Those of us who live in Europe have reason to be very pessimistic about the next four years. The state that Europeans have relied upon as their security guarantee is now in the hands of the nationalist extreme right and the information space is saturated by the output of tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk who are either aligned with or beholden to that nationalist right and who openly fantasize about replacing elected European governments. These pressures come on top of military aggression from Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, austerity in public services, increased energy costs, stagnant living standards, a difficult green transition, demographic decline, and anxiety about immigration and cultural diversity. Most of these pressures are likely to be deliberately worsened by the incoming Trump regime in the hope of having its ideological allies come to power in European countries. In fact the very same figures who vaunted the importance of national sovereignty are salivating at the prospect of a great power interfering to their benefit in domesic affairs: so much for patriotism!
Resistance will be hampered on several fronts. First, the left and the labour movement, a popular bastion against fascism during earlier waves of ultra-nationalism, is weak and divided with its institutions such as parties and trade unions shells of what they once were as the result of changes in the class structure. Second, liberal and democratic values, tolerance and human rights, that might form some kind of principled rallying point have been badly compromised by mainstream parties’ desire to accomodate the so-called “legitimate concerns” of voters around migration and security, Widespread discrimination against minorities and growing toleration of mass death among irregular migrants as well as deals with dictatorships at Europe’s margins to contain would-be migrants exacerbate the abandonment of any pretence at humanitarian univeralism. European governments have been reluctant (or worse) to resist Israel’s actions in Palestine and the wider Middle East, again making a joke of Europe’s claimed values. Third, European leaders will be prevented from mounting any kind of principled resistance to US attack by the fact that, in the face of Russian aggression, they will feel the need to carry on pretending that the American enemy is in fact their friend and ally. The parallels with a toxic relationship with an abuser are obvious.
Nobody knows how seriously to take Trump’s various threats to make America great again through territorial annexation, but they bring the prospect of either confrontation with European “allies” or, more likely, their abject humiliation through forced acquiescence. Meanwhile the norm against forced annexation will have been further broken — no doubt Israel will also seize the moment — and one can imagine a kind of new Yalta where Trump does a deal with Putin on mutual expansion of their supposed security spheres with terrible consequences for Ukraine but perhaps also for other parts of Eastern Europe.
The Trump adminstration will do its best to crash our economies through hostile economic measures such as tarrifs. At the same time they will try to close down as much as possible European co-operation with China as a trading partner, including, perhaps, by sanctioning individuals and companies. In the information space, the likes of Musk are already trying to foment ethnic and racial conflict in Europe by promoting “Great Replacement” ideology and portraying Muslims particularly and immigrants generally as invaders and sexual predators. When this pressure turns into violence, as it already has done, they will defend the perpetrators as unjustly persecuted patriots whatever the actual facts of the matter. In the UK, Musk has bemoaned the incarceration of far-right figures who have instigated and organized violence against minorites as an attack on free speech.
At the same time, just at the moment when the world needs to fight off climate disaster, the Trump regime will both abandon US support for the energy transition and weaponize the issue on behalf of its ideological allies in Europe who will claim that we are too poor, too cold and too unemployed because of woke eco-obsessives and will demand the full restoration of the carbon-based economy.
What glimmers of light are there? Very few. Perhaps the performance of the Trump/Musk regime will be so horrifically bad domestically that their European allies will be discredited by association. Maybe the most damaging actions on the economic front will also have significant blowback effects on the US, to the extent that such measures are significantly reined back. Some really rerrible climactic events might serve to discredit the far-right narrative in the eyes of voters. Perhaps some European leaders will grow a spine, but that seems unlikely. Maybe the Trump administration will be undermined by internal divisions: Trump himself might be replace by Vance who might be more pragmatic (but probably wouldn’t be). And then there’s the hope that the election cycles are such that many European governments, having recently been elected, will outlast the Trumpians before they have to face the far-right at the polls. But what else?
