Mother Jones: How Do You Know If You're Living Through the Death of an Empire? It's the little things.
...Savage invasions, crushing battlefield defeats, sacked cities, unlucky rulers put to death: These are the kinds of stories that usually come to mind when we think of the end of an empire. They seem appropriate, the climaxes we expect from a narrative of rise, decline, and fall.
We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.
The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.
That’s why the banalities matter. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was...
Whatever date you pick for the fall of the Roman Empire—...—the relevant fact is that the die was cast long before then. The same will eventually be true of the fall of the United States, assuming there’s anybody left in our climatically uncertain future to write that history. All empires think they’re special, but all empires eventually come to an end. The United States won’t be an exception.
The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial philanderer and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative. But it’s far more likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of sweetheart deals for the ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies. And that’s to say nothing of the decades of pointless, self-perpetuating, and almost undiscussed imperial wars that produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and treasure, and a great deal of justified ill will.
Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say it was just icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before, in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading, in local elections nobody was following, in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on, in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic...
We don’t have to wait decades for all this to sink in. The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the bleeding.
https://archive.ph/hUN9k
Still true. This administration could not stanch all of the bleeding. But it tried mightily, while corporate media made sure that very few, if any, knew.
(Note -- Sharing my paid subscription for edification falls under Fair Use._
= new reply since forum marked as read
I heartily agree that you should suscribe cuz they're worth every penny.
We're facing behind closed doors decisions, drama narratives, false information and numbers, so it's important that we go to sources that don't erase history, name names and provide numbers and other sources of information.
The best way that evil takes over is for good men to do nothing but stand back and stand by.
Faith and vigilance will not be enough in the moment-to-moment times ahead. We must do what we can for as many as we can for as long as we can.
I just tried donating a little while back and ran into an error. I will try again tomorrow.
That’s the site that is giving me this error:
“Our system returned the following:
Error processing credit card”
There is nothing wrong with either of the cards I tried. And I tried on both my phones (I have one for e-commerce and one designated solely for work and bank stuff). Both are flipping out. I have had this happen before.
I will email them and see what the issue is.
Thanks
Thanks Ancianita! 
Thanks for reading, jmbar2! 
It shocks me to reflect how much has happened since then.
Thanks for sharing this!
