And so, finally, to the post imperial, post democratic United States. I have been struck for years by the resemblance of the current United States to the western Roman Empire of the 5th century.
There have been many causes going back many years: the 1973 oil embargo, the Vietnam War and the death of the War on Poverty, the desegregation movement and other rights movements which produced counter-revolutions. By themselves these things may not have created an epochal divide. Reaganism was the quickener. For thirty or forty years after Nixon, in the world at large, the socioeconomic landscape was changed by invasion, the drug trade (greatly expanded during and after the Vietnam War) de-industrialization, Friedmanite economics, judicial and military coups, and disaster capitalism.
Increasingly, since 2000, the general picture resembles Western Europe in the late 4th century:
The opponents are not foreign governments with squads of hackers; the opponents are the domestic citizenry, who must be kept in their place, literally by means of militarized police forces equipped with weapons from the never-ending production of weapons for the never-ending wars abroad, or made to accept the new global order by means of increasingly complete economic insecurity.
As well as the "War on Terror" and the enlargement of the surveillance state, other broad societal programs of repression are steady features of everyday life:
The war on drugs and its disproportionate application to people of colour;
The war on public education prosecuted at the elementary and high school level by means of decreased education budgets, unfunded mandates, severe inequality between schools in well-off districts and the rest, and the overall demonization of the system presented as the Charter School movement; prosecuted at the college level over the last 20 years by means of grotesquely increased price of tuition,associated crippling, often lifelong, debt, and now by such budget cuts as will reduce faculty and increase tuition costs even further;
The war on unions conducted since Reagan used the U.S. Army to break the PATCO strike in 1981: the demonization of public servants as members of the only large unions left; the destruction of the Post Office (begun by Nixon) and consequently, of the Letter Carriers Union; resistance to unions by employers large and small, most notoriously by the most profitable or successful entities (e.g. Amazon and Walmart).
Enough repressions to withstand the comparison, then.
There are some further general developments to separate the late fourth century from the earlier fourth, and previous imperial centuries:
The later destructions of the middle class are either further developments, or they are consonant with the textures and shapes of life we already experience.
The broadest political and economic remarks come from Tom Engelhardt's article picked up by Salon:
1 - 1% elections - where candidates belong to dynasties as often as not, and all seek the backing of billionaires months before they got before the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. Once elected, the candidate will enact programs to favour the same billionaries
2 - The privatization of the State - from Hillary Clinton's Gmail account and the outsourced electronic surveillance of virtually all electronic communication to the use of private corporations to supplement U.S. Armed forces (Blackwater the most well-known), the war on terror has brought unprecedented secrecy to the affairs of state, with all the corruption that guaranteed secrecy so temptingly offers
3 - The de-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency - the hamstringing of government by agreement (e.g.: the repeated debt ceiling crises; the letter from John Boehner and 47 Senators to the government of Iraq, undercutting foreign policy already in progress; the desultory debating of war authorization for military action against ISIS, while the war begins and continues without authorization), combined with the reduction of the Presidency to funding and knuckling under to the state's security apparatus
4 - The rise of the national security state as the fourth branch of government - its staggering growth and its equally staggering non-state agents; the Department of Homeland Security as a de facto second Defense Department; the use of drones, domestically, to monitor internal U.S. communications in conjunction with the CIA, which is now also breaking down the separation of analysts and spies (and so obliterates the long-crumbling border, this side of which the CIA might not actively operate)
5 - De-mobilization of the American people - the huge demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam eras have been made invisible even when they occur, as the media under-reports or fails to report them; widespread objection to the deployment of military force has been undercut and by the privatization of the military, on the one hand, and the end of the draft on the other - (4)
The privatizing of state security, the secretizing of ever more realms of illegally gathered data, the governmental obsession with weaponizing itself to the almost total abandonment of programs benefitting ordinary people (the repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicare, privatize Social security, the student loan racket, the actual reductions in funding the WIC, SNAP, and Headstart programs among the most notorious) are one aspect of the changing political and social landscape.