{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }
Matt 01.10.25 at 10:48 am
I consider myself to be a pretty pessimistic guy, who usually thinks things won’t work out well and are at least as likely to get worse than to get better, but I think this is probably a bit too pessimistic. For all this to happen, a bunch of people who are not that smart, not that organized, are hard to get along with, and have other serious problems would have to have a lot of things go right for them. That might happen! But, I think the above is close to an absolute worst-case scenario, and the more likely outcome, while bad, is less bad than this. (I’ll add that I think too many people in the Trump/Greenland post are giving him more credit than he deserves. He’s not a smart man, and he doesn’t have a complicated plan. He may well cause a lot of trouble, but it won’t be because he has some worked out scheme, or is involved in some serious negotiation planning.)
“Trump himself might be replace by Vance who might be more pragmatic (but probably wouldn’t be).”
To my mind this would be much worse. Vance, also, is not a deep thinker. But, he’s much more organized, has genuinely bad views, is chock-full of resentment (the worst and most dangerous emotion, I’d argue) and could do much more harm.
James McA 01.10.25 at 12:12 pm
Imperialism has risen again, and the hypocrisy inherent in that mindset are fully on display as you’ve outlined.
The glimmer of hope is Ireland . They have been the one beacon within the EU actually standing up to Israeli imperialism and have been seen to be doing so through the legal processes available to them on the international stage. They still hold sway in the US, although the next few St Patrick’s Days may prove that this is no longer the case. And, tangential as it may seem, their two major sports are amateur – every village has a GAA club, and the teacher in the primary school could be playing for the county in front of 80,000 peopl, before getting up the next day to volunteer to coach the kids. This has embedded a culture of egalitarianism , deference to wealth that plagues former empires has never really taken hold, and there’s not much tolerance for individual exceptionalism in Ireland. I can testify from personal observance, Michael O’Leary flies Ryanair and sits in the holding areas with the passengers if his plane is late, even though he’s one of the richest men in the country.
Aardvark Cheeselog 01.10.25 at 4:13 pm
I cannot find fault with OP’s analysis. All I can say is, usually things don’t wind up taking the worst path we can imagine, and the lesson I’m taking from last time is “don’t get sucked into the drama and theatre.” Following too closely that is so exhausting and enervating and discouraging that you won’t have energy for literally anything else.
hix 01.10.25 at 5:04 pm
The military aspect seems overrated to me, invading is still costly after an easy victory in a symmetric war…. Neither would the US get lucky with Greenland much less Canada or Mexico, nor would Russia be any lucky with invading further eastern Europeans even if they were isolated (which also seems unrealistic to me). Beyond that, probably even more dark at the moment. Not exactly sure why.
Peter Dorman 01.10.25 at 5:43 pm
This is pretty strong pessimism. I agree with Matt @1 that it’s a worst case scenario, not impossible but on the lower end of what may eventuate. One glimmer to keep in mind is that illiberal plutocracy doesn’t have answers, or even much in the way of muddlings-through, to the crises our societies are confronted with. They will likely get smashed on the rocks of reality sooner rather than later. This will probably happen on the economic front first.
But the deeper pessimism I feel is that the short run failure of the far right will not bring us to a longer run resurgence of the left. If the left and center-left parties are just a refuge for angry voters seeking to punish right-populists who messed up, it will be more of the same. A few years back in government, hemmed in by economic and political constraints, and then back on the streets in an even more dangerous world.
One of my touchstones has always been “Mario and the Magician” by Thomas Mann, his reflection on resistance to fascism. He draws it out, but the message is pretty simple: no is not enough. There has to be a yes to something else, something vivid and inspiring. The yeses of yesteryear (!) no longer do this for us, and we don’t have any new ones to take their place.
engels 01.10.25 at 6:54 pm
While I usually agree with Dornan I have to say that there was in my recollection a “yes” to something else, something vivid and inspiring: the Corbyn-Sanders movements that were so phenomenally popular they had to smeared into oblivion (as sexist/racist/antisemitic/Brexit-sympathiser/bros) by the same progressive political establishment and intelligentsia that’s now settling in to a long sojourn in Grand Hotel Abyss.
Laban 01.10.25 at 9:34 pm
Call me an old economic determinist, but I’m pessimistic about Europe because it contained the West’s only world-class productive economy*, that of Germany, and Germany has struck the buffers since they lost their cheap Russian gas to “persons unknown”.
