Whats Wrong With Americans?

Navigating the U.S. Political Landscape Amidst Decline and Disillusionment --- [Estimated reading time: 15 min.]

Going into our most holy American holiday, July 4th, the upcoming Presidential election has officially started to seep into our cultural zeitgeist.

Unlike past elections, where there were at least some people that were passionate about a candidate - this is the first time in my life where most of my fellow countrymen are just plain disgusted with the options on hand.

And who could blame them?

The options on the menu right now are:

1. An 82 year old man who showed clear and apparent signs of cognitive decline in front of more than 50 million people right at the most important moment of his re-election campaign.

2. A 78 year old convicted felon and wannabe autocrat who just endorsed military tribunals for his political opponents in his own party and wants to remake the United States into a christofacist state.
   

3. A guy who admitted doctors found worms in his brain and who just had photos released of him eating a dog.

Jon Stewart perfectly captured the average, sane American’s response when he said

This cannot be real life, it just cant, we’re Americans, FUCK

We sane and informed Americans are about to celebrate a hallowed out Independence day right before many of our friends and family work towards implementing the final steps of the “second American revolution” that will usher in the beginning of the American autocratic state, because the one defense we have against autocracy is

check notes

An 82 year old man that “beat medicare”.

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I am a half-blood - An American, born in the United States but also a Frenchman with European citizenship, French family, French friends, French habits and a different mode of thinking passed down to me from my (aristocratic) French mother and (aristocratic) French family.

In this post I will use my deep connection with the American polity to try and create something like an explainer for my European friends, and in that way my European self, for whats wrong with Americans right now.

Sidenote: Yes, I know that the French aren’t doing all that great right now by almost any metric - but I’ll continually compare the French far-right and the American far-right so you can see why Americans are in for a whole different magnitude of societal upheaval than the French right now.

Everything is getting worse, and everything will get worse, no matter what.

In order to take a magnifying glass to why the American political system is uniquely fucked I need you to first understand that everything, everywhere is going to get worse this entire century - no matter what we do or how we organize our societies.

That is the reality of population overshoot, ecological collapse, resource depletion and diminishing returns. I already outlined a brief explainer yesterday, so read that if you’re not already collapse aware and cognizant of our global trajectory this century.

The central project of politics right now, whether most of us realize it or not, is managing the journey from where we are now to the collapse that awaits us as the climate continues to degrade.

The fact that our destination is clearly already predetermined and unavoidable seems to justify the argument that “both sides are the same” for most of my collapse aware friends. We’re going to the same place, politics is an exhausting endeavor and it’s easier (and safer) to be a “double hater” American that views both parties as the same.

It’s an excuse to do nothing, be (blissfully) ignorant, not expect much from your elected officials and thus not be disappointed when they repeatedly fail to live up to even the most basic functions of their jobs.

But our journey from here to collapse is everything. It matters whether my girlfriend and I have or do not have the right to contraceptives. It matters whether I do or do not have the right to critique my government in writing or protest. It matters whether healthcare is a right or a commodity reserved for the wealthy.

In the process of collapse there will be a distribution of the suffering required to grapple with the imbalance between our diminishing resources and our overconsumption. That distribution matters - and the Republican party is putting forward an agenda that will shift an incredible amount of suffering onto the majority of the American population. This shift will be so extreme it cannot survive a system where the ruling party is elected by popular mandate - so the American political system itself has to change in order to usher in this new (widely unpopular) vision of America.

The 2nd American Revolution, Project 2025

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” - Heritage Foundation president and head of Trump’s Project 2025
July 2nd, 2024

Yep, this is the part where I touch on Project 2025. A plan so bold, so unpopular and so unamerican that I sound like a lunatic every time I try to explain that this is a real plan put forward by real powerful people who are pulling of real levers of power.

Luckily the Heritage Foundation made the plan publicly available online.

