By Charles Hugh Smith July 14, 2020 "
" As with the French Revolution, that will be the trigger for a
wholesale replacement of our failed institutions”.
Since it’s Bastille Day, a national holiday in France
celebrating the French Revolution, let’s ask a question few even think (or dare) to ask: could America have
a French-style Revolution? Not in
some distant era, but within the next five years?
By French-style Revolution I
don’t mean the extravagant use of the guillotine, I mean the complete
political overthrow of the ruling elites. This overthrow
need not be violent; it could be an entirely peaceful electoral rejection of
the two-party political elites and the Federal Reserve / banking /
financialization elites which together form the neoliberal-neofeudal ruling
elites.
The BAU
Crowd (business as usual) considers the possibility of such an overthrow
of parasitic, predatory elites as remote as a landing by Martians. I suspect they’re purposefully blind to the
reality that America’s elites and
institutions are structurally incapable of accepting meaningful reforms that
would address the extremes of dysfunction, exploitation, predation and wealth /
power / income inequality that characterize America today.
America’s elites and institutions have only one systemic
response to crisis: do
more of what’s failed spectacularly.
This inability to acknowledge the reality of their own
self-serving incompetence and the deeply dysfunctional nature of virtually
every level of America’s economic, social and political orders leaves an
overthrow of the entire ruling elite as the only option
left other than resignation to Bread and
Circuses funded by the Fed, a policy of
desperation that will inevitably debauch the U.S. dollar and impoverish
everyone who counted on Bread and Circuses to fix what’s
broken.
Counting on
Fed-funded Bread and Circuses to fix what’s broken is the perfection of magical thinking, a state of denial expressed by the phrase routinely
(but apparently falsely) attributed to Marie Antoinette, when she learned that
the peasants had no bread: Then let them eat brioche (roughly
translated into “cake” in English).
Ignoring
the horror of the delusional BAU Crowd, let’s explore the set-up for a French-style
Revolution in America.
Setting aside the horrors of the guillotine, the French
Revolution was many things unfolding at once:
— The failure of the Monarchy’s
money system, as inflation soared to the point commoners could no longer afford
bread. (The price of bread peaked the week that the Bastille was stormed
by mobs.)
— The overthrow of the state-religion nexus in favor of Enlightenment
rationalism.
— The romantic ascent of liberty as
the rallying cry against an oppressive feudal hierarchy.
— The fragmentation of the social and political orders into
warring factions.
— The failure of the Monarchy’s
institutions to recognize and understand the potentially fatal challenges and
institute reforms that addressed the problems.
— The failure of the French economy, which was plagued by
poor roads and communication lines, limited trade due to regional fragmentation
and low levels of productive investment.
— Geopolitical rivalries with Great
Britain, the rising power of the Germanic states and other continental European
powers (Russia, Austria, Sweden).
In sum, institutions that had failed collapsed and
were replaced, first by Napoleon’s centralized bureaucracies and later
by political reforms, a process that took much of the 19th century to play out.
I think
the parallels to America in 2020 are obvious.
Most
importantly, America’s core institutions have failed: the financial system,
healthcare, higher education, the political process and the national
defense/intelligence complex.
In every
case, a class of insiders has come to dominate each centralized hierarchy for
its own benefit. Blinded by their
greed and hubris, they cannot recognize or understand the systemic failure they
inhabit because their attachment to their position, privilege and power is
blindingly strong.
Reform is
impossible, for as with the French Monarchy, the existing system is the
wrong structure and unit size, to
borrow a phrase from Peter Drucker. Reforms profound enough to actually repair
what’s broken would require the insiders surrender much of their position,
privilege and power, which they will never do.
As I have taken pains to explain, finance capitalism has
fatally distorted the American economy in ways that few understand (or
want to understand, since it’s so disturbing).
The resulting concentration of
wealth and power has also fatally distorted the political process of
governance.
As I explained in my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation and Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege, America’s systems only function
when there is more of everything to distribute, i.e. “growth”: more money,
more goods and services, more political power.
When there
is less of everything, America’s institutions fail because they have no
mechanisms for DeGrowth / contraction.
This is the result of their systemic structure as
centralized hierarchies. Expansion is effortless,
contraction breaks the system. (See the chart of the rising
wedge model of breakdown below.)
Much is being made of the fragmentation of American society
into so-called progressive-conservative camps, and perhaps the best way to understand this fragmentation is that both camps recognize the failure of American
institutions but differ on how to reform them.
Given that America’s institutions only function with “more
of everything,” a reality that aligns with America’s zeitgeist of “there’s
always more of everything,” I consider it inevitable
that whomever is in
power will enthusiastically
embrace the illusory “solution” of
printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, in the delusional confidence
that the world’s appetite for dollars is essentially infinite.
Put another way: America finds it
comforting to assume that it will always be able to digitally create “money”
out of thin air and trade this “nothing” for real goods, i.e. “something.”
That America has
gotten away with this magic for decades only fuels the
confidence of those who reckon the way to “get more of everything” is so easy
and simple: just create another few trillion dollars out of
thin air and buy the world’s resources with this “free money.”
Eventually the rest of the world
will tire of this fraud, and America will face the loss of its magic
printing press.
At that
point, inflation will destroy the purchasing power of the US dollar and
commoners will be unable to afford the cost of living.
As with
the French Revolution, that will be the trigger for a wholesale replacement of
our failed institutions. Whether
that replacement can be accomplished within the existing political system will
depend on a great many factors that will be unfolding simultaneously and
interacting with each other in unpredictable, nonlinear ways.
How do we get from “there”–failed,
centralized hierarchies dominated by self-serving insiders– to “here”–opt-in,
decentralized, adaptive, self-organizing and anti-fragile institutions?
Nobody
knows, but I suspect the decay of our failed institutions will accelerate
rapidly, and we won’t have to wait very long to witness the messy
transition to new decentralized, localized, flexible non-elite-ruled
institutional models.
SEE
CHART AT
SEE ALSO THIS VIDEO
The End of
Globalization & Financialization Leads To A New Monetary System - Charles
Hugh Smith
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/MzqCSaK9ZcY
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