I looked at the latest German polls in Deutsche Welle, and they were blaming everything but the elephant for the poor state of their drawing room.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-immigration-and-the-economy-top-the-list-of-concerns/a-71265549
“a 61% majority of those polled expressed opposition to reviving German-Russian economic relations with the lifting of sanctions against Russia”
there are other world class firms in Europe and the US, but only Germany consistently ran large trade surpluses.
wetzel-rhymes-with 01.10.25 at 10:38 pm
Through both of Trump’s impeachments and the Jan 6 riots, the norms and ideas of “the law” have given way to total irony and nihilism amongst the GOP who compete in making the immolation of the law into a performative spectacle of fascist propaganda. There is an entirely different permission structure. They have a Dear Leader.
I do not know if “social states” can be described in systems theorylike the state of a living cell becoming cancerous or undergoing apoptosis. We are descending from the are of rational “equality” to a new oligarchical, heroic, or feudal age, where a propaganda of metonymy and synecdoche support monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures given to us by History through Capitalism. As your society becomes more fascist you lose the functions of journalism. We are losing law and science for the social production of truth. Mimetic rivalry is replacing the underlying structure of “respect for difference” in how a stable democracy and political parties function, and so fascism represents deindividuation where everyone looks to the mob for how to act.
A traditional party like the Democrats cannot fight an information war with a fascist political party where even violence or degradation is a spectacle. There isn’t an analytical solution, a Nash equilibrium you can reach with fascists. A nihilistic, fascist animus has given our society Trump. It’s a kind of paganism based on logical murder where he is our king, priest, and prophet to resolve our mimetic crisis with “sacrifices of the Other”. I think this mimetic crisis is a cancer that will spread through our media and infect all of our “former allies” so we will all be together in Oceania.
Fascist information warfare and propaganda reflect a kind of genocidal social animus in collective unconscious, and so a Dear Leader has formed to purge liberals, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants. So far it is mostly neo-Orwellian kayfabe. However, to pretend the fake violence of professional wrestling is real, or to pretend the real violence of Jan 6 is fake, conditions the fascist to the idea that death is a spectacle and so the individual is not important.
hix 01.10.25 at 11:33 pm
Gas import prices are a rounding error compared to German gdp and not particular out of line with historical trends any more. US ones are just very cheap.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Aussenhandel/Tabellen/erdgas-jaehrlich.html
https://www.finanzen.net/rohstoffe/erdgas-preis-ttf/chart
Not much different regarding electricity. When all else is equal, production in France or the US wins out at the moment, but that was rarely an all else equal comparison in the past and Germany grew just fine with similar price electricity price gaps.
Also, at least the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden. have a history of huge trade surpluses just the same.
Copernicus 01.11.25 at 12:05 am
James McA@2
Michael O’Leary flies Ryanair and sits in the holding areas with the passengers if his plane is late
As has been told to me by Ryanair employees in the past, O’Leary does this to monitor that they’re not getting soft on passengers (a smiling face to his staff and customers and then a dagger from HR afterwards)
Laban@7
Germany has in recent years locked itself into ‘balancing the budget’, i.e. the austerity chimera. No Green Revolution here!
Alex SL 01.11.25 at 1:26 am
I am also extremely pessimistic, and leaving aside climate and resource overuse, it is because “the left and the labour movement, a popular bastion against fascism during earlier waves of ultra-nationalism, [are] weak and divided”. It seems obvious to me that we are still benefiting from the existence of national institutions and global arrangements that were established in reaction to the labour movement and the USSR. And the more these arrangements are hollowed out, the more we return to the times when most people lived in abject poverty and nations went to war with each other about once per generation.
While I would not want to live under Stalin, widespread prosperity and internal political stability of nations were a result of social safety nets that capitalist elites established because they were worried that their working class would defect to the communists if they didn’t. Germany’s first welfare laws were, for example, enacted under Bismarck in an attempt to stop the growth of the labour movement. Since about the late 1970s, that fear is gone, and since then, social safety nets ranging from labour protections across union power to pensions have increasingly been cut, privatised, and abolished (the only exceptions being social justice for minorities and women, perhaps because, as important as they are, compared to health care and old-age pensions, something like accepting gay marriage or not bullying somebody for being trans doesn’t cost much, if anything). More to the point of the post perhaps, our international arrangements are a legacy of WW2, when fascism was only defeated because of a grudging alliance of the USA and the USSR, and, in the case of NATO, the need to contain communism.
