Here are some headlines from just the last few days.

19 weeks into 2019, there have been 15 school shootings. An Attorney General in contempt of Congress. A President provoking a constitutional crisis, simply ignoring the law — and instructing his administration to ignore it, too. Georgia making miscarriages — miscarriages! — punishable by a decade in prison, not to mention trying to leave the state to get an abortion. Caravans of Americans are crossing the border into Canada…to get the insulin they need to live: $1000 a month in America, but maybe $100 in Canada.

Good Lord. What the? Even I’m shocked and alarmed at the speed and intensity with which gruesome, terrible, and bizarre news is erupting out of America. And you, my friends, should be too.

America is in free fall. We haven’t seen a rich country implode like this since the Weimar Republic. Yes, really. And while you might cry, “At least we’re not Venezuela!”, you are very much missing the point. America is the Venezuela of the rich world. Nobody else has American problems. Canadians and Europeans happily live their lives — even if their societies are affected by global currents of stagnation and extremism here and there. But no other rich society is collapsing at light speed — nor are most poor ones.

And yet collapsing is precisely what America’s doing. It’s collapsing now at a faster rate than ever, in fact. A decade ago, collapse was slow, hazy, like fog. Three years ago, it was ominous, like an arriving thunderstorm. But today it is like a volcano — explosive, catastrophic, and terrible. American collapse has never hit harder or faster than right now, right here, this moment. Yes, really. Americans might have gotten used to it all — struggling amidst the wreckage of a failed society. But they shouldn’t be. I’ll come back to all that — and what to do about it, too.

But to do that, I think that we have to understand where we are, and I don’t mean that the way an Ezra Klein or Chris Hayes does. I mean really understand it, through the eyes of history, the world, and ourselves. You can judge for yourself whether I succeed, or fail. Let me begin here.

Did you know that more than 50% of Americans have suffered financial hardship due to medical bills? That more than 50% have nothing saved for retirement? You probably do, all too well, because you’re living it. Of course life is that way — 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So what is there to save? Bang! My first kind of collapse: economic collapse. And the truth is that while meaningless things like the stock market may be booming, and unemployment low, the economy, as in what people actually experience, is in catastrophic shape.

Those statistics aren’t just grim — they’re frightening. You cannot have a society collapsing economically in truer ways than the majority of people being unable to afford medicine or retirement or being able to make ends meet (and if you don’t believe that, please ask yourself if you think working a thankless job until your dying day is something you’d like to do.) America is collapsing economically — and the reason is simple: predatory capitalism is the sole economic force in society. Hence, San Francisco’s main hospital, Zuckerberg General…doesn’t accept insurance. LOL — what the?

Yet hidden in the grim reality of such cold statistics, which we’ve all become a little inured to — the majority of Americans can’t afford this or that — is that American collapse is eerily reminiscent of Soviet collapse. They tell us a society is no longer able to provide the most basic goods to people anymore. Let me say that again — because it’s one of the keys to really understanding American collapse. America is a society that can’t provide basic goods for its people anymore.

(In Soviet America, the breadlines are for insulin, as the joke goes. But it’s only funny because it’s not really a joke. In America, capitalism can’t provide any of the following: healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, safety, belonging, trust, truth, decency. And that’s just a partial list. American capitalism has made them unaffordable to anyone but the ultra-rich, and even then, maybe still unaffordable at all. Hence, economic collapse.)

But when a society cannot provide basic goods for people anymore, what happens? That brings me to my second kind of collapse — social collapse. Incomes haven’t risen for half a century — how Soviet is that? — while prices for basic goods, like insulin, which those poor people had to go to Canada to buy have skyrocketed — so much so that many basic goods are now in perpetual artificial shortage. And the result has been something truly astonishing, genuinely astounding, at least in historical terms.

America’s once-prosperous middle class is now a fast shrinking minority. That’s a radical change to the structure of a modern society. It’s literally not been seen since the days of the Weimar Republic. Remember what that was followed by? And yet American thinkers didn’t understand, barely bothered to notice — which was even more shocking and alarming. But the truth was that this was something very much like the foundations of a house crumbling. A modern society is made of a small number of poor, a small number of rich, and a very large number middle — and that gentle bell curve is absolutely vital to its ongoing stability, harmony, and peace. (And progress is widening the curve, softening it, so that there’s less poverty, less extreme riches, and more shared wealth in the middle. That’s the key to the European Miracle.)