Briefly, this document is the GOP agenda in 2025 should Trump retake the Whitehouse. It is a step-by-step plan to transform American from a liberal Democracy to a quasi-fascist state with Christianity at its core using just executive authority and the already politicized Supreme Court. This would transform our government into something that more resembles a hybrid of modern day Iran and Russia. Proposals found directly in the document show how a Trump presidency would:

• Politicize the entire executive branch and its agencies - so that current non-partisan bureaucrats can be fired on day one a replaced with loyal political operatives. For example, scientists in the FDA that determine what does or does not make your tap water cancerous will be replaced by political operatives loyal to the president.
  

• Outlaw abortion and contraceptives nationwide to discourage recreational sex.
  

• Manipulate the federal electoral system so that the Republican party becomes the de-facto official state party, similar to the communist party in China or Putins party in Russia. Basically eliminate the need for a popular mandate from Americans at large to stay in power, as Republicans have already done in many red states.
  

• Turn immigration and border enforcement into a sort of secret police that can detain anyone and transfer them to what basically sounds like concentration camps without any legal recourse in any state (yes, this includes American citizens).
  

• Remove checks and balances on the President so he’s more able to bypass the other two branches of government to do whatever the hell he wants (especially deploy the military on American soil).
  

I could go on, but I don’t want to. There are better places to learn more about the horrifying ramifications of Project 2025. Whats important to recognize here is

1. By any metric this agenda is incredibly unpopular with the American public at large, and that includes Republican voters. The problem is…
   

2. Most Americans don’t know about Project 2025, because most Americans don’t pay attention to politics.

This is radically different than, say, the French. Yes, my people are currently voting in fascists - but unlike the American GOP that fascist party had to moderate itself to get the levers of power. The National Rally’s current success is the result of a decades long project to find a balance between their roots in Nazism and the populist agenda and policies required to actually win power amongst the French.

Unlike the GOP, the National Rally is a genuine secular far-right populist party that is acting more like a centre-right one - whereas the GOP pretends to be a populist party sometimes while always enacting policies that are plutocratic in nature. Like it or not, the French seem to actually support the actual policies their far-right party want to implement whereas the Americans seem to just be greatly misinformed on what their two political parties want to do with the country, which president is responsible for which policies (1 in 5 swing voters think Joe Biden is responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and how their own political system even works (for example, Independents continually blame Democrats for the immigration crises when it was Republicans that blocked a bill to implement stricter immigration enforcement because, well, they knew that Democrats would be blamed for it).

This lack of enagement is chiefly due to Americans having a democratic system that is worse at representing the majority than the more common parliamentary system

I want to keep this section pretty short, but it’s really key here to understand that all the forces I’m discussing that make American political life vastly different than most other first-world democracies interact in a system that is also vastly different than the parliamentary system most other developed democracies use to translate the will of their population into legislative action.

The United States uses a presidential system of governance, where states via the electoral college (and this is important - states, not people, states) elect the president while the people directly vote for their legislators.

This is very different than the common European parliamentary system where citizens elect their legislators and their legislators elect an executive.

Even in France - where the president is elected by the people and a seperate prime minister is elected by the legistlator - it’s still people directly voting for both.

In the U.S., however, there are two major institutions where a minority of people can still implement their will on the majority. The electoral college and the Senate.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of this further, but it is important to note that these imbalances that are unique to America make it so that even though the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump - he was elected in 2016. And even though it’s become increasingly rare for the majority of Americans to vote for Republicans they still maintain much more power than their public mandate.

This illustration from the economist in 2016 of what the US would look like with a parliamentary system does a good job of illustrating how different our global predicament would be if the US had a more representative form of governance - and why the GOP is doing everything in its power prevent reforms that would make the Presidential system more in line with the will of American voters.

As you can see, only 54% of American voters actually identify with one of the two major parties on the ballot in any election year. Is it any wonder than why American voter turnout lags most developed democracies?

So thats the first serious thing thats wrong with Americans. If you’re reading this you are most likely more informed about American politics than most Americans. Unlike most Western European countries our polity at large just does not consume or follow the news - it’s too depressing how little agency we have and at the same time we are so comfortable we can afford to ignore politics.

Something as unpopular and catastrophic as Project 2025 can be publicly discussed by one of the two major candidates in the 2024 election and the vast majority of Americans don’t even know about it.

Americans genuinely think their current economy, socio-economic mobility and quality of life is the worst it has or could ever be

I love this statement because my American readers are probably vigorously nodding their head in agreement while almost anyone outside the country in doing a double take.

Both perspectives are somewhat correct.

Americans are right that our real economy is the worst it has ever been and has continually been trending downwards since the 1970s. This graph illustrates that point nicely.

This is why a family in the 1970s could attain a middle class life (car, house, stay at home wife, kids, regular vacations) on a single salary working in a factory, or at the post office, or as a clerk. Up until the 1980s workers got a fair share of total economic output of the country and that kept inequality in check.

But, for various reasons (*cough* neoliberalism *cough*) inequality spiked.

Do you see it? Income across major cities in 1970 look like a bell-curve, but in 2015 (right before Trump is elected) the balance shifts to something more like a smiley face. This is what wealth transfer from a large middle class to a continually shrinking rich elite looks like.

It’s the death of the American dream. It’s an economic system that doesn’t just stop working for the middle class it actively takes away from them. At the micro-level this is people that are losing their houses, their retirements and their ability to comfortably provide for their family with the skills they have acquired over an entire lifetime and never getting these fixings of middle class life back.

As we all know, losing something you once had is much more infuriating than never being given it in the first place.

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However, as my international friends know, Americans still sit at the top of materialistic comfort globally.

A great example of this is the recent housing crisis. millennial Americans (like myself) are outraged by inflating housing costs that are completely outpacing wage growth.

What they don’t realize is that our “housing crisis” is a utopia compared to our Canadian neighbors.

This is the story for all our major economic indicators. Yes, the real American economy isn’t doing so hot relative to it’s own history - but we’re doing much much better than the rest of the world globally. American jobs pay better than European jobs, American houses are cheaper than European houses, America is the only nation that has kept inflation relatively in check, American socio-economic mobility and opportunity is still the best in the world, our civil liberties and institutions are still stronger than anyplace in the world outside of Europe (for now).

It’s made scrolling subreddits focused on international relocation morbidly comical - With Europeans, Canadians and people in less developed countries expounding how phenomenal the opportunity and quality of life in the US is if only they could get in while terrified American liberals are expounding what a utopia Europe or Canada must be while assuming that they of course will be let in (gotta love that uniquely American exceptionalism).

So there’s the second thing thats wrong with Americans, they are very pampered - but less than they used to be without any history or experience to understand that things could (soon) become worse. Unlike almost every country outside North America, Americans have never lived under a dictatorship, or faced a serious military threat/occupation or experienced life inside a political system that doesn’t at least pretend to be accountable to its citizens.

And that’s why Americans at large never see real stakes in their elections. As bad as things have gotten since the 1970s - they still aren’t so bad. So whats the worst that can happen?

There is no such thing as a singular American culture or people.

A common mistake for Europeans when they plan a visit to America is to vastly under-estimate the size of the United States. Texas is the size of France but not even 10% of the landmass of the entire US. Only 5 countries have an economy thats larger than California’s and one of those countries is the US itself.

On top of this, unlike most other developed countries America is a colonial project that was seeded by many empires that were competing with each other before our founding.

So in France the majority of citizens share some sort of common ancestry and thus some sort of common culture . Yes there is one notable serious regional difference left- Brittany, an area of France that was largely settled by the Brittons as opposed to the rest of France whose ancestors are mostly the Franks and the Gauls.

But that pales in comparison to the ancestral and regional differences that make the United States more akin to almost a dozen nations and peoples instead of one.

Rutger (known as Whatifaltist) breaks down the U.S. into nine nations for example.

And while I don’t necessarily agree with the specifics on this map, I think it gets the point across that the way Americans see other Americans is more akin to the way French people see other Europeans like Greeks, Turks or Germans than the way French people see other French people.

I know this will be the most controversial statement in this post, especially for the woke crowd, but whether we like it or not it’s historically racially homogenous developed countries that tend to move towards socialist-democratic norms and have strong institutions (The Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, etc) and very racially diverse, large and populous developed countries that tend to settle on more illiberal systems of political management (China, the US, African nations whose borders were invented by British colonialists, Israel and Palestinians, etc.)

This is intuitive - it’s hard for a Dutch man in Denmark to completely shut off their empathy another Dutch man with similar ancestry, customs and appearance whose living a within a day of travel.

But it’s easy for a Southern baptist to turn off any form of empathy or humanity for a “coastal elite” in California, because that may as well be a different country and race of people to them. The chasm economic, racial and cultural chasm between these two people is as large as the monumental physical distance between them.

This is the third thing wrong with Americans - the nature of this country’s inception as a massive colonial project makes any sort of cultural, national homogeneity very difficult - so Americans are exceedingly easy to divide and pit against one another.

Ok, but how do these forces result in these insane candidates?

Glad you asked, lets break this down step by step:

1. Population overshoot and resource depletion means that all political systems and human quality of life metrics are going to decay as we continue towards eventual global societal collapse. An enlightened society would recognize this and turn itself towards managing that collapse and simplifying itself, but humans as a whole are incapable of voluntarily accepting that their quality of lives will continually decline. Even the best and most developed democratic systems are going to experience decay since no politician can truly deliver on their promises to improve the material wealth/health of their citizens (mental health, however, is possible to improve and I’ll talk about that in part 2 of my series called “Are you supposed to be OK right now?”.
   

2. The American Presidential has a baked in bias against the will of the majority of voters, which dissuades many Americans from wanting to participate in political life and makes political parties more prone to acting like the personal companies of presidential candidates and less like political parties loyal to policies, not a person. This is how you end up with a Bush and Trump presidency even though Gore and Clinton won the most votes. It’s also why the Democratic party keeps putting forward their incredibly unpopular, but powerful, political operatives as candidates (Clinton in ‘16, Biden in ‘24) instead of truly popular rising candidates in their party that would actually win the electoral college.
   

3. Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and don’t actually know what a 2nd Trump presidency would entail. So even you might be horrified by Project 2025 and already see the first steps of it being implemented by the Supreme Court - American’s by and large just think a second Trump presidency would be exactly like the first Trump presidency and the guy that’s supposed to inform them of that is 82 years old and can barely speak coherently.
   

4. Despite their relative materialistic comfort, prosperity and low inflation the average American sees the economy as in crisis. Due to our uniquely inflated wealth inequality - they’re right. From the outside it may look like the American middle class is more pampered and decadent than their European counterparts, but in reality due to wealth inequality and the commodification of social services/safety nets like healthcare, our middle class is shrinking by the day and unlikely to rebound. This is causing an immense amount of anger, just like our European counterparts dealing with more extreme inflation, immigration and stagnation.
   

5. Americans are not a singular people, or even really part of a singular nation. Yet we are governed like a single nation. This makes it easy for us to be divided and to see Americans from other “nations” as existential threats to our ways of life. This is how you end up with a hot civil war and the current cold civil war in under 250 years, despite being the most decadent and wealthy country the world has ever known.

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   Well that was exhausting to write and came out much larger than I expected. If you read this far thank you very very much but please go outside, touch some grass and enjoy the company of your family and friends here in the twilight days of our Democracy. If you’re a subscriber I promise that my next article, part 2 of the series “Are you supposed to be OK right now?” will be much brighter and have some practical tips for coping with [waving my hands around] all of this.
   

   Happy 4th of July.
   
   - Jordan Lovinger