By now, maybe you’ve seen the surprise Australian election results. They’re not much of a surprise if you’ve been reading along here, I suppose — but I digress. The country elected hardcore “conservatives” again. I put that in quotes, because like in America, there’s nothing really conservative about Australia’s conservatives — they’re not interested in conserving, say, the planet, truth, educated people, trust, or kindness. They’re reminiscent, instead, of the kind of bellowing, jeering fools that have come to be synonymous with Trumpism or Brexit.

The ongoing collapse of the English-speaking world is what I want to discuss. It is very much a collapse, a great turning point of modern history. Unfortunately, the Anglo world doesn’t really have any thinkers or leaders left to understand all that, much less see it clearly, to connect the dots.

Why is it that the world’s three English speaking countries are the ones in steepest decline? (You can point to ex-Soviet states, like Hungary and Poland — but that misses the point entirely. They are countries that never developed anything close to mature democracies, whether in terms of political institutions, parties, norms, or media. They are developing societies that have stalled out.) Only Anglo countries — and only Anglo countries — are mature democracies in such severe, steep, implosive decline. They are countries that simply do not function in basic ways anymore — that are choosing to self-destruct because they cannot seem to reach for progress anymore.

That’s for a very simple reason.

English speaking countries built the world’s most capitalist societies. But capitalism implodes into fascism, by way of authoritarianism, theocracy, supremacy, kleptocracy, chaos. And now Anglo societies are reaping just that whirlwind, as capitalism fails. They’re at different points along that path — but the path is just the same. Economic collapse leads to social collapse leads, ultimately, to political collapse — Trumpism, Brexit, etc.

I know that you probably don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. Frankly, you’re fed a load of shining, seductive hogwash…daily, hourly, by the second. Everything’s fine! Things have never been better! The economy’s booming! Really? Let’s look at some cold, hard empirical realities about America, which leads the Anglo pack in terms of collapse — it’s where Britain and Australia are headed. You probably know these facts all too well if you read me regularly.

80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the majority have nothing saved for retirement, 40% struggle to afford food, 70% struggle to afford food, medicine, and housing. Shall I go on? Suicide is skyrocketing, longevity is plummeting, real incomes are falling, poverty is exploding. More Americans live in poverty than the entire population of Canada, or any European country. School shootings are a regular feature of life, as is police brutality, as is murder. America’s health indicators are at the level of much poorer countries — whether maternal mortality. The average American lives a life haunted by fake “debts” he or she will struggle their whole lives long to “pay back” — medical debt, student debt, credit card debt, even “lunch debt” for little kids.

Let me translate all that for you. Poverty, debt, misery, hunger, illness, and despair are endemic in America. Yes, really. 40% of people struggle to afford food. Am I the one overstating it — or you the one not alarmed enough yet? By any objective standard, American standards of living have fallen so far that they approach something like what you might expect of Soviet levels — breadlines, remember. They have reached way, way beyond mere “crisis” levels. A crisis would be something that threatens us in the future. These dismal trends in American life point to genuine social collapse. What kind of country can’t feed 40% of its population? Won’t let a majority save a penny?

Bang! The kind of society that destabilizes. When people can’t aspire not just to “better” lives — but even to minimally good ones, ones that feel relatively safe, secure, calm, and happy, not full of heart-stopping anxiety, dread, fear, and panic, what happens? Wham. Things fall apart. People turn to alternatives. What are the alternatives to democracy? Fascism, supremacy, authoritarianism, theocracy. Lesser things. We go backwards in history. To old ways. It’s not surprise that Americans turned to exactly those things en masse — their democracy, institutions, and social contract, all failed to deliver decent lives to them.

It was eminently predictable, therefore, that the following would happen. Economic collapse, growing deprivation, would lead to social collapse — the withering away of the middle collapse — which would lead to political collapse, people turning on democracy itself. Why is it that Trump hasn’t been impeached? Why is that so many still support him? The Nazis never had a majority either. A majority has never been needed to fully collapse a society, whether America, Rome, or Weimar Germany — just a fanatical enough minority, something between 25 and 40 percent of society, that’s committed to extremism. And that’s exactly what we see in America’s case.

Now. What does all that tell us about the future of the other great Anglo societies, Britain and Australia? Remember, I don’t include Canada and New Zealand in “anglo societies” because properly speaking, they’re multicultural — they have multiple official languages and rights for different groups (though you can see just these same trends at work in Anglo provinces, like Ontario, for example.)

What’s happening to the Anglo world is that it’s getting Americanized. Britain is the furthest along, and Australia is further behind. But they are following America’s lead — and they will end up in precisely the same place if nothing changes. Let me illustrate, with Britain’s example.

What has a decade of brutal “austerity” — underinvestment, American style, in public goods, whether healthcare or education, produced in Britain? A society that looks, well, suspiciously like America. Or at least is beginning to. Just like in America, longevity is falling, suicide is rising, depression is endemic, incomes are flat, trust has blown apart, and people have little to no savings.

In fact, there are no other countries in the other world — save perhaps Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea — where all those trends are true at once. Yes, really. Even in Iraq, life expectancy and incomes are rising. As I often say, you can’t have worse social indicators than the trifecta of falling longevity, incomes, and happiness. And if we look around the globe, these bitter realities are only true in Anglo societies — unless we count the world’s most savagely failed states.