With the labour movement and the threat of communist revolution seen off, there is no reason why elites shouldn’t get back to sucking dry everybody else in their own nation and then war-mongering against other nations for the combined benefit of acquiring loot and distracting the masses from their poverty. The only other factor of note is fear of a nuclear war, which, however, is only relevant in the case of nuclear powers directly going to war with each other; it does not stand in the way of a nuclear power invading nations not equipped with those like Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or Panama.
Will we ever again have a strong, united left with ideas of internationalism and working class solidarity? Although class struggles have been a part of any complex society since at least antiquity, I fear that the labour movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was unique and of its time.
novakant 01.11.25 at 5:58 am
This has embedded a culture of egalitarianism , deference to wealth that plagues former empires has never really taken hold, and there’s not much tolerance for individual exceptionalism in Ireland.
I get what you’re saying, especially compared to the US. But this is nevertheless a rather rosy view of Ireland. I don’t expect anyone to take my word for it, but Sally Rooney is popular for a reason.
John Q 01.11.25 at 8:19 am
“Third, European leaders will be prevented from mounting any kind of principled resistance to US attack by the fact that, in the face of Russian aggression, they will feel the need to carry on pretending that the American enemy is in fact their friend and ally”
This is the crucial question. Europe (including Ukraine) is powerful enough to repel an already weakened Russia without any help from the US (which they probably won’t get anyway). The habits of almost a century have conditioned Europeans to wait for the US lead. But Trump’s actions, notably threatening to attack an EU member country, might finally shake this. This statement from Kallas is a notable shift in this direction
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ready-take-lead-ukraine-if-us-no-longer-willing-says-kaja-kallas/
Jeremija Krstic 01.11.25 at 9:59 am
13: “Europe (including Ukraine) is powerful enough to repel an already weakened Russia without any help from the US (which they probably won’t get anyway).”
And that’ll be the end of Europe, then.
But then according to Orwell’s 1984, which appears to be entirely prophetic, Neo-Bolshevik Eurasia includes all of Europe sans the British Isles. So, this is probably how it happens.
engels 01.11.25 at 12:33 pm
Michael O’Leary flies Ryanair and sits in the holding areas with the passengers if his plane is late
Does he pay them £55 pounds to print his boarding pass?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66500479
Thomas P 01.11.25 at 12:55 pm
There is also a possibility that Trump will act so deranged that Putin seems sane in comparison (or at least weak enough that he is the lesser threat) and EU+Ukraine+Russia will feel forced to come to an agreement. Opinions are split to what extent fear of NATO expansion drove Putin´s invasion, but if Trump manages to break NATO that argument is moot. Ukraine can promise not to join NATO as part of a peace treaty without it costing them anything and Putin has something to show to prove he won.
At least one can hope. It’s insane how military budgets in EU are exploding as if we didn’t have better things to do.
Robert Weston 01.11.25 at 4:37 pm
The parallels with a toxic relationship with an abuser are obvious.
This point from the OP is key, as is JQ’s take at #13. German elites, in particular, believe their country has a filial bond to the United States. In their view, America picked their country up after it had unleashed a war of destruction and extermination, fed it when it was hungry, clothed it and kept it warm amid ruin and destitution, protected it from the vengeful Soviets, rebuilt its economy, even let a country built on exports compete with it on the world markets. All that creates an unbelievably strong emotional attachment to the United States that will just not go away no matter how bad things get. As in: Your mother gave you life and you don’t turn your back on her, no matter how harmful and self-destructive her behavior. Besides, in Berlin and Washington, there’s a whole ecosystem of Transatlantic institutes, fellowships, exchange programs, that will keep the flame burning. In Germany, Atlanticism is not so much a policy stance: It’s an identity.
