The Empire isn't Dying, it's being Killed

Living through the decline and fall of an empire being destroyed from within

The fourth of July, the weekend, an extra day off for most of America. Hot dogs, deadly flooding, fireworks, one of the worst bills ever passed in U.S. history, back to work — what a time to be alive. It doesn’t feel real, but this is the cadence of a dying empire. And, in time, it comes to feel normal. The steady sinking of society, interspersed with moments of sudden and sharp decline, is part of the rhythm of our lives.

Sometimes it’s fires and floods that mark the steep inflection points, but most often it’s the powerful deliberately gutting our country to hand it over to the rich piece by piece. The big bill is the latest of these catastrophic decisions handed down by the ruling class. ICE will now become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money than the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined. As Trump creates a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, and makes a barbaric show of shipping alligators over for a grand opening, ICE is set to grow into its full Gestapo form. JD Vance and Stephen Miller are salivating and celebrating as this empire crumbles around their secret police regime.

Via People’s World

The big bill defunds the pillars of a functional society and funds kidnapping, violence, and billionaires instead. An establishment that loses its mind at the idea of defunding police is eager to defund health care, to defund our lives. Twelve million people will lose Medicare, trillions of dollars will be very directly transferred from life-saving programs to the pockets of the richest people on Earth, our massive deficit will be expanded to fund deportations and tax cuts. A Nebraska hospital has already announced that it will be shutting down, and numerous other rural hospitals could soon follow suit. The infrastructure that supports life is being gutted, and the only thing being built in its place is systems of violence and repression.

This is the reality of late empire. The death throes of the status quo are projections of strength. Violent police forces at home, death dealing abroad, and an internal hollowing out and depletion of the structural integrity that supports a functional society. We bomb Iran, we fund genocide in Gaza, we give billions to secret police, and at the same time we roll back health care and defund education and curb the immigration that is vital to our prosperity. All to facilitate theft on the biggest scale, all to steal more money from the working class than ever before.

Trump talked a big game about changing these trends. He said he’d bring manufacturing back to the United States, and he’s doing nothing to make that happen. He and his party talked about becoming the party of the working class, but are stealing more from us than ever before. Instead of these sham talking points our economy continues to be more and more top-heavy, more and more skewed towards the .1%, with success and stability increasingly out of reach for everyone else. The rot continues, the decline is accelerated, the empire sinks into the muck.

All of this should be opposed to the fullest, of course. A real opposition party would be laser-focused on stopping the handouts to the rich, ensuring people don’t lose health care, and making sure the ICE secret police don’t receive more money than God. Instead the Democratic Party spent much of the last week and a half condemning Zohran Mamdani. Then, at the 11th hour, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries gave the longest speech the chamber has ever seen. The bill passed shortly after. The party has of course funded ICE under Obama and Biden, viscerally opposed defunding police or border enforcement, and attacked its left flank more aggressively than it fought the GOP. It’s difficult, right now, to forget or forgive the many iterations of Democratic party leaders saying “We need a strong Republican Party.”

This, too, is the dying empire manifest. Both parties are bought out by the capitalist class, and the supposed opposition fights socialism and minor progressive reforms with more fervor than they fight the fascists. This is the decay, this is late-stage capitalism, this is the rot of our empire. Republicans trample over all of us, over the entire population, and Democrats celebrate giving a long speech. The opposition rings as hollow as the decrepit system they mirror.

In sharp contrast to their weak opponents, the fascists refuse to feign contrition. They celebrate gutting this country, they celebrate stealing from us, they smoke cigars over our graves. They know what giving ICE more money than most militaries on Earth will do, and that’s what they want. They barely hide their evil intentions, because they know that our democracy is immensely weak, and that power trumps perception in this increasingly autocratic country of their making.

And life goes on. That too is the story here, and in it is double-edged sword we have to reckon with. On the one hand, we do persist. We continue. Most of us who could constitute a real resistance to fascism are still here, still able to act. On the other hand, the perpetual continuation of life’s monotony has a lulling, dulling effect. As long as we can persist in our routines, some chunk of the population that ought to rebel will put one foot in front of the other just as they did yesterday.

