What if We Could have a New Type of Government?
The old one died, but if not this year, how about the next?
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 21, 2020
The clearest indicator of an empire’s end is the calls for a return to the past. This results from the rise of incompetence and irrationality in a government that has lost any goals but greed. Inevitably this is a consequence of unsustainable growth and the difficulty of meeting the needs of a vast and diverse population.
The list of empires that show this is long, including Han China, both periods, the Song (Sòng cháo; 960–1279) and Ming (1368 to 1644) dynasties, and finally the Ching (Great Qing 1644 to 1912), the last Chinese imperial dynasty. The long history of empires in Mesopotamia, dynasties in Eygpt, Alexander’s Hellenic empire extending to Northern India, Rome’s Western Empire, and, almost a thousand years later, Rome's Eastern Empire at Constantinople.
All of these were eternal in the eyes of their rulers until they fell. Each collapse's reasons and nature are specific and have been studied in great detail, but things fall apart, and there is no future but more of the same. In the slower world of classical history, it may take two or three generations for people to realize that what they thought was eternal was already gone.
Many of us have been writing about the decline and fall of the American Empire for years. As the end approaches, there is no other topic but how this cannot be true. We are told daily that we should ignore everything we see and feel, and the same failed systems will suddenly start to work. How can the golden City on the Hill end?
This is the question that is asked only after an empire has ended. We want to keep fooling ourselves and looking for signs of life, but the illusion is ever harder to maintain. Fragmentation becomes factions warring over competing delusions.
The last gasp for the US was the pyrrhic victory of Joe Biden. Trump and his coterie of criminals, thieves, and authoritarian opportunists were forced from power, but the damage is already far too great to repair. The political organization used to accomplish that removal was already bankrupt and staggering. It is using its remaining energy to denounce the social democracy and planetary restructuring that could save it.
Donald Trump continues his fumbling pursuit of a dictatorship as if he lived in a previous century but still manages more destruction of the walking dead US of A. Members of his party have accepted the end and are demanding the elimination of representative government and removing any pretense to morals or ethics as a side benefit. For them, the promise of power and endless corruption is a dream come true. Those are not people you want as neighbors.
The talk of civil war driven by increasingly irrational conspiracies championed by idiots, see above for signs of the end, are gaining in volume as Trump fumbles. The exhausted ‘Biden restoration’ will finish off Trump, but that is not the problem. Trump will linger like a nasty fart, but the fart is not what destroys you.
Secession is now the official policy of the Texas Republican (Trump) Party. We should encourage them. Go for it.
Any other state with a Trump party government and an advanced case of social psychosis should secede. You will be much better off on your own, and so will we. The people who can’t stand what you are doing will move on to better places, and you can claim you didn’t want them anyway.
We know that economically the Trump states are dependent on the successful coastal and metropolitan center states. Still, you are irrational and unable to understand basic economics, so you need to figure it out. We will have to sort all of this out soon anyway as climate disasters force massive migrations and a brutal conversion to a sustainable lifestyle.
But we need a working set of regional models to make these changes as rapidly as possible, and the dead weight of fascist programmed psychotics is too great a burden to carry. The new regional models need the freedom to evolve and rediscover the communal responsibilities and sharing that rely on diversity instead of being threatened by it.
The dead albatross of Biden’s neoliberal return is no better for the changes we need. It is a lot easier to disconnect from that predetermined failure than waste time thinking there must be some hope there somewhere as that ship slowly sinks. Yes, it is better than immediately drowning in bullshit while watching incompetent vaudeville tyranny, but it only buys some time. We cannot afford to waste that time.
States or metropolitan areas that have their act together should take things into their own hands. This is inevitable as technology, and the lessons of this pandemic expand that areas of successful metropoles that will add smaller cities as the new styles of remote work and distancing become permanent.
I realize that this will not be real for most of the population until we begin to deal with the social vaccination failure preventing herd immunity. The social psychosis is dedicated to denying disease, but the COVID virus doesn’t care. It will also continue to evolve, and the slower were are at controlling it, the greater the risk.
We need to encourage the Trumpists to secede. The rest of us need to begin to talk seriously about what kind of regional government will make it possible for us to survive in the onslaught of climate destruction for our biological form of life.
Let’s ask Santa for new regional city-state governments for Christmas 2021. Start now because this is a big ask.
We can wish the Trumpist states well on their quest for someone to oppress. And may they have a Merry War on Christmas all by themselves next year.