(Do you see how dire that is? And yet do you also see how different it is from what you’re taught to see? Anglo media, thinkers, punditry never raise these issues. You’ll never hear an Ezra or a Chris or a Jake talk about them. Why would they? They don’t need to, or they can’t, or they don’t have to. So the result is that the average Anglo has no idea — no idea whatsoever — that at this juncture in human history, Anglo societies lead the world in a truly unique, gruesome, and bizarre thing: collapse.)

Britain has become Americanized at light speed — longevity falling from European levels in just ten years, incomes flattening, trust cratering. Australia’s further behind, it’s true. But the trajectory of collapse is the point. Anglo societies are now following precisely the same path as America. And that, my friends, is the path into the abyss. It’s the path in the mass hunger, despair, poverty, and illness — the kind that lead to genuine fascism, authoritarianism, and theocracy rising, just as we see in America.

Now. What caused the mass poverty, hunger, despair, and illness that devastated America so much they destabilized it? The answer’s pretty obvious, and it’s another one you won’t like to hear about. Predatory capitalism did.

What else is making Americans go into “medical debt”, “student debt”, “credit card debt”, “lunch debt”? Nothing else. It can’t be anything else because there is nothing else in society. 80% of America’s economy is the most extreme form of capitalism the world has ever seen. The kind where kids have to pretend to die at school…because the gun lobby has bought Congress. The kind where desperate American form caravans to buy insulin in Canada, because it costs a tenth of what it does in America. The kind where you have to choose to die so your family can keep their house.

Predatory capitalism (you can call it “corporatism”, if you must) is what made Americans poor — not “socialism” (there isn’t any, for Pete’s sake.) Now, they struggle to understand that — most or many of them will defend capitalism to their graves, because, well, if they give up on that, they give up on hope, on the dream, and they have to face bitter reality: maybe it was choosing that very system that pushed them into poverty, hunger, despair, and illness.

So America’s the most capitalist society in the world today — and it’s most spectacular failure now, too. But the second most capitalist society in the world — the rich world, anyways — is Britain. And the third is Australia. America’s economy is almost all capitalist, as much as can be — 80%. Britain’s is about 70%, and so is Australia’s, roughly. Contrast that with Europe or Canada — which are about half private and half public. See the link yet?

Anglo societies are the most capitalist in the world — and they’re the ones collapsing fastest and hardest, too. That’s not some cosmic, magical coincidence — it’s an obvious casual relationship. The Anglo world is imploding because Anglos are the most capitalist societies in the world.

And capitalism is failing now. It’s imploding into fascism, as it produces, instead of a good life for everyone, mass poverty, hunger, despair, and illness. Remember how 40% of Americans struggle to afford food? How 70% struggle to afford food, housing, and medicine? My friends, I’m not kidding, and just because the Ezras and Nates of the world don’t think those statistics matter, doesn’t mean you should be so foolish. Those are epic, unreal, shocking, Soviet levels of collapse. Capitalism is failing — and it’s failing catastrophically.

But capitalism also fails in a precise, predictable way. Capitalism promises proles they’ll be rich like capitalists, one day — but it has no intention whatsoever of ever delivering. The tension between these two things — the impossible promise of a glittering life full of riches, and the reality of a wasted life full of fear, anxiety, and dread, is how capitalism implodes into fascism. Society soon enough becomes gripped by anger, riven by rage, torn apart by fury. If the masses can’t have what they were promised, fated to have — they’ll take it by force, by violence. That’s the essential promise of Trumpism, isn’t it? And of Brexit, too.

And so society soon enough turns on the “weak”, those at the bottom of social hierarchies: immigrants, refugees, Jews, Muslims, women. Hence, Australia puts refugees in horrific offshore detainment camps, just like America puts little kids in concentration camps, just like Britain demonizes and attacks immigrants and refugees even if they’re doctors and professors. These are all predictable tides, too.

So the English speaking world’s collapse can be summed up like this. Anglos built the world’s most capitalist societies. The rest of the rich world wasn’t foolish enough — notably Europe — to buy into capitalism’s bizarre thinking. It understood that capitalism would never give people decent lives — and so it built genuine social democracies instead, like Canada. Only Anglos believed that capitalism would make everyone something like a slavemaster — rich, dominant, merciless, strong, powerful, ruthless, selfish, stupid, and that was the ideal they wanted everyone to aim for.

But capitalism, in an ironic, twisted double-cross, did what capitalism does — it left people poor, hungry, ill, and abandoned. Broke and alone and desperate. Not rich and powerful. As mass poverty and hunger and illness and despair skyrocketed, to levels unseen in rich countries since the Weimar Republic — bang! — America and Britain destabilized. Their democracies began to fail, as people turned on their fundamental principles, decency, investment, care, truth. Hence, Brexit and Trumpism. Australia’s not so far behind.

Anglo societies are imploding because capitalism implodes into fascism — and they built the world’s most capitalist societies. Hence, today, they’re the ones being ripped apart by right wing extremism hardest, unless you count countries that never were democracies at all, or still aren’t. Britain’s already far, far down the path of Americanization. It’s not the country it used to be, a world leader, stable, safe, prosperous, smart. It will probably go most of the way to full-on American collapse. Will Australia go that far? My sense is it will pull back before the brink. Or will it?

It’s also part of capitalism to condition people to never be able to — or want to — understand capitalism’s flaws, shortcomings, failures. Marx called that a “false consciousness.” Anglos are still right there. Capitalism has left them utterly devastated. And yet they cling to it, like a drowning person clinging to the wreckage of the very boat that capsized them. They don’t know, they can’t see: the shore is just a few short steps away.

Umair

May 2019