Culture Crash (5) describes the destruction of the intellectual middle class as the destruction of post-War cultural consensus. Timberg's arguments / observations / conclusions, chapter by chapter:
Introduction - Down We Go Together – 2008 crash + job losses, LA Times layoffs – changing shape of economy & society – creative class is not big tech
1 – When culture works – the necessary conditions for culture (artists need very little money to produce, except in times of high rents which you have to spend time earning the money for
2 – Disappearing clerks – knowledgeable disseminators of culture, book store, music store clerks – stores close, that cultural filter & educator is lost - Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Lethem
3 – Permatemps & content serfs – sessions musician have lost work which supported their original work – Kodak & Instagram – crowd funding at a tipping point – faster media making it more difficult for long-term projects (novel, string quartet) to pay for their own creation – the occasional success is publicized & hides the massive failure, artists not being able to continue, not being able to earn a middle class living in creative fields – state budgets for the arts down, corporate also – the point where recession turns into depression – NY's soundtrack & advertising jingle economy has collapsed b/c of sampling & digitizing
4 – Indie rock's endless road – a very few massive bands make most of the money – touring cannot pay; there's no time to write or recover – merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) cannot cover the costs – other job losses mean smaller audiences at live concerts – musicians get 6% of their earnings from records
5 – Architecture meltdown – starchitects and nothing else – middle class houses are no longer architect-designed, as they sometimes were – full time employment with intern wages – commercial building has slowed to almost nothing – young architects leaving the field – construction costs going down, fees are based on costs – rookie design work disappearing (full page illos in magazines, e.g.) – after “recession” magazines spend almost no money on illos or photography – public building also down – e.g. museums – exit recession not into a world of stability & health (architect's family has no medical insurance)
6 – Idle dreamers – demonization of artists, who mostly work hard & want middle class stability in order to go on working – artists have trouble getting paid – Nixon & Spiro Agnew demonizing “long-haired” artists / hippies (Vietnam) – Dan Quayle - "newsroom elites sneering at America" – news outlets devoted to celebrities – celebrity-industrial complex – rabid faux-populism – obsession with economics has destroyed all other considerations
7 – The end of print – plight of newspapers (scandals of inflated circulation figures & advertising charges not mentioned) – new media worst abuses of old economy: production speed-up, sweatshops, piecework, low or no wages, interns, while huge profits for the owners (e.g. Huffington Post) – loss of newspapers = loss of consensus news sources – the revolt against expertise – crooked politicians & fraudulent business executives favoured by collapse of investigative journalism – real magazines operate at a loss, go out of business or are funded by non-profits & foundations – television has erased the pre-television past, no historical perspective
8 – Self-inflicted wounds – semiotics & deconstruction have left academic discourse impenetrable, essentially privatized and increasingly irrelevant to life outside academe: how can value be asserted in such language? – non-championing of “English” has led to lack of a common language – Pauline Kael's influential anti-intellectualism (“the art-house audience,” “the atmosphere of incense burning” that greeted some foreign films) – Cage and Warhol thrilling but destroying consensus – liberal consensus attacked from both sides: collateral damage of New Right's anger & left's postmodern putsch. All trends come together in internet, Kael → flame wars, all opinion equally valid – market worship means no real criticism/critical dialogue – food has replaced art as a field of discussion and knowledge
9 – Lost in the supermarket: winner-take-all – the fabulous(ly wealthy) few, the many struggle or give up – e.g. CEO pay: how can some work be 10K times more efficient or valuable? – societal balances against winner-take-all effects have disappeared (monogamy, progressive taxation, public good, trust-busting, unions, child labour laws) – Star Wars and the blockbusterization of everything - (6)
10 – Epilogue: restoring the middle – how?