Besides, as much as Germans and other Europeans dread Trump’s return, there remain substantial areas of agreement with Washington, besides standing strong against Russia: It’s hard to overestimate how viscerally French elites hate le wokisme , so that in their view, Trump’s return will prove a salutary warning to uppity minorities.
Then, there’s Israel, unconditional support for which is now a litmus test in much of Europe. Enough said there.
John Q 01.11.25 at 7:36 pm
Musk’s intervention in support of the European far-right is a double-edged sword. It will undoubtedly help the parties he favours, but it will also help to break the Atlanticist consensus referred to by Robert W.
The same is happening with the pro-Israel consensus. Nearly all European countries voted in favour of the latest General Assembly call for an immediate cease-fire, opposing the US.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/12/un-demands-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-how-did-your-country-vote
Stephen 01.11.25 at 8:55 pm
CB as OP; ‘liberal and democratic values, tolerance and human rights, that might form some kind of principled rallying point have been badly compromised by mainstream parties’ desire to accomodate the so-called “legitimate concerns” of voters around migration and security.’
Much as I share your revulsion about (alas, democratically-elected) President Trump II, I wonder about your wording here.
It reads as if you think there are no real, legitimate concerns of voters about migration and security, and roll on Open Borders. I would freely concede that some such concerns are imaginary. For some others, I would think that those of the Charlie Hebdo staff that survive might not agree with you.
J-D 01.12.25 at 6:03 am
This is how my mind works.
My first reaction on reading that was to wonder whether the perpetrators of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo were immigrants, so I looked it up.
No, they were not immigrants, they were French-born. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting that answer to my question, but I thought to check, and that’s the answer I found.
That’s how my mind works.
How was your mind working?
Thomas P 01.12.25 at 7:11 am
Stephen, the two brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo were born in France. I don’t see how harder migration policy would have prevented the attack, nor do I see their staff supporting right wing populism.
Laban 01.12.25 at 11:06 am
Robert Weston – “fed it when it was hungry, clothed it and kept it warm amid ruin and destitution, protected it from the vengeful Soviets, rebuilt its economy”
That doesn’t sound much like 1947 Germany to me.
“Especially in the Ruhr area where I’ve done most of my research, the food situation was catastrophic. Record low temperatures froze the waterways so that ships with perishable foods imported from abroad were trapped in the harbors. A bad harvest meant less fresh food sent from the agricultural parts of Germany to the cities. In Essen, it’s said the actual ration people received amounted to just over 700 calories a day per person.
A coal shortage, due only in part to the coal exported by the Allies from the Ruhr region, meant people had trouble heating their homes. The “White Death,” as the Germans called it, took its victims. How many people died as a result of hunger, cold and illness in this period isn’t clear. Some historians estimate hundreds of thousands.”
https://postwargermany.com/2012/09/26/hunger-winter/
Up until July 1947, Allied policy was based on JCS 1067 – which directed “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany”.
I wonder if the “unbelievably strong emotional attachment to the United States” is more like that of Bill Sikes’ dog in Oliver Twist.
As Machiavelli put it “men avenge slight injuries, but not grave ones”.
hix 01.12.25 at 12:42 pm
Not only are all terror attacks a rounding error in causes of death or disability – the number of racists trying to kill a Muslim tends to exceed the other way round. Ironically enough, the last terror attack in Germany was caused by anti-islam conspiracy theories, exxactly the ones the far right adheres to. Suddenly, a “register for the mentally ill” was demanded and of course because the guy who did it headed from Saudi Arabia, AFD just claimed it as an islamic terror attacks. Too bad, shared mass delusions are not even defined as mental illness.
