By then, everyone reluctantly realized that there wasn’t going to be any good ending or VJ Day moment that would retroactively make their support of the Iraq War look noble or wise. They realized the money and credibility they invested in this project—clinched by a particularly impressive Herbalife presentation at the UN—was simply not coming back.
However, this is America, and in our country, no dream ever really dies. In this case, we were able to swap out George W. Bush for General David Petraeus as 2007’s figure of national leadership and competence and trade “Mission Accomplished” for “Uh, the Surge Worked?” And that was that. The Iraq War didn’t demonstrate American might or benevolence on the global stage the way we might have hoped, nor did it inspire any new national purpose or credo. But it was no real loss, either, because not a single person involved was ever held accountable, save for Chelsea Manning.
* * *
And then, in 2008, we got Obama, the living refutation of swaggering idiot cowboys like Bush and snarling, sneering blood drinkers like Cheney. Nevertheless, Obama pulled off a much trickier job: Febreze-ing our national conscience without ever truly reckoning with what happened or winding down our blood-soaked “strategic interests in the region.” Despite Obama’s gloss as a liberal beacon of hope, this was the moment the War on Terror stopped being an emotional spectacle in American life and became a new baseline for reality. It joined the background static of our society, with the imprimatur of both parties and therefore all acceptable points of view. It became something that simply is, existing perfectly outside the realm of politics and ideology. The days of “boots on the ground” and “nation-building” were over, and the phrase “War on Terror” now meant harnessing our technology to manage a global drone assassination campaign. We could even safely retire “War on Terror,” as the thing itself no longer required a name, so thoroughly metastasized was it throughout our body politic.
All this was far less upsetting for the public—the American public, that is—but all the more corrosive to our souls, precisely because of how invisible and consequence-free it now appears.
Still, it should be noted that while they may be out of power for now, the architects of the War on Terror remain at large. They’re ensconced in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, in think tanks, op-ed sections, and on cable news. Some have even taken up positions as leaders of the #Resistance to President Trump, but none of them have lost hope for a new Pax Americana. Their mission remains the same. For these “heroes in error,” the real prize is still, and always was, Iran. The Islamic Republic. The Shia Succubus. Iraq is just a Scrabble tile away from Iran, and while Saddam’s old stomping ground was merely supposed to be a launching pad toward the rest of the Middle East, Iran was always the real treasure, the site of a new, glorious, liberated American dominion to print AEI pamphlets and pump petro-dollars.
Iran is our real enemy because, for our national security planners, it represents the unthinkable: a genuine regional power with its own oil resources outside the US fold that isn’t a complete basket case. As such, we’re treated to the semiregular cant that Iran is the “greatest exporter of terrorism” in the world and—even more galling, considering who’s saying it—that it’s “meddling in the region” and is a “threat to its neighbors.” This is also why it’s considered gauche to bring up Saudi Arabia’s state sponsorship of terrorism and Wahhabism. For American NatSec intellectuals, be they of the Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute, killing three thousand Americans and engineering the worst famine of the twenty-first century in Yemen is far more forgivable than getting away with an Islamic Revolution for forty years. This is why Saudi Arabia remains in good standing in the media and think tank zone, despite being patient zero for Islamic fundamentalism and terror.
The End of the World Chapter As We Know It
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Conservative pundits love to compare America to Rome, mainly because they want to be allowed to drape sheets around their asses and bring back slavery and man-boy love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful analogy. Like Rome, we’re a deluded and decadent empire in terminal decline.
After a brief postwar golden era (for white people), the end of the twentieth century saw America open up the world economy so much that we stopped making things at all and just started buying them elsewhere to support our British, German, and South Asian pals. Nowadays it’s other people who make things—not least our erstwhile Communist enemy, China. Despite the gaudy, ongoing celebrations of American Exceptionalism, this country has been reduced to being the military arm of international capital: demoted from manager to rent-a-cop. Everything’s on credit, with a precarious and doomed balance between military spending and domestic debt.
Meanwhile, China, carved up by Europe in the nineteenth century, expelled those powers in the twentieth. They kicked off this century with a supercharged, state-guided capitalism that’s carrying out the most mind-boggling planned industrialization in world history.III They’re developing domestic markets, not just exports, and starting up their own imperial designs in Africa—the last remaining spot on the planet yet to be turned into a base for cheap industrial manufacturing. In twenty years, that pang you get when you see “Made in China” on a clothing tag will be replaced by a wince from seeing “Made in Africa,” and it may even sting a little more. But China is doing just what America’s done—what the world’s been doing—for the last two hundred–odd years: consuming and growing more and more each year, with no end in sight, driven by a deep, deep madness.