Now, to really understand that, you need to think historically. Once upon a time, wealth wasn’t distributed in a gentle bell curve. It was something more like a U, or a J. There were vast numbers of poor — peasants, serfs, and so on — and a small number of “nobles”, kings, lords, and whatnot. But no one much, really, in the middle, except maybe a few clergymen or wandering traders here and there. Premodern society is characterized by a lack of shared wealth — because predatory institutions have extracted it: think of the lord demanding a tribute of half the harvest, because he “owns” the land, or worse…your daughter.

(And yet that’s exactly what happened to Americans. The people they pay tribute aren’t called feudal overlords — they’re called billionaires. And yet the average American pays a large portion of his income in taxes, while billionaires pay little or none — while charging people massive sums through giant monopolies for basic things, like insulin or retirement. Bang! That’s tribute by any other name. Think of Zuck and YouTube making a fortune off making America’s kids miserable, lonely, misinformed, and afraid.)

So the gentle bell curve of shared prosperity in America collapsed into a twisted, barbed fishhook. And as America’s social structure underwent this epic, titanic change — there can’t really be anything more dramatic that happens to the structure of a modern society than its broad middle withering away — so poverty in America exploded. So much so that the UN began to highlight it as a concern. But it was a new kind of poverty. The poverty of being a formerly middle class person in a rich country. The poverty of having a job, making a decent amount of money, sometimes — and yet even then not being able to pay the bills, month after month. It was precocity, insecurity, fragility.

As the gentle bell curve of modern prosperity imploded on itself, and became a bent, jagged, twisted hook, it symbolized a titanic change in society: larger and larger numbers of effectively poor people, while a tiny group of super rich became ultra rich — in predatory ways. How else could most people be getting poorer, year after year — unless those getting richer were preying on them, cheating them, swindling them, after all? So while America’s social structured collapsed into the new poverty of precarity, at the very same time…billion dollar corporations became the world’s first trillion dollar corporations, and mere billionaires became multi-billionaires…all for no good, fair, decent, or sane reason.

What happens when a society structure implodes like that? Well, think about what that gentle bell curve of modern prosperity really is. It’s not just a statistic. It’s a hope. It’s a feeling. It’s hundreds of millions of lives, minds, souls. It’s decency, fairness, justice, truth, meaning.

Bang!

Just imagine all that vanishing for a second. How does it feel? Imagine the gentle bell curve of shared wealth becoming a jagged, barbed fishhook. How does that feel? It feels exactly like it looks: scary, bad, ominous.

The bell curve of prosperity promised Americans that a middle class existence would be theirs, if they played by the rules. Work hard. Don’t squander your money. Be a good and decent person. Have some humility. And you know what? You’ll have a pretty good life. You’ll educate your kids, take a few vacations, own a home worth living in. But those are just materials. The social curve is a feeling — it always is — and this feeling was security, pride, belonging. Not the mean, nasty, brutish kind. The gentle kind. The puppy and picket fence kind. The life full of laughter and love and a few tears kind.

But instead, as the curve imploded, Americans got precisely the opposite. The heart-stopping panic of not being able to pay your bills. The terror of not being able to afford that life-saving operation, medicine, therapy. The horror of wondering whether your kids would be shot at school — and the added horror of them having to pretend to die in “active shooter drills.” The dread that kept them up at night — how will I pay for my kids’ education? What kind of lives will they have? What happened to my own. Imagine all that suffering for a moment. Really imagine it. All those feelings, those emotions, those sentiments.

Do you see now what I mean by America is the Venezuela of the rich world, and the Soviet Union of this century a little bit? Do you see how the collapse a country’s social structure isn’t a small thing — but the biggest thing of all, perhaps — and yet how American thought completely ignored it, and mostly still does? And that brings me to my third kind of collapse — political collapse.

