The end of the 'American Century'?

== Shifting Power Structures ==

I've long noticed that each of the last three or more centuries only began to show their "theme" or nature about a decade and a half into them. Culminating in 1918, World War One ended what had been an ebullient century of Optimistic Industrial Europe, that began with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, which ended the French Century, and so on. Back in December 2013, Bloomberg ran a piece of mine and they insisted I be specific about 2014. But in fact, the pattern seems approximate... but chilling.

Shall we fear that the 2016 election of Donald Trump presages the collapse of the American Century? Certainly, every single action that he takes... and the Republican Party... seems aimed at demolishing the web of alliances built by Marshall, Truman, Eisenhower and so on, while devastating the scientific and entrepreneurial excellence that dazzled the planet. Our reputation as reliable partners, as logical problem solvers and as pragmatic negotiators lies shattered, just as other powers rise up, proclaiming "It's our turn, now."

To be clear, I am no believer in mystical crap like "cyclical history" or romantic pattern-seeking twaddle like "Fourth Turning" generational "theory." But It's all right to experience a "frisson" of worry, as the Concave (or American) Century sure seems to be giving way to something else. We still have time to win this phase of our Civil War and regain our formidable strengths, I believe. But we need to get cracking.

Here is the Bloomberg article, reprinted on my own site.

== Facts are inconvenient ==

Diametrically opposite to his claims, Donald Trump has signed less legislation at one year than any other president since Hoover.  If your dogma is hate-all-government, then why does DT brag so, about a legislative “record” (that isn’t remotely true)?

Where Trump has surpassed most modern presidents is the number of pages of legislation, most of it in the new tax bill that passed with zero hearings, crafted in secret by only two dozen top Republicans and their lobbyists.  Congrats on that.

Dig this. The GOP has run Congress for 20 of the last 22 years, and across that time they were the laziest in U.S. history, holding the fewest (non-Clinton-lynching) hearings, introducing or passing the fewest bills and holding the fewest days in session… but breaking records in days spent fundraising or closeted with lobbyists. Look at the stock value of K Street lobbying firms and tell us about “draining the swamp.”

Now, your values may rank higher some of Trump’s actual accomplishments, such as driving a mass exodus of skilled civil servants, e.g. from the State Department, eviscerating the IRS so that the number of audits has collapsed, and cancelling consumer financial protections. (For example, a hated Obama-era rule that your financial advisor must tell you, when he is guiding you into investments that serve him, and not you.)

If that's you, then you probably believe it actually matters what symbol foreign  agents wear on their lapels. The very same fellows you used to rave about when they wore hammers and sickles, as villainous enemies of everything American, are now great pals -- the very same men -- since they switched to wearing crosses. Dang, got to hand it to them. (The last five minutes of Blast From the Past were prophetic!)

== The (Potemkin) Korean Candidate  ==

Have you wondered how North Korea developed sophisticated H Bombs and ICBMs so swiftly? Those warmongering for a U.S.-Iran fight claim it’s Tehran that’s been helping. This article shows otherwise - that NK lured in rocket and nuclear scientists  who lost their jobs at the end of the Cold War. But it implies the help came one worker at a time. But what if a neighbor of NK had a geopolitical reason to want this present situation?  Consider the benefits of having a puppet regime that can strike at America… while you have utter deniability.  Anyone who thinks the Kim regime has been anything but a wholly-owned subsidiary, since 1950, is naïve.

Berit Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Scout.ai, is a global expert on this subject. Scout broke what may have been the earliest story on how what she calls "computational propaganda" was used by a foreign power's info-war teams in a torrent of well-orchestrated and smartly planned efforts to affect outcomes in both state and national elections inside U.S. boundaries. Today, experts are reasonably certain that the same teams and techniques were used against Britain to affect the Brexit vote, in Spain during the Catalan rebellion, in France, in Germany, and elsewhere.

Worse yet, there appears so far to be no real solution, and politicos are assuming, in public, that all upcoming elections in the world's democracies will again fall under info-attack by the same powers.

As a result of all the above, Berit has been speaking around the world on the issues relating to this direct threat to free speech and democracy, from New York to Lithuania to Brussels, Amsterdam, Estonia - the list gets longer daily.

At our recent FiRe conference, Berit was interviewed by the BBC's Ed Butler. Video is available here. 

== Conservatives: rebuild cred by being “right” more often! ==

In New York, crime has fallen in each of the major felony categories, with just 285 homicides in the city, the lowest since reliable records have been kept. The numbers portray a city growing safer even as the police use less deadly force, make fewer arrests and scale back controversial practices like stop-and-frisk. And what to do with that fact? Point and scream at Chicago! Though the New York trend is by far more typical across the nation.