So brace yourself for a lot more talk about a showdown between democratic Western values and mammoth, red, Communist China, and remember that it’s all total horseshit. It’s just cover for a desperate scramble for resources on our wheezing, dying planet, as every country’s elites pile up last bits of obscene wealth to better withstand the inevitable collapse.
And what a collapse it will be! As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his thought-provoking bestseller Our Interconnected World, the world is more interconnected than ever. Ideas, capital, racist memes, and state repression flow through borders at the speed of imagination. Thanks to the digital revolution, a neo-Nazi in Budapest can now obtain a list of local Roma and their addresses from an anime-obsessed hacker in Quezon City on a platform funded by a paleolibertarian transhumanist venture capitalist in San Jose who is at that instant explaining the plot of Atlas Shrugged to a yawning high-class cam girl in Johannesburg, all at the click of a button. For you and the transnational ruling class, this means that world capitalism is churning toward its brutal denouement at maximum efficiency.
Yes, the world’s future is a veritable Choose Your Own Adventure of impending cataclysms. Runaway wealth inequality dramatically expands the underclass as nations race to the bottom to cut wages in a futile effort to slam the brakes on the inexorably falling rate of profit; throw in resource scarcity and overconsumption and we get rationing of basic human necessities among the global poor and outrage among the Western upper classes when the rare earth metals needed to manufacture their animatronic Boss Baby–themed merchandise have been exhausted. Or we could just have a good old-fashioned global economic depression once the cheap-credit house of cards falls over.
Of course, no roster of anticipatable apocalypses would be complete without the total ecological collapse caused by climate change. It turns out that two centuries of spewing industrial effluvium into the atmosphere to power the modern world wasn’t without its consequences. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 PPM. As of this writing, we’re over 410 PPM and rising. The concentration limit needed to prevent irreversible ecological damage is, uh, way less than that.
To be fair, it may be all right, as fossil-fuel industry scientists point out that the earth’s atmosphere had similar CO2 concentrations during such periods as the Solar Death Epoch and the Uninhabitable Era (a misleading name, given the various genera of bedbug that prospered during this
period). We aren’t looking to cause a panic or anything, but to be perfectly honest, you should put this book down right now and look up the cost of a decommissioned missile silo in Svalbard.
We don’t have to tell you what climate change has wrought. You see the headlines on the Weather Channel website when you’re just trying to find out whether you need an umbrella today. It’s a five- to seven-degree-Fahrenheit increase in the global mean temperature (and that’s if we do nothing), ocean acidification (permanent end to Red Lobster’s Crabfest), half a meter or so of sea-level rise (which has already inundated a few insular countries), destruction of millions of acres of arable land (increased property values in the Yukon Territory), food insecurity, water insecurity, the return of ancient comic-book-villain-origin-story-caliber diseases unearthed from melted permafrost, immensely destructive tropical storms that cause precipitous drops in approval ratings for Republican administrations, sharp reduction of biodiversity, albedo effect, feedback loop, polar ice caps melting, malaria, war, refugees, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
People talk about the “coming apocalypse.” Take a closer look. The apocalypse is Puerto Rico annihilated by a hurricane. It’s villages in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal tortured by lethal flooding.
The apocalypse is already here; you just don’t live there yet.
Not too long ago, scientists agreed that a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius was the absolute upper limit for preventing environmental catastrophe. This was the starting point for global negotiations to reduce carbon emissions. The international community, fully cognizant of the consequences of their actions—as directed by the US and rising countries like China and India, who felt left out of the first Industrial Revolution—said “Eat my ass” and ignored the warnings. The cutthroat cost-benefit analysis they offered was that transitioning to clean, renewable sources of energy would slow down economic development to an unacceptable extent. China and India wanted to know why they couldn’t litter their countryside with CO2-spewing, coal-burning power plants when countries like America and Britain built their wealth (and colonial empires) in the past century doing the same. And developing countries in places like Africa and Central America that have never enjoyed the fruits of a stupid consumerist society like ours had a thing or two to say about their resources being pillaged and their environment being destroyed to ensure that middle-class Americans and Chinese can afford Chaturbate tokens.
If a bleeding-heart cuck socialist atheist liberal professor were to become president of the United States, even they wouldn’t have the moral authority to say to people living in the Slumdog Millionaire reality, “You know what, we may have had our heyday stealing your resources and spewing noxious gases into the atmosphere to build a rich and entitled middle class, but you guys need to knock it off because the insurance premiums on our beachfront condos are getting out of control.” (And that’s if the American ruling class wanted to do something about climate change.)