What happens when a society can’t provide basic things for people anymore — as its gentle bell curve of shared prosperity implodes into a jagged crook of fresh poverty for the undeserving, many, but obscene wealth for a predatory, shameless few?

Think about it. Really picture it. Feel all that heart-stopping panic and fear engulfing a once prosperous and peaceful society. See that gentle middle-class bell curve becoming that barbed, razor sharp fishhook. It’s a little bit like watching a heart-attack on an EKG, isn’t it?

What tends to happen when all that hppanes is revolution. But revolutions can go two ways. The wheel of history can spin forward, or backward. Sometimes, it does both, fighting itself. In America, it spun backwards. That was predictable, too, because America is a deeply conservative society. It was eminently predictable that as American systems failed to deliver decent lives to people, even livable ones, for no real fault of their own — they’d turn backwards to older systems. Unfortunately, in America’s case, those systems were supremacy, bigotry, and hatred. (When people’s minds are consumed by fear, dread, anxiety, about their very survival — soon enough, all too easily, those emotions become hatred and loathing of the other. In America, that was the weaker, the different, the minority, who was always seen as a lesser human being.)

Bang! American political implosion. Today, we see the results: an Attorney General in contempt of Congress…a President more than happy to provoke a constitutional crisis by simply ignoring the law…because, my friends, that is what authoritarians do. America is having a textbook authoritarian meltdown. That’s why in nearly every objective ranking of democracy, America barely qualifies as one anymore.

What to do about all the above. The first thing — and I mean this intently — is to understand it. Yes, really. Just understand it. Why? Well, think about all the people who didn’t — and still don’t. Not a single pundit or leader or intellectual or politicians understands any of the above. They didn’t predict it, warn of it, call it. Only figures on the fringes (like me, who actively rejects being part of the establishment) did. So your first responsibility if you want to fix American collapse is to really get it. By that I mean this.

Economic collapse produced social collapse sparked political implosion. A society unable to provide basics for people anymore saw its social structure erode badly — and that dramatic, terrible transformation in social structure alone was enough to predict political destabilization. Do you see how these things are linked — like dominoes, each knocking down the next?

Now. If you understand all that, then you should also understand that the way to undo American collapse is to begin at the beginning. To uproot it, not just cut off its branches, which will just grow back — there are always Trumps around, my friends, and they are always just a symptom, a symbol. How do you do that? Think about the causal chain.

Political destabilization, sparked by social implosion, caused by economic collapse. Start at the beginning, not the end. That is how authoritarianism and collapse is really undone. In this case, as in most cases, it means: systems that are able to provide basic things for everyone again, which restores the gentle bell curve of shared prosperity, which makes the middle class grow, which stabilizes the polity again, as people’s fear, dreads, anxieties begin to recede — and so does their hatred, anger, rage, and violence.

So the second thing you can do is choose leaders that get it, too. That’s crucial, because in a social collapse you don’t have many chances to stop it, reverse it, undo it. It’s like an avalanche. In this case, America’s lucky to have one chance left, and that’s the next election. If you ask me, that’s it — the last one, yes, really.

I don’t need to tell you by now that there’s one candidate who gets the logic above — or at least if she doesn’t get it explicitly, she understands it implicitly — and that’s Elizabeth Warren. She understands that there’s only way to undo a social collapse: for everyone to lift everyone else up. If all we’re ever doing is pulling one another down — which is modern American life — where can we go?

Hence, she has a plan to do just the above. Create systems that give people basic goods again, whether healthcare, retirement, childcare, and so on. Those systems will produce a vibrant middle class again — by employing people and creating better choices both. And the feeling, the mood, the sentiment of a time, an age, a place, will change. Remember the feeling of the curve imploding on itself to become a twisted fishhook? It feels just like it looks: scary. When life feels good again — safe, gentle, welcoming, fair — then politics will stabilize, too.

All that is how a society finds its way back to prosperity. On one level, it’s simple. And yet on another, a truer one — nothing could be harder. Remember when I said America was the Soviet Union of this century? Maybe I’ll yet be — much to my own happiness — proven wrong.

Umair

May 2019