Apart from these factors undermining or destroying broad cultural consensus, Timberg also details the aiding and abetting of "the 'skyboxing' of America" by the effects of digital technology. Richard Esgow shows the effects of Silicon Valley's economic biases / assumptions / practices resulting in the further impoverishment of the already poor.
Esgow:
1 - Tech products become the byproducts of a money-making scheme rather than an end unto themselves - resulting in products which aren't so much "better mouse-traps" as hypable into near-monopoly / monopsony, from which position they can manipulate the market further, apply downward pressure to wages and suppliers, and freely engage in other abuses
2 - Even inspired leaders internalize a worldview which places profits over humane behaviour - e.g., the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses
3 - The culture encourages a solipsistic detachment from reality, even as its brute economic strength colonizes everything it touches - e.g., the effect of Silicon Valley's wages structure on San Francisco, as real estate prices rise the the city becomes more inhospitable to the poor
4 - The Valley gets fixated on lame...buzzwords which often come down to using tax loopholes to undercut other vendors/suppress suppliers' prices
5 - Silicon Valley’s culture...increasingly produces monopolies which "suppress wages, overcharge consumers, mistreat suppliers, and drive the economy increasingly off-course"
Buzzwords provide the verbal fog which enables 1 and 5 to sound vaguely compatible with equality of opportunity, democracy, social equity, or whatever other populist concern might raise its head; they function as social / cultural / conceptual anaesthesia; they are inherently deceptive.
Timberg identifies the bulwarks against the winner-take-all society the United States' had produced. Progressive taxation has become tax exemption for the corporations and the rich; trust-busting is a thing of the past; the public good is rarely mentioned (e.g. in the case of publicly-owned airwaves, or the necessary number of Federal meat-inspectors); unions are under attack (see above); child-labour laws are continually weakened by high rates of failure among minority school students...
And so we circle back to "the dissolution of the supports for the imperial order" which Starr examines in the collapse of fifth century western Europe.
There have been many causes going back many years: the 1973 oil embargo, the Vietnam War and the death of the War on Poverty, the desegregation movement and other rights movements which produced counter-revolutions. By themselves these things may not have created an epochal divide. Reaganism was the quickener. For thirty or forty years after Nixon, in the world at large, the socioeconomic landscape was changed by invasion, the drug trade (greatly expanded during and after the Vietnam War) de-industrialization, Friedmanite economics, judicial and military coups, and disaster capitalism.
Increasingly, since 2000, the general picture resembles Western Europe in the late 4th century:
"Curtains and masses of courtiers separated [Emperors] from the subjects: in public the rulers appeared almost as automata, stiff in robes and protocol... Within their palaces... they gave audience only to foreign ambassadors and important subjects; for advice they relied on a consistorium, consisting not of the freely chosen "friends" of unofficial standing of the Early Empire but mainly of executive officials. These in turn supervised an intricately ordered bureaucracy... which reached into the urban levels. From the praetorian prefects downward all "were inflamed with a boundless eagerness for riches, without consideration for justice of right," or as other writers put it bureaucrats sold "smoke," i.e., promise of assistance with the machinery of government which was not given in reality - heaping up their piles of gold while the Empire in the west went to pieces"- (1)"[H]eaping up...pieces" is familiar to us as the revolving door - lawmakers passing bills lobbyists/industry groups have written in full expectation of lucrative employment within those industries when their stints in lawmaking/the Administration are over.
"The more the Empire tottered, the more evident became repression and terrorism. The concept of lèse majesté remained a potent tool to strike down opponents" - (2)Lèse majesté (the surveillance state replacing the emperor) is one of the most savagely punished crimes we have: consider the punishment of whistle-blowers who inform us of the nature of what official secrecy hides (e.g., Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange), or the sheer extent of official snooping (Edward Snowden).
The opponents are not foreign governments with squads of hackers; the opponents are the domestic citizenry, who must be kept in their place, literally by means of militarized police forces equipped with weapons from the never-ending production of weapons for the never-ending wars abroad, or made to accept the new global order by means of increasingly complete economic insecurity.
