They proceed to decline from thereupon

I received a question from a subscriber about the most crucial factors that, to me, would define the ongoing societal shift in the USA.

Again, disclaimer incoming: I’m a foreigner, I hail from Moscow, which is already sufficient to qualify me a Kremlin asset for some very progressive readers (despite the simple fact that, as I repeatedly noted, I abhor both Putin and Zelensky), and only my second cousin lives in LA. Moreover, I support Canadian hockey teams in NHL rather than American, because I have more relatives in the Land of the Northern Lights than, say, around the Mason-Dixon Line.

But, as it happened not once in history, our noise suppression headphones are pitifully insufficient for suppression of bangs and whispers across the pond in the lands of the hegemon.

It’d be pretty useful for many folks in the Anglosphere to develop a similar sensitivity to cries and whispers in Chinese, Russian, or Indian circles of culture and politics, be such circles cursed or blessed,

but that’s another matter, and an attempt may deliver boomerang effects, as had been duly noted already by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad.

I highlight three (a random number of sorts, actually there is more, of course) most relevant factors: the productivity-pay gap that emerged in 1980s; the Big Exodus of industry from the US accelerated after the onset of Chimerican symbiosis, which led to ever-increasing financialization of American economy and rapid Ponzi-like escalation of twin deficits; and, of course, the proliferation of innovative bidirectional mechanisms into politics, catalyzed by development of social media. Hardly could it be illustrated better than with a nod to Musk’s Twitter purchase, which may emerge as a milestone in its own right similar to the Louisiana deal. ;)

Overall, it feels that time is ripe for the definitive pulse of a phase transition, when it seems as if the next beat might never come. Ask yourself if it feels so, that’ll be the answer whether the phase societal change is on the way.

In the USSR forty years ago, Perestroika was starting in a pretty similar manner, after the Able Archer and euromissiles showdown, with the war in Afghanistan ever looming in the background, at the time when Russo-American relations degraded almost to the rupture in diplomatic relations, and the very existence of humanity sometimes appeared as if poised on a cusp.

Gorbachev was often calumniated as a traitor and foreign agent, just like Trump is now being libeled by rabid progressives and neocons. Andropov, in his winter days, is said to have quipped bitterly: “We don’t know the society in which we live all that well.” Rampant Left and TDS victims, whom I despise, too, live in a society they seldom understand.

One random example in favor of my thought:

They seem to have slept through the entire shale oil revolution.

After revelations as hilarious as this, I’m not surprised that they’re equally naive in matters here across the pond, so that they demand solidarity with the EU parasitic bureaucracy from low-waged migrant workers. Thomas Sowell could have been delighted.

Sowell noted that preferential treatment makes equal meritocratic treatment look like discrimination. Such is precisely the fate that befell the system of illusions Trumpists call wokeism.

The pendulum of neoliberal progressivism, amusingly betrothed with rabid neoconservatism in foreign policy (cursed be fanatics like Nuland or Blinken), has swung so far Left that the backreaction will be sharp and sprawling wide.

Every societal tendency, when pushed to the limit, meets an opposition: already in the times of Han dynasty Sima Qian codifies such a principle in his biography of Li Si.

(The following observation, surely, may come in assistance to Elon Musk, who is now de-facto Chancellor-in-Chief of the United States, promoted to an executive post roughly similar in scope to that of Li Si. It should be noted, however, that there did exist two Chancellor posts in Qin, the Right 左丞相 and Left 右丞相 Chancellors— names which bore no connection to modern semantics. Albeit these two were not always occupied, and some influential persons managed to dominate the position alone as “advisor of the state” 相邦, which today serves as a better description of Musk’s functions, for nobody knows for sure who the formal director of DOGE is.)

嗟乎！吾聞之荀卿曰『物禁大盛』。夫斯乃上蔡布衣，閭巷之黔首，上不知其駑下，遂擢至此。當今人臣之位無居臣上者，可謂富貴極矣。物極則衰，吾未知所稅駕也！

Alas! I have heard Xunzi say: “Don’t let things flourish too greatly.” I, Si, wore a commoner’s clothes (bùyī) in Shangcai, I was a perfectly ordinary man donning a black head covering (qiánshǒu), of country alleyways, but the Greatest Emperor did not realize that so inept was his nag: His Majesty raised me to this high position.

No one among statesfolk occupies a post higher than mine; truly, a pinnacle of wealth and nobility I have reached. When things reach their pinnacle, they proceed to decline from thereupon, though I do not fathom yet where are the customs on which my carriage will be turned around.

DEI, affirmative action, etc. are no different.

Robin DiAngelo has had her part des anges, time to move on from the pinnacle of a totem pole.

Reverse racism and all such fuzz are no better than “ordinary, well-established” racism and xenophobia. But aren’t the progressives cute when they enter berserk mode, urging, for example, to expel all Russians, like me, from the EU? Their stance loses then any semblance of internal consistency:

In Russian, a joke existed in 1990s, when the previous round of Russo-American mutual attraction started, as suddenly as the previous, Evil Empire-tinted, had displaced the Brezhnev-Nixon-Kissinger Détente:

In Russia, we call a Milky Way what in America they would call a Mars.

That is, de-facto standard for chocolate bars in post-Soviet Fall Russia already was begging to differ, for purely stochastic reasons.

I think the current dismal state of Roscosmos excludes manned extrasolar missions, so both the US and Russia should set their controls for Mars.

But then again, I can’t stand any chocolate bars, finding them too dangerous for physique and teeth.

I hereby conclude my treatise with the best pic I’ve seen this week about Russo-American reversal ;)

Origin context for the curious American readers: