

The question is whether the political system as a whole can adapt and to a large extent that depends on whether voters can make coherent choices or not. Selecting Trump was a failure, the next few elections will show whether any lessons have been learned or not. If not, democracy has failed, not capitalism.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 20:35

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Sneakster posted:

They weren't betrayed by the left, they were stomped on by the capitalist class. Normal people do not join militias or communes. Women and children at the edge of survival aren't the ones spending thousands on guns.

The poor overwhelmingly supported Sanders, the political class did everything it could to remove that as a choice, and the poor largely dropped out after that point with old people being exceptionally gullible but between two capitalists who both pandered to the same ugliness (don't you loving dare pretend Clinton didn't support a wall, didn't pander to homophobia, and didn't cut welfare and campaign against expanding it).

You're projecting middle class support for colluding with capitalist interests as the poor supporting people in elections they ignored after the bourgeois stamped out any chance of reformist candidate.

You're calling into question the right of the poor to vote for liberals engineering fascism as the only alternative, and that in and of itself was supported by the bourgeois.

-> Poor people support socialist candidate
-> Bourgeois stamp that out
-> Poor people lose hope of reform and ignore election that holds nothing for them
-> Bourgeois vote for fascists
-> Conclusion: poor people being allowed to vote is the problem.

This is insane reasoning. You're projecting capitalist propaganda and expecting a worth while analysis. Apparently the digger revolution didn't work out because of racism, and it turns out the people with the most power and exploitative role in the system are truly the victims of lumpenprole supporting them. If you think about it, the heroes are white middle class liberals. Everyone else is a victim to be saved or a deranged mob.

Poor people didn't overwhelmingly support sanders and Trump was a reformist outsider candidate who beat the both the republican and democratic establishment to get elected.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 02:24

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Fojar38 posted:

Handwringing about American decline has been a regular feature of American society since WWII. It's never been materially true though and is usually a product of either incomplete information or of the political cycle.

"Moral decline" tends to be something people argue whenever the current party in power doesn't match their views (for example, ITT people are arguing that the supposed decline is because of capitalism and income inequality while during the Obama years people argued it was because America didn't have a strong enough military and growth wasn't high enough) and is impossible to quantify so I usually ignore it when assessing the "declinist" narrative.

In fact, now that I think about it the nineties seemed to be the only point in time since the 1920's that Americans genuinely believed that they were in ascent even though American power has been increasing in an absolute sense since 1945 while any potential competitor flounders.

Right it's not in material decline. What's remarkable is to watch the left and the right both pretend they're under constant siege. Social welfare decline was a bullet point in the OP yet social welfare hasn't really declined anywhere ever but has generally increased in the western world steadily for decades including in the U.S.

But..there are real underlying indicators of democratic sustainability that are in decline. Current levels of polarization, ideology and distrust are probably unsustainable.

Fojar38 posted:

I think that we're in the middle of one of those corrections right now. Corrections occur when the center cannot hold anymore and something shocks the system like the election of Donald Trump. We won't truly know if I'm right or not for a while yet, but one of the reasons Trump happened is because the political process in the USA had been stagnating for a while now (since 2000 I think, but possible since earlier) and people had been treating politics like a formality wherein the office of the Royal Presidency was designated by the powers that be that doesn't really affect them and that they don't really have any influence over anyway. Then Trump happened and delivered a mortal blow to the fantasy that you don't need to care about what happens in Washington.

Right now we're in the middle of an ideological blowback against a President that I'm not sure has any precedent in the 20th century or onward. To the point where people have actually lost their minds. In some ways it's similar to the Tea Party but far, far larger, and I think that it's going to have a measurable (and, in my opinion, positive) impact on politics for the decades to come. You already have seen an immediate impact of his election across other Western democracies of right-populist candidates almost instantaneously becoming unpalatable.

Trump might have ended up inadvertently saving the USA from political stagnation.

Yeah I really think people should spend more time looking at the 1960's and especially 1970's to understand what's going on now. That's a far better historical comparison than ancient empires.

This is the optimistic view which I probably share in the long run. But its governance that's going to steer us out of this problem and when is faith in government and and democratic political process (compromise) going to return? It's harder now to imagine a world where the opposition isn't tweeting about the illegitimacy and/or calling for the jailing of the opposition.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Aug 14, 2017

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 03:13

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

WampaLord posted:

Bull loving poo poo. Welfare's been slashed in the US for two decades now.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/02/heres-why-bernie-sanders-doesnt-say-much-about-welfare-reform/

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 03:27

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Fojar38 posted:

Faith in the democratic political process is hard to quantify. Nobody has tried to violently overthrow the government and nobody with any influence has called for it. Democratic institutions have so far done an excellent job checking the abilities of an unpopular President to forward his agenda (this is by design.) Advocacy for the removal of Trump has called for legal, constitutional means of doing so (impeachment.) Congressional Republicans have shown greater willingness to compromise with Democrats this year than they have at any point in the Obama years (though still not enough.)

This is the correction I'm talking about. It's just not something that happens immediately, it's a process that takes years.

I agree that so far institutions have done a great job in general checking Trump but the simple fact that people are advocating lawful impeachment doesn't mean much. Firing comey was lawful yet I think it fundamentally undermined our republic. Turkey just lawfully voted for constitutional reform that undermines their democratic future. Far more about the success of state and society rides on convention and culture than law which is more subjective and contradictory and fragile than most people realize

WampaLord posted:

loving lmao at trying to use a chart showing that average spending on the poor is only $12,000 per capita and trying to claim welfare has gotten better.

Umm what?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 03:44

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Pembroke Fuse posted:

Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases.

Yes. That's what "2014 dollars" means.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 03:56

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 22:59

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

The crisis of legitimacy is a direct consequence of politicians kicking this can down the road, because it easier for them to do that. That crisis of legitimacy lead to Donald Trump, but it won't stop there. Even if Trump is impeached or whatever, the underlying factors that enabled it are still there.

Predictably, upper class liberals are interpreting this as some kind of unprecedented, unpredictable event, either the result of some collective madness, or an indicment of the intelligence/moral-purity of the American public - but actually, it's simply the logical consequence of discrete, goverment policy and ideology, for the past couple of decades.

Voters do in-fact have agency and can be held accountable for their decisions. Being angry and voting for Donald Trump arn't necessarily the same thing.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 04:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization.