Must We Collapse?

A not-small part of me is rooting for American collapse. The reason ought to be obvious, but I’ll state it, anyway. For the last few decades, our nation has been operating like a barely-functional alcoholic. We stagger from crisis to crisis, flailing at our international responsibilities while just managing to keep the lights on at home. We’re belligerent, angry, abusive. A nation at war with its own demons. We’re sick, getting sicker, and the only hope I see at the moment is for us to, finally, hit rock bottom.

I don’t think we’re there yet. Unfortunately, I don’t even think we’re close. America remains too powerful and too prosperous for the nation to quit the bottle just yet. I suspect we need to fall much further before the nation writ large is willing to take a dispassionate look in the mirror and resolve to make amends and change our ways.

It sort of feels like the entire nation is only a strong gust of wind away from this.

If we continue on our current slutty course of swinging between the two parties every couple of years, we’re going to end up dead in a ditch. Maybe sooner, maybe later. The election of Trump accelerated that process of American collapse, which was, perhaps, always the goal. Deconstruct, dismantle, destroy. As Grover Norquist, the tax extremist who started his career going to bat in support of apartheid South Africa famously put it in 2001, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it.”

Almost 25 years later, it appears that Norquist is getting his wish. Thousands thrown out of their jobs, foreign aid suspended, important government services shuttered, contracts canceled, farmers stiffed, NATO sabotaged. Trillions in spending cuts mandated by a “big, beautiful Republican spending bill” whose singular purpose is to put more money into the pockets of the wealthiest Americans.

If this were only about tax cuts, it wouldn’t be quite so disastrous, but this administration isn’t satisfied with lining their pockets. They also would punish the least among us for the crime of existing. The elderly, disabled, and poor will all see drastic cuts to the already parsimonious social services on which they rely. Also being cut: pure scientific research, the sort of thing that, for generations, has helped the nation lead the world in cutting edge technology and innovation. Much of that work will now move to Europe and China, which will have the downstream effect of making the United States less competitive and less safe.

But the richest will have their tax cuts.

When Trump announced his latest absurd tariffs on Canada and Mexico, I cheered. Let the economy tank. Let the stock market fall off a cliff. Let our partners see us in all of our shameful drunken revelry. Let’s get this American collapse over and done with as quickly as possible so that we can remove the lampshade from our head, survey the damage, and begin drying out.

It's a terrible thing to root against one’s country, but that’s where I’m at because in rooting for American collapse, I am cheering for the nation that I believe we can be. I’m cheering for us to rise up off the mat and reclaim our rightful place in the world as a sober, judicious defender of democracy and human rights. I would like us to, once again, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other great nations, many of whom have undergone their own collapses before emerging, chastened, with a clearer sense of their obligations to the rest of the world. England may have lost her empire, for example, but she knows how to stand against tyranny. Germany and Japan may have fallen under the spell of hyper-nationalism, but both nations are now responsible global citizens. Then again, the USSR collapsed and re-emerged as a mafia state, so these things can cut both ways.

I think we stand a better chance than Russia. My hope is that America will revert to form after our flirtation with fascism. After all, we’re the birthplace of the modern democratic republic. We’re the nation that once welcomed the discarded of the world because we understood that all people are created equal. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? That’s all of us. Nobody’s comfort is assured. Nobody’s safety guaranteed. Not you, not me. Not Elon Musk, who, apparently, has now taken to wearing a Kevlar vest when out and about.

Is that freedom?

Look around. Is this freedom?

I don’t know how to root for American collapse without rooting for American suffering. Maybe it’s not possible. But I think a quicker collapse would mitigate that suffering more than the slow-motion disaster we’ve been undertaking over the last 40 years. I’m not interested in blame right now, though I know where to place it. I’m not interested in name-calling right now, though I know whose names ought to be relegated to American infamy. I’m interested in the current administration following their current course to its inevitable conclusion and then being dragged from the White House and hung upside down from a girder. I am, naturally, being metaphorical. What I literally want is for them to be tried, convicted, and then hung upside from a girder.

How bad can it get? Our own history teaches us that it can get pretty f’ing bad before it gets better. Great. Let’s hasten the bad stuff so that we can get ourselves off the road and into the drunk tank before too many more people get killed.