As well as the "War on Terror" and the enlargement of the surveillance state, other broad societal programs of repression are steady features of everyday life:
The war on drugs and its disproportionate application to people of colour;
The war on public education prosecuted at the elementary and high school level by means of decreased education budgets, unfunded mandates, severe inequality between schools in well-off districts and the rest, and the overall demonization of the system presented as the Charter School movement; prosecuted at the college level over the last 20 years by means of grotesquely increased price of tuition,associated crippling, often lifelong, debt, and now by such budget cuts as will reduce faculty and increase tuition costs even further;
The war on unions conducted since Reagan used the U.S. Army to break the PATCO strike in 1981: the demonization of public servants as members of the only large unions left; the destruction of the Post Office (begun by Nixon) and consequently, of the Letter Carriers Union; resistance to unions by employers large and small, most notoriously by the most profitable or successful entities (e.g. Amazon and Walmart).
Enough repressions to withstand the comparison, then.
There are some further general developments to separate the late fourth century from the earlier fourth, and previous imperial centuries:
"The cities declined or disappeared, the aristocracy became independent of the imperial administration, and the Christian church adopted a very ambivalent attitude towards the state" - (3)(If the whole Church has not become ambivalent about the State, certainly the Christian right agitates, sets out to obstruct, legislates and murders its least white-patriarchal, authoritarian components.)
The later destructions of the middle class are either further developments, or they are consonant with the textures and shapes of life we already experience.
The broadest political and economic remarks come from Tom Engelhardt's article picked up by Salon:
1 - 1% elections - where candidates belong to dynasties as often as not, and all seek the backing of billionaires months before they got before the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. Once elected, the candidate will enact programs to favour the same billionaries
2 - The privatization of the State - from Hillary Clinton's Gmail account and the outsourced electronic surveillance of virtually all electronic communication to the use of private corporations to supplement U.S. Armed forces (Blackwater the most well-known), the war on terror has brought unprecedented secrecy to the affairs of state, with all the corruption that guaranteed secrecy so temptingly offers
3 - The de-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency - the hamstringing of government by agreement (e.g.: the repeated debt ceiling crises; the letter from John Boehner and 47 Senators to the government of Iraq, undercutting foreign policy already in progress; the desultory debating of war authorization for military action against ISIS, while the war begins and continues without authorization), combined with the reduction of the Presidency to funding and knuckling under to the state's security apparatus
4 - The rise of the national security state as the fourth branch of government - its staggering growth and its equally staggering non-state agents; the Department of Homeland Security as a de facto second Defense Department; the use of drones, domestically, to monitor internal U.S. communications in conjunction with the CIA, which is now also breaking down the separation of analysts and spies (and so obliterates the long-crumbling border, this side of which the CIA might not actively operate)
5 - De-mobilization of the American people - the huge demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam eras have been made invisible even when they occur, as the media under-reports or fails to report them; widespread objection to the deployment of military force has been undercut and by the privatization of the military, on the one hand, and the end of the draft on the other - (4)
The privatizing of state security, the secretizing of ever more realms of illegally gathered data, the governmental obsession with weaponizing itself to the almost total abandonment of programs benefitting ordinary people (the repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicare, privatize Social security, the student loan racket, the actual reductions in funding the WIC, SNAP, and Headstart programs among the most notorious) are one aspect of the changing political and social landscape.
