Can we admit how completely fucked we are?

Donald Trump is destroying the American economy and the American empire. More precisely, the Trump administration is accelerating the demise of the United States, internally and externally, that’s been underway for a long time.

We are truly at the end of the road. It’s a road along which we have been alternately force-marched and slow-walked for decades and we’re at the point where our toes are hanging off the edge of the cliff. The abyss beckons. No one is going to pull us back.

This is the culmination of capitalist decline, imperialist defeat, and Zionist fanaticism. It is the American answer to the question: Socialism or barbarism? It is the collapse of the post-WWII U. S.-dominated world order, of the American (and “Western,” Euro-Atlantic) project tout court, and of all pretenses regarding it.

Terms like “democracy,” “human rights,’ “international law,” or “peace and prosperity” are nothing but bad, unfunny jokes.

Donald Trump is an appropriate villain for this last act of the American tragi-comedy, which has always been plagued by a hubris based on ignorance and arrogance. But it’s a world stage, and he is just a crude personification and culmination of the domestic and global forces that have been at play. All the American and Western liberal and conservative actors have played their parts in setting the stage for the tragic dénouement we are living through.

The Trump administration is engineering the final collapse of the American economy and empire using aggressive, simplistic versions of bipartisan policy frameworks that have underlain American politics for a long time.

These have been combined with the exceptional decline in America’s economic infrastructure, the exceptionally sad state of American political consciousness, the exceptionally stubborn attachment to the atavistic Zionist colonial project, and with Trump’s exceptional narcissism, to create a perfect storm of aggressively stupid and self-destructive policies that will lead to a catastrophic collapse of America’s already fragile social economy and standing in the world, as well as all the fictions of exceptional historical and international virtue premised thereupon.

Z Factor

Let’s first consider the stupidest—because most unnecessary and gratuitously self-destructive—element that’s in play: The United States’s absolute commitment to participating in the Zionist genocide. This is also the clearest example of how Donald Trump bluntly embraces and realizes the goals of the Zionist ethnic-cleansing project that have been more subtly embraced and gradually promoted by presidents and politicians of both parties. I am going to harp on it, because we cannot overstate how destructive and self-destructive the U.S. government’s commitment to Zionism is, and how central it is to the demise of America. There’s no room for 25-hour “oppositional” monologues that don’t mention it.

All of Trump’s Zionist breakthroughs during his first administration — recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, abrogation of the JCPOA, the Abraham accords — were policies at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly supported by Democrats, and were all accepted by the Biden administration. Trump’s unconditional support of Israel’s present Gaza genocide is, of course, a continuation and intensification of Biden’s.

In this case, as in every other, Trump has abandoned any “soft power” approach in favor of enthusiastically embracing—to the extent of offering to take responsibility for—the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. It’s the same project, as I argued, that Biden was implicitly but definitely supporting.

This is, as the saying goes, “worse than a crime; it’s an error.” Soft power is real power. The “mind-forg’d manacles” are the invisible but strong bonds that hold an empire of injustice together.

The persistence of American hegemony and Zionism over the past eighty years rests on the belief among so many people that each represents something good and virtuous. When the hold on the mind breaks, and the metallic manacles come out, the regime is in trouble.

That’s been particularly important regarding American support for Zionism, which has rested entirely on constant cultural repetition of imaginary narratives. These have been impossible to sustain in the face of the live-streamed Gaza slaughter, which has demonstrated the actual supremacist basis of Israel and the Zionist project since 1948 and which, I have been thrilled to note, has given rise to an unprecedented anti-Zionist movement in the United States.

That’s why the Trump administration, the American state, is, as I predicted it would:

to an extent unprecedented in those prior protest cycles… unit[ing] to crush, criminalize, and forbid anti-Zionist dissent….

I am certain the breadth and severity of the American state’s reaction to these anti-Zionist protests will be unprecedented. The students will be expelled and arrested. Laws will be passed criminalizing criticism of Israel and Zionism. Censorship of social media will be tightened. No American anti-Zionist political movement can be allowed.

It must be said that the live-streamed, 18-month-long genocidal, exterminate-and-expel ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the holocaust and horror of our time. As one commentator put it: “Gaza is a live broadcast of humanity’s moral collapse.” The deliberate, proudly proclaimed targeting and mass murdering of children, journalists, doctors, and teachers rivals, if not outstrips, the vicious supremacist cruelty of the Nazis and King Leopold. It reveals and condemns the fundamental “Nakba” character of the Zionist enterprise and must be opposed by every human being with a shred of ethics.

America’s bipartisan, indispensable, enabling participation in this enterprise is sufficient to damn this country to lasting historical ignominy. Trump, advancing along the road paved by Biden and every president since JFK, can say or do nothing to compensate for this crime against humanity.

Trump and most American politicians do not know or—such is their commitment to Zionism—do not care that the United States, though its sponsorship of Zionist colonialism, has become rightfully, and probably irretrievably, reviled, and is destroying the last shred of American credibility and hegemony in the world.

We are seeing clearly now how the United States In the world, and every political movement within the country, Is weakened in every way (but, for a moment financially) and put on........

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