One of the last far right terrorists a couple of years ago was mentally ill in a more narrow sense. Of course, his parents also told him far right conspiracy theories and hid him away with no threatment…. So what of the two things was the casual factor and how exactly the lack of threatment would be helped by a register is anyones guess. Disgusting. Now how about focusing on actuall mass causes of death like inequality and bad health insurance coverage, or social stigma leading to lack of threatment, suicide, oh also socially accepted if not desired drugs like alcohol or cigarette, or car centred cities where rich people drive around with quasi tank SUVs.
engels 01.12.25 at 1:34 pm
Leaving aside Charlie Hebdo I do think “legitimate concerns” is liberal unspeak because it is sneering at the idea of “legitimate” (ie. non-racially-motivated) anxieties about recent levels of immigration (eg about absolute numbers, economic effects, concentration in particular areas, failure of government to expand infrastructure to keep pace, and, yes, cultural change)—and refusing to engage with them rationally, which imho whether you’re pro or ante is a big reason we are where we are.
wetzel-rhymes-with 01.12.25 at 7:22 pm
John Q, you wrote in #13 and #18
From this American’s perspective, the United States was not powerful enough to repel Russia’s information war in the sense that Russia-style kleptocratic fascism has spread across international boundaries in the person of Trump. What is the mechanism? Maybe “constitution” also like a social state. If propaganda can change the relationship between the letter of the law and its spirit then the constitution of a society may change.
Peter Thiel is the tech magnate who gave us J.D. Vance for Vice President (and wants us to know it). In his recent Financial Times op-ed, A Time for truth and reconiliation, Thiel, wrote,
What are media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs?
1) journalism
2) the practices of normal scientific research
3) institutions of the law
These are actually a society’s only reliable instrument for the production of truth. How will European societies hold up when Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Apple teach show you look to the mob for what is the truth? I think you need ideas from René Girard to understand today’s fascism. Peter Thiel has written about the influence of Girard’s philosophy personally. Thiel was an undergraduate and went to business school when Girard taught there. For someone who was also his advisee, René Girard’s philosophy is like the fire of Azura Mazda if it is made into the weapon of a fascist propagandist, and for my part, it’s un-Methadist of me to say Thiel’s approach to Girard may be anti-Christian, so like John Wesley is famous for saying “We can agree to disagree!”, but I believe it’s a tragic misreading of a philosopher René Girard to find an “end of history” justifying political scape-goating or dehumanization through engineered “crises of degree”.
René Girard’s totalitarianism extended to deconstructing Hegel and only as far as the Sermon on the Mount, but that concept of Mussolini, the “sacrifice of the Other”, fascinated the White Russian philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, whose body Putin returned to Russia for a state funeral. According to Putin, Ilyin is the philosopher of the “new Russia”. Enlightenment ideas perverted became the Terror after the French Revolution, and there was a track to nihilistic terror state from Hegel through Marx to Marxist-Leninism. Fascism forms a pagan totalitarian nihilism where “sacrifice of the Other” is the central ritual. In Ilyin’s philosophy, the individual is hopelessly mired in sin, so it is the state which must perfect itself seeking grace through purges, penitently suffering in imitation of Christ crucified, and against the outward Enemy in war.
My point is that Thiel, his political associates, Musk, and others are philosophical revolutionaries who believe they see a path to creating the Department of Reality, which is a path to a kind of neo-Orwellian terror state of permanent mimetic crisis and scapegoating. The broader engineered social changes under information war are a greater threat to Europe than physical security issues, because the global cartel forming around Trump with all major media, the Gulf, Putin, the tech-bros, appears to have a stepwise path and efficacy over achieving what appears to be profound social and political transformation not only in the United States but Europe too. For European nations or any other free democratic state, the threat isn’t from outside in the form of Putin’s tanks but the racism, fear of immigrants, and homophobia that will be stoked to create a fascist animus and entail a breakdown of social state into a neo-Orwellian eschatology of faux genocide and terror. This is the new social reality in an unwinnable information war. We lost it in the United States. We didn’t even know we were having it. Wish us luck!
engels 01.12.25 at 9:57 pm
I don’t think anyone would say I have ever been especially preoccupied with terrorism but I think it’s reasonable to regard being murdered by a terrorist as a worse outcome than dying from alcohol-related illnesses or being hit by a bus and it can certainly be more unpleasant.
hix 01.13.25 at 2:38 am
Here is a great comedy routine by Marc-Uwe Kling about this ridiculous Islamic terrorism hysteria (in German, good that auto subtitles work great these days).