Culture Crash (5) describes the destruction of the intellectual middle class as the destruction of post-War cultural consensus. Timberg's arguments / observations / conclusions, chapter by chapter:
Introduction - Down We Go Together – 2008 crash + job losses, LA Times layoffs – changing shape of economy & society – creative class is not big tech
1 – When culture works – the necessary conditions for culture (artists need very little money to produce, except in times of high rents which you have to spend time earning the money for
2 – Disappearing clerks – knowledgeable disseminators of culture, book store, music store clerks – stores close, that cultural filter & educator is lost - Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Lethem
3 – Permatemps & content serfs – sessions musician have lost work which supported their original work – Kodak & Instagram – crowd funding at a tipping point – faster media making it more difficult for long-term projects (novel, string quartet) to pay for their own creation – the occasional success is publicized & hides the massive failure, artists not being able to continue, not being able to earn a middle class living in creative fields – state budgets for the arts down, corporate also – the point where recession turns into depression – NY's soundtrack & advertising jingle economy has collapsed b/c of sampling & digitizing
4 – Indie rock's endless road – a very few massive bands make most of the money – touring cannot pay; there's no time to write or recover – merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) cannot cover the costs – other job losses mean smaller audiences at live concerts – musicians get 6% of their earnings from records
5 – Architecture meltdown – starchitects and nothing else – middle class houses are no longer architect-designed, as they sometimes were – full time employment with intern wages – commercial building has slowed to almost nothing – young architects leaving the field – construction costs going down, fees are based on costs – rookie design work disappearing (full page illos in magazines, e.g.) – after “recession” magazines spend almost no money on illos or photography – public building also down – e.g. museums – exit recession not into a world of stability & health (architect's family has no medical insurance)
6 – Idle dreamers – demonization of artists, who mostly work hard & want middle class stability in order to go on working – artists have trouble getting paid – Nixon & Spiro Agnew demonizing “long-haired” artists / hippies (Vietnam) – Dan Quayle - "newsroom elites sneering at America" – news outlets devoted to celebrities – celebrity-industrial complex – rabid faux-populism – obsession with economics has destroyed all other considerations
7 – The end of print – plight of newspapers (scandals of inflated circulation figures & advertising charges not mentioned) – new media worst abuses of old economy: production speed-up, sweatshops, piecework, low or no wages, interns, while huge profits for the owners (e.g. Huffington Post) – loss of newspapers = loss of consensus news sources – the revolt against expertise – crooked politicians & fraudulent business executives favoured by collapse of investigative journalism – real magazines operate at a loss, go out of business or are funded by non-profits & foundations – television has erased the pre-television past, no historical perspective
8 – Self-inflicted wounds – semiotics & deconstruction have left academic discourse impenetrable, essentially privatized and increasingly irrelevant to life outside academe: how can value be asserted in such language? – non-championing of “English” has led to lack of a common language – Pauline Kael's influential anti-intellectualism (“the art-house audience,” “the atmosphere of incense burning” that greeted some foreign films) – Cage and Warhol thrilling but destroying consensus – liberal consensus attacked from both sides: collateral damage of New Right's anger & left's postmodern putsch. All trends come together in internet, Kael → flame wars, all opinion equally valid – market worship means no real criticism/critical dialogue – food has replaced art as a field of discussion and knowledge
9 – Lost in the supermarket: winner-take-all – the fabulous(ly wealthy) few, the many struggle or give up – e.g. CEO pay: how can some work be 10K times more efficient or valuable? – societal balances against winner-take-all effects have disappeared (monogamy, progressive taxation, public good, trust-busting, unions, child labour laws) – Star Wars and the blockbusterization of everything - (6)
10 – Epilogue: restoring the middle – how?
Apart from these factors undermining or destroying broad cultural consensus, Timberg also details the aiding and abetting of "the 'skyboxing' of America" by the effects of digital technology. Richard Esgow shows the effects of Silicon Valley's economic biases / assumptions / practices resulting in the further impoverishment of the already poor.