Europe, populated as it is with self-loathing environment-loving sexual deviants, has tried to do its part, starting a continental cap-and-trade market that has accomplished little more than making bicyclists in Amsterdam feel smug and reducing the spot price of crude oil so developing countries can get cheaper dirty energy. Of course that’s before the US pulled out of the already watered-down and woefully insufficient Paris Agreement altogether.
So peace out, globalists. You can take away my diesel-burning backyard smelter when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Nobody wants to deal with the hangover from two centuries of untrammeled environmental extermination. Every earnest attempt at even ameliorating the effects of climate change has failed dramatically, and each time someone tried, global capitalism snuck away with cookie crumbs on its face, pausing only to make a cutesy “Who, me?” face to the camera right as another Bangladeshi village got buried in mudslides.
Capitalism would be moribund even in the absence of all this; climate change just gives an exciting, breakneck, life-and-death impetus to this struggle coming down the pike. It’s the Splash Mountain of teleologies. The dislocations created by climate change helpfully remind us that the political systems we live under are incapable of solving any fundamental problems or acting in the interests of anyone but the ruling class—and no number of bright-eyed Brookings Institution–trained technocrats can change that.
I Ain’t Blogging Anymore
* * *
As business mindset futurist experts, we can tell you that these trends will lead to more nationalism, more terrorism, more weapons, more wars, more fracturing of the creaky global order in which the real enemies of humanity will never be identified so long as there’s an inexhaustible supply of people who don’t look like you to scapegoat, and more walls put up by rich countries to keep out those folks lining up just to get down.
And if the global order can’t even get its act together to forestall an imminent threat to its own survival, what should make you think it could handle any number of looming self-inflicted technological crises? Take a moment to imagine what new and exciting crowd-control weapons Elon Musk will sell to your government in the next few years. Think about what every country now understands about the human genome and what biological weapons will exist by the end of the next decade. The United States already spends well over half a trillion dollars a year on its military to defend against . . . what? Obviously, a handful of nukes alone would be enough to ward off any attempt to violate our territorial integrity, but goddammit, we need more to maintain our imperial dominion over a shrinking segment of a dying world. The rest of the global populace is still, understandably, not happy about this state of affairs.
For how long is this situation tenable? You don’t have to be the main character in the first third of a YA novel to realize we’re going to end up in a very bad place.
We’re sure that you, the idiot reader so stupid as to buy this book, can imagine a global order built on egalitarianism—one in which the productive forces of society aren’t spent on inventing new weapons of mass destruction and clever ways to brutalize dissidents but on ensuring that all people enjoy the fruits of their birthright, an order that holds human beings and their fundamental rights as sacrosanct, that believes the provision of basic human needs to be the sole objective of politics and the economy, that rejects violence and militarism in toto.
But that’s not your world. Sorry to bum you out. The rest of this book is kind of funny, though.
* * *
I. Except for the emerging public-private partnership of China, but how much of a threat could they ever become?
II. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Blacks Showing Decided Opposition to War,” Gallup, March 28, 2003, http://news.gallup.com/poll/8080/blacks-showing-decided-opposition-war.aspx.
III. From 1901 to 2000, America used 4.5 billion tons of cement. A couple years ago, China started buying a lot of cement. They went through 6.6 billion tons in just three years. Analysts fear that by the end of the decade, China will have more half-pipes per capita than the US.
CHAPTER TWO
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LIBS
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party, Senator? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every one of those programs. Every one. So when you try to hurl the word liberal at my feet as if it were something dirty, something to run away from, something that I should be ashamed of, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and wear it as a badge of honor.
—MATT SANTOS, THE WEST WING
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
—ANTON CHIGURH, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
*
* *
Prick a liberal, do they not bleed? Of course—they’ll bleed all over you like a Romanov’s second cousin. Do they not, like us, prefer things be good, rather than bad? In some very general sense, yes. And, as the first epigraph above lays out, do they not have a record of popular legislation to their name? To be sure, and boy, do they love to bring it up.
Why, then, do we hate the lib?
The essential problem is not that liberals are “as bad” as conservatives but rather that there is a giant sucking void at the core of their being. In place of real beliefs, liberals have guilty consciences; in place of politics, they have a Democratic Process to assuage those consciences. This process pits tepid reforms against a deranged and revanchist right wing with no such inclination toward consensus or incrementalism. Despite its claim to the mantle of American Progress, the liberal algorithm produces positive social change or legislation only when pressured—sometimes terrorized—by militant and/or popular left-wing movements. Without an organized and popular Left, liberals end up negotiating themselves into oblivion, moving the country, inevitably, to the right.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 4