Peter T 01.13.25 at 5:33 am
There is indeed much wrong with the world, and I have little hope that things will turn around any time soon. If we are looking for a break with the established course then climate catastrophes will not do it – they have become ordinary news, and anyway just relentlessly nibble away at the edges of a large and resilient system – a withdrawal of insurance here, an abandoned town there, another species marked off the list. It’s at lightspeed geologically but glacial in human terms.
The US is at the core of the system, and the US has become that classic late-stage hegemon, one economically reliant on finance. Derivatives and other claims on the future have piled up (90% of the valuation of large US firms is now in ‘intangible assets’ – patents, brand value etc). This is imaginary wealth (Cedric Durand’s label is Fictitious Capital), although with very real effects, dependent on being able to validate it down the track. EG, if Tesla”s valuation was marked to cars actually sold rather than to visions of cars sold in the future it would fall to a fraction of its current price. Every threat to it so far has been dealt with by having the US government take on the claims (quantitative easing, COVID bailout). This presumably has a limit, or could be overwhelmed by some collective collision with reality.
engels 01.13.25 at 12:54 pm
If I were of a more conspiratorial bent I would wonder if all the (indubitably insane and terrifying) Trump/Musk theatre is there to distract us from this:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai
engels 01.13.25 at 2:25 pm
Thank God austerity is over
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/13/keir-starmer-says-treasury-will-be-ruthless-on-public-spending-cuts
Thomas P 01.13.25 at 4:30 pm
wetzel-rhymes-with, while it is popular to put Putin as the boogeyman responsble for all evil, I think his influence on US politics is far overstated. It is largely a domestic problem, and one might as well say that Putin is a result of how the US handled Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Clinton called and congratulated Jeltsin when he sent tanks against their parliament!
Peter T, I think you are still trying to be too rational in the valuation of Tesla. It has nothing to do with cars produced today or cars produced tomorrow, people invest in the expectation that the stock price will continue to rise, more like Bitcoin or other purely speculative assets than a normal company where you try to estimate future earnings.
Robert Weston 01.14.25 at 12:02 am
Laban: That doesn’t sound much like 1947 Germany to me.
Up until July 1947, Allied policy was based on JCS 1067 – which directed “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany”.
Thanks, but to me, I suppose, the question is: Is the Transatlantic narrative that’s so prominent in Germany based on the White Death and on JCS 1067? Or is it rather based on JCS 1779, which rescinded the former? As well as on things like the Berlin Airlift and especially the Marshall Plan?
Incidentally, thanks for link, which is great. But if anything, it underscores the point above: The author makes it sound as though, through her research, she discovered things that are by no means hidden, but that just don’t usually come up in discussion of the postwar occupation.
John Q 01.14.25 at 6:43 am
“the United States was not powerful enough to repel Russia’s information war in the sense that Russia-style kleptocratic fascism has spread across international boundaries in the person of Trump”
Trump is home-grown. In the last stages of his rise, he probably got some help from Russian infowar stuff, but the Republican party was going in this direction before Putin even rose to power
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/07/20/the-republican-phase-transition/
What matters is that the US (unlike, for example, Brazil) has proved unable to repel the worst elements of its own society
Peter T 01.14.25 at 10:15 am
Thomas P @ 31
I am not supposing that Tesla’s valuation is ‘rational’, just using it as an example of money piling up without much if any regard for any correspondence to actual products and processes. This ‘money’ has real consequences, both in its growth and – often rapid and unexpected – decline.
engels 01.14.25 at 1:44 pm
Reasons to be cheerful from the ASI: London still no.2 vampire squid and we’re really good at making bombs
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1878828978498306389.html
Laban 01.14.25 at 4:52 pm
John Q – “What matters is that the US (unlike, for example, Brazil) has proved unable to repel the worst elements of its own society”
But if you remember, the US ruling elite had only just repelled one assault on its citadel during the years 2010-2015, when “Occupy Wall Street” mysteriously transmuted into “Black Lives Matter” as the rallying call of the left. Exactly how this transformation took place would make a very interesting academic study. I don’t know if it’s been written yet.