But we’ve reached a tipping point. Resistance now needs to be a part of our every day. That reality is often sold and packaged to you in small bites. Little moments of pushback, little symbolic gestures, bite-sized resistance to the tsunami of fascism. But that’s not what it means, not really. Integrating resistance into your everyday means weaving it into the fiber of your life, your being. It means countless little actions, but beyond that it means being deliberate about those actions adding up to something. It means a willingness to take bigger actions, bigger leaps. It means setting individualism aside and joining this battle. It means joining the broad coalition of people setting their desires aside, seeing the gravity of the struggle we’ve all been placed in the middle of, and acting accordingly. It means understanding that to live we must devote our lives to fighting back. It means understanding that to have a life beyond fascism we must first grind it into dust.

Some of that fight is immediate. It means stopping ICE from kidnapping our neighbors, it means removing every Democrat who practices appeasement, it means summarily defeating the Republican Party. But it also means something bigger. The oligarchy has enabled fascism, the same oligarchy that most politicians in both parties take orders from. Fascism in America was birthed out of neoliberalism and the erosion of worker power and the weak facade of liberal democracy. To defeat this monster we have to reshape society. To create a way of life where we can adequately respond to tragedy and despotism we have to change everything. We won’t last within this cycle forever. We won’t last within a rhythm of collapse and decay and the forced march of business as usual. Structural supports will start to give. Load-bearing walls will fall. Gradual collapse will accelerate in bursts of violence.

Sooner or later millions of people will see that we can’t go on like this. We need to be ready to welcome those millions into the work of building a better world. Because opposing fascism doesn’t just look like fighting, although plenty of that is required. It also looks like creation. If we fail to create then the radicalization of the population will not inherently look like a people’s revolution. Without creation the decimation of society will breed more fascists, not fewer. Without vehicles to welcome people into the work of improving society they’ll hop into the fascist lane of scapegoating and the downward cycle of self-consuming violence.

The declining spiral we find ourselves in isn’t new. It’s accelerating, and every day more people can feel the lurch, can feel the pull in the pit of their stomachs, but it isn’t new. When neoliberalism rose, when Reagan attacked public services, when unions began falling to attacks and decay, all of that was the arc of an Empire trending down. When the systems that made the middle class were hollowed out by the super-rich, when a handful of people were given license to mine our lives for more and more wealth, the writing was on the wall. This is what capitalism does. Reforms are walked back, the greedy enable their own greed, and most people are thrown into the wood chipper.

It’s no surprise that neoliberalism led to fascism. It’s no surprise that huge swaths of this country fell for scapegoating, believing billionaires who point at working-class migrants and say those people are the problem. But now, with the floor fully falling away, with the rug being fully pulled out from beneath us, we find our options narrowing. It’s socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg said. It’s solidarity or destruction. It’s hanging together and fighting together, or dying separately. With the decay of empire, our path narrows. We can plod ahead until we walk straight off a cliff, or we can break away, deviate, build something new before this hollowed out shell is reduced to ash.

And just like the decay isn’t new, neither is the fight. People have been resisting, have been building, have been seeking and creating ways out since the empire began. We don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. It’s incumbent upon us to look to those who have been building alternatives — economic, political, cultural and social alternatives to the dominant systems — for years and decades. We can and must join them, we can and must work together. Time is limited, the past few days have shown us that yet again. Our work is urgent, and together we can go infinitely further and faster than we can alone. So find each other. We need you. - JP

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A few organizations to look to, both as models and as resources:

The New Economy Coalition — https://neweconomy.net/

The Debt Collective — https://debtcollective.org/

Cooperation Jackson — https://cooperationjackson.org/

DSA — https://www.dsausa.org/

Tenant Union Federation — https://tenantfederation.org/

EWOC — https://workerorganizing.org/

Dream Defenders — https://dreamdefenders.org/