Esgow:
1 - Tech products become the byproducts of a money-making scheme rather than an end unto themselves - resulting in products which aren't so much "better mouse-traps" as hypable into near-monopoly / monopsony, from which position they can manipulate the market further, apply downward pressure to wages and suppliers, and freely engage in other abuses
2 - Even inspired leaders internalize a worldview which places profits over humane behaviour - e.g., the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses
3 - The culture encourages a solipsistic detachment from reality, even as its brute economic strength colonizes everything it touches - e.g., the effect of Silicon Valley's wages structure on San Francisco, as real estate prices rise the the city becomes more inhospitable to the poor
4 - The Valley gets fixated on lame...buzzwords which often come down to using tax loopholes to undercut other vendors/suppress suppliers' prices
5 - Silicon Valley’s culture...increasingly produces monopolies which "suppress wages, overcharge consumers, mistreat suppliers, and drive the economy increasingly off-course"
Buzzwords provide the verbal fog which enables 1 and 5 to sound vaguely compatible with equality of opportunity, democracy, social equity, or whatever other populist concern might raise its head; they function as social / cultural / conceptual anaesthesia; they are inherently deceptive.
Timberg identifies the bulwarks against the winner-take-all society the United States' had produced. Progressive taxation has become tax exemption for the corporations and the rich; trust-busting is a thing of the past; the public good is rarely mentioned (e.g. in the case of publicly-owned airwaves, or the necessary number of Federal meat-inspectors); unions are under attack (see above); child-labour laws are continually weakened by high rates of failure among minority school students...
And so we circle back to "the dissolution of the supports for the imperial order" which Starr examines in the collapse of fifth century western Europe.
" ... [T]hree vital supports for imperial unity - the position of the emperor, the central administration, and the army - had vanished; the cities were much weakened and destroyed; the aristocracy had greatly changed its way of life [retreating to country estates]" - (7)I think we have crossed a similar epochal divide, that we are now outside the old American hegemony and outside the old America.
(If you find arguments from the ragged remains of ancient evidence - digs and pot-sherds and chance-preserved documents - so much unsubstantiated fluff, too much subject to bias/whimsy/special pleading, Peter Turchin's work shows population dynamics to be the underlying engine of these changes.)
Timberg mentions divorce many times in connection with the GFC-accelerated destruction of the cultural middle class. Economic stress often results in divorce. But Empires don't go gentle into that good night. Where's the blood in all this?
Here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .
Minorities, women, children, and the homeless are being raped, injured, jailed, and murdered into sub-serf status by militarized police and for-profit prisons, by voter ID laws and other state legislation intended to nullify Federal law.
Engelhardt doesn't know how to name the new reality. I first trained as a mediaevalist. If he doesn't know what to call it, I do.
---
(1) Starr, Chester G., The Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 476: a Study In Survival, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. 165.
(2) Starr, p. 166.
(3) Starr, p 167.
(4) See also Maddow, Rachel, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power, New York, Crown, 2012.
(5) Culture Crash: the Killing of the Creative Class, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015
(6) See also Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future? New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
(7) Starr, p. 176.
(8) Starr, p. 166
Timberg mentions divorce many times in connection with the GFC-accelerated destruction of the cultural middle class. Economic stress often results in divorce. But Empires don't go gentle into that good night. Where's the blood in all this?
Here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .
Minorities, women, children, and the homeless are being raped, injured, jailed, and murdered into sub-serf status by militarized police and for-profit prisons, by voter ID laws and other state legislation intended to nullify Federal law.
Nor was it solely the government which exhibited barbaric brutality. The sophist Libanius, a proud partisan of ancient culture, believed in the crudest of magic and exulted at a famine in the city where his son died; Egyptian papyri attest that in the Nile valley men with official influence could physically assault the weak with impunity - (8)
Engelhardt doesn't know how to name the new reality. I first trained as a mediaevalist. If he doesn't know what to call it, I do.
---
(1) Starr, Chester G., The Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 476: a Study In Survival, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. 165.
(2) Starr, p. 166.
(3) Starr, p 167.
(4) See also Maddow, Rachel, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power, New York, Crown, 2012.
(5) Culture Crash: the Killing of the Creative Class, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015
(6) See also Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future? New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
(7) Starr, p. 176.
(8) Starr, p. 166
