US declining capitalist system
Like all previous economic systems in recorded history, capitalism is on track to repeat the same threestep trip: birth, evolution, and death.
The timing and other specifics of each system's trip differ. Births and evolutions are commonly experienced as positive, celebrated for their progress and promise. The declines and deaths, however, are often denied and usually feel difficult and depressing.
Notwithstanding endlessly glib political speeches about bright futures, US capitalism has reached and passed its peak. Like that of the British Empire after World War I, the trip now is painful.
Signs of decline accumulate. The last 40 years of slow economic growth in the US have seen the top 10% take nearly all of it. The other 90% suffered constricted real wage growth that drove them to borrow massively (for homes, cars, credit cards, and college expenses). Their creditors were, of course, mostly that same 10%.
University costs rose as graduates' prospects for good jobs and incomes fell. Those without degrees faced worse prospects. Inequalities of wealth and income soared. To protect their positions atop those inequalities, the 10% increased their donation-fueled sway over politics and culture. Compliant politicians then reinforced the deepening inequalities of wealth and income in that typical spiral of systems in decline.
The relentlessly deepening inequality is especially painful and difficult for the United States because it had been temporarily reversed in the 1930s and 1940s. The sharply reduced inequality then - celebrated as the rise of a vast "middle class" - led to renewed affirmations of American exceptionalism and capitalism's virtues. We lived, it was said, in a post-1930s "people's capitalism."
The claim had its grain of truth, if no more than that. It made expectations of "middle class" jobs and incomes seem to be birthrights of most (white) Americans.
The ever-deepening inequality since the 1970s first frustrated and then collapsed those expectations. A kind of bitterness at a fading American dream has settled in and agitated popular consciousness.
Capitalism became increasingly a disappointment, a sign of system decline. Another sign is the increasing interest in socialism and elections of socialists despite the relentless antisocialist drumbeats of the Cold War and since.
The US response to Covid-19 displays more signs. With 4% of the world's population, the United States accounts for 20% of the world's Covid-19 deaths.
Despite being a rich country with a well-developed medical apparatus, the system as a whole has failed to cope. Its response compares unfavorably with that of many less rich, less medically equipped nations. In the United States, testing, prevention, treatment, and vaccination remain uneven, inadequate, and slow.
During the last capitalist crash of comparable scope, the 1930s Great Depression coupled with World War II, the pre-1930s extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income were reduced by more than a third. In sharp contrast, this latest capitalist crash coupled with a pandemic increased already extremely unequal distributions.
US capitalism's flexibility from 1930 to 1945 compares with the rigidity of its income and wealth distributions now. Then, a nation rallied in the face of massive dangers. Now that nation splits. A capitalism still ascending back then became ossified, and decline set in.
The last 40 years of redistributing income and wealth upward from the poor and middle class to the top culminated with former president Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts.
Over the 30-plus years before 2017, corporations and the richest 10% (who own more than 80% of stock market securities) had enjoyed unprecedented gains, absolutely and relative to the other 90%. They "needed" a massive tax cut less than ever. But the Republican Party's control of the US government could and therefore did gift it to them anyway.
This worsened the already fast-rising reliance on deficits and national indebtedness that followed the 2008-09 crash. The unprecedented and continuing explosion of money and national-debt increases are the public0finance signs of capitalist decline.
When the Roman Empire declined, many blamed the resistances arising within its far-flung areas for the decline. They were called "barbarians," denounced as "invaders," and generally scapegoated to distract attention from plentiful signs of internal decay.
Today, the anxiety about and demonization of immigrants and all manner of foreigners "cheating" the United States, economically and politically, are likewise signs of decline. The United States' remarkable economic growth across its history "solved" its labor problems by a combination of rising wages for workers already here plus massive immigration of lower-wage workers.
A rising capitalism needed and could accommodate both parts of that solution. Today's US capitalism can accommodate neither. The United States' recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were neither necessary nor successful in military terms.
They did enable massive government spending and justified rising "defense" outlays in federal budgets.
The Soviet Union as a great enemy had gone. A limitless, global war on "terrorism" provided an interim foreign danger until today's pivot toward a new Cold War with China could settle in as a prime justification.
“They were called "barbarians," denounced as "invaders," and generally scapegoated to distract attention from plentiful signs of internal decay. Today, the anxiety about and demonization of immigrants and all manner of foreigners "cheating" the United States, economically and politically, are likewise signs of decline. The United States' remarkable economic growth across its history "solved" its labor problems by a combination of rising wages for workers already here plus massive immigration of lower-wage workers. A rising capitalism needed and could
accommodate both parts of that solution.”