This article demands “Affirmative Action for conservatives on college faculty." Now I actually like good debates! I want there to be fact-loving and cogently collegial conservative voices on campus! The problem is that they are rare, compared to the prevalence of fact-hating, dogmatic fanatics. 

And yes, there are dogmatic leftists - a problem that is rife, at the 5%+ level - at almost any university; anecdotally a clade of drivel-spinners and even bullies. PC screechers did their own cause vast harm in the 1980s, by driving off campus conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and his neocon pals, who sought shelter in faux-academe "institutes" like Heritage, where their madness went unchecked by collegial interaction or feedback. Campus sanctimony junkies thus share some blame for the lunatic excesses, when neoconservatives got their chance at policy-making. 

Still, lefty university loons are much more rare than media imply… and that problem certainly won't be helped by adding other crazies “for balance”!

Matthew Reed Bailey offers an explanation “why Liberals are demographically more represented in Academia than are "Conservatives." This has to do with "roughly 80% of Conservative Policies being discovered to be "just wrong" over the last 50 years.” Bailey avows “only in the areas of Free-Trade and Globalization do they "Get it right."  

I would add a few more narrow islands of cogency on the right. They were okay to resist the left’s worst crime/mania of the last generation — the insipidly insane notion of desegregation by Forced School Bussing, which permanently alienated 30 million American voters and led directly to the revival of today's Confederate Coalition. That sanctimonious-drooling madness has never been admitted by a single leftist, for the self-destructive and criminally stupid mistake that it was.

And coming up to contemporary matters, let me prove my contrariness by stepping up and avowing that today’s right is on-target criticizing a democratic policy to emphasize family reunions in legal immigration. Sure it sounds nice, but when you think about it — beyond parent and child — it is flat-out evil. And I mean that word. With the best of intentions, perhaps, it is truly an evil policy! Dems should offer it up as a bargaining chip.

In fact, I invite you to look back at Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" of 1994, a spectacularly brilliant piece of political theater that helped sweep the GOP into power over Congress for 20 of the last 24 years. If you actually read the "Contract" carefully, about half of the proposals are -- well -- somewhat reasonable. Of course, they are the promises that later gopper leaders -- worse than Newt -- went on to betray. Still, democrats, study the "Contract" method! It worked. Consider how. And these other suggestions.

== Alas, a sane conservatism should be right more often than that! ==

Beyond that, it’s sad that conservatives - many of whom I like - can never tabulate how often their “side” has been flat-out wrong, and learn from this that they need to revise — not their best-core values, but their reflexes and methodologies and especially who they accept as allies.

Climate denialism is blatantly a political-dogmatic cult whose ranting rationalizations are funded by coal barons, petro boyars and oil sheiks, using the same ad agencies that promoted "tobacco is harmless" and “cars don't cause smog,” and "it doesn't matter that our bays and streams kill fish and catch on fire!"... all while waging all out war against science and every other caste of knowledge in American life, sabotaging the research we need in order to find out whether humanity and america and our children might be in danger.

The U.S. military is made up of people who tend largely toward a crewcut-conservative personality. Yet, the US military officer corps is also fact-centered. They were the first American institution to realize that racism, and later sexism, boiled down to crippling presumptions that simply wasted tons of talent that warriors could not afford to forego. Likewise, officers know that climate change is a real threat to the republic, just as they know that foreigners meddling in our elections pose real danger, possibly at the level of war.

Alas, sane-adult American conservative civilians can afford the refuge of incantations. Deep-down, they know this is untenable — e.g. that most of the sexual perverts in politics and nearly all the child molesters are republicans. So they have just one recourse: to chant incantations issued by Fox that anecdotal far-lefties are representative of all liberals.  

It is a lie. Anecdotes about lefty-flakery have zero bearing on the vast majority of moderate-pragmatic, science and fact loving Democrats.

There can be another America-led Century. And if so, the next stop is Star Trek. If not, then feudalism, the natural human social order, will clamp on forever.  It all teeters on whether we can overcome this tipping point crisis. And that won't happen till our recurring national fever - the Confederacy - is quelled, yet again, and conservative Americans rejoin the actual conversation about our future.

== Listen to fact-people ==

Captain Mark Kelly (US Navy, retired) is a combat veteran and former NASA astronaut and brother to the American who stayed in space for a year. He writes: “This year has been an unequivocal disaster for the future of the planet.” He is very clear about what’s happening. Tell your mad uncle to look him up.