But the processes in the US and UK have been more or less the same since the 1970s – the share of profit accruing to labour has been static or falling
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-typical-male-u-s-worker-earned-less-in-2014-than-in-1973/
while industrial production has been moved to cheaper places, and the stuff that you can’t export, like agricultural work or service industries, has been supplied with cheaper imported labour aka “the jobs the locals don’t want to do for poverty wages”.
Importing people is tremendously good for employers of unskilled labour, but also for our rapidly growing landlord class, a class which, like the pawnbroker, was almost disappearing by the mid-60s.
During these latter years, the left didn’t seem that concerned about the old working class, but now that the postgrad kids of the middle classes are still living at 30 in single rooms in shared houses, they may possibly wake up.
PatinIowa 01.14.25 at 7:54 pm
John Q at 33: “Trump is home-grown.”
Exactly. Nothing in what he says, and very little in what he does differs from what we’ve been hearing from the American Conservative Movement™ since William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review in the fifties.
It’s the unfettered power that differs, and certain nuances in speaking about economics.
It used to be said, pretty commonly, that the Union won the Civil War and the South won the ensuing peace. I’d say that the Civil Rights Movement won the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, and after Nixon’s second election the reactionaries have carried the day.
And if you want to know why the Democrats haven’t been able to resist, take a listen to Hubert Humphrey’s congratulatory phone call to Richard Nixon after the 1972 election: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes/33/conversation-033-062.
John Q 01.15.25 at 12:33 am
Laban @36 “the years 2010-2015, when “Occupy Wall Street” mysteriously transmuted into “Black Lives Matter””
Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 and was over, at least as a large movement, by the end of 2012. Black Lives Matter emerged as a hashtag soon after that, but didn’t become a really big thing until the Floyd murder in 2020. There was little or no overlap between the initiators of these movements, although plenty of overlap among the supporters
In between those two dates, there was the 2017 Women’s March, and later there have been protests against genocide in Gaza.
There was no mysterious transmutation here, nor is there one “true cause” from which everything else is a distraction. The unfortunate fact is that all have been losing ground for the last decade or so
engels 01.15.25 at 1:01 am
…The 24-country poll, which also included Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey, found that Switzerland, the UK, 11 EU nations surveyed and South Korea were alone in feeling Trump 2.0 would be bad for their country and for peace in the world. “In short, Trump’s return is lamented by America’s longtime allies but almost nobody else,” stated the report by the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/14/european-jitters-about-trump-20-not-shared-by-much-of-world-poll-finds
MisterMr 01.15.25 at 10:46 am
@Laban 36 (but also a more general argument)
Fundamentally, we do not know what determines the wage share, however one of the determinants is the rate of unemployment: the higer the unemployment, the lower is labour’s bargaining power, the lower the wage share, so for example the wage share falls after an economic crisis when unemployment is high but rises when the economy reaches a new peak and unemployment is low.
Let’s call this the cyclical determinant of the wage share.
On the other hand there are other things that influence the wage share, such as the level of the minimum wage, labor laws, taxation etc.
Let’s call this the structural determinants of the wage share.
Now, the idea that immigration reduces the wage share logically is linked to the cyclical determinant (unemployment): more people come competing for the same jobs, perhaps they accept lower wages, and this brings down the wage share.
But this impies that unemployment should be higer: immigration is supposed to lower the wage share by increasing unemployment.
However if we look at USA historical levels of unemployment, we see that unemployment today is not higer than in the past, it is in fact very low, see fore example this graphic, you see that unemplyment in april 2023 was at its lowest since the fifties (!!).
So the logical conclusion is that the low wage share is not due to high unemployment, but rather in changes in the “structural” determinants (labor laws, taxation etc.).
But immigration should work through the “cyclical” determinants, so it seems to me that the impact of immigration on the wage share is minimal.
Delocalisation is more ambiguous because it could work by lowering the level of competitive wage share, so it is more likely to impact the wage share, plus politician are more likely to do anti-labour changes to the laws if they think their country has to be more “competitive”.
notGoodenough 01.15.25 at 12:08 pm
Fundamentally, the anti-egalitarian promulgates hierarchical oppression – or simplistically, that there are people who matter and people who do not; and the rights, well-being, and existence of the latter should be entirely dependent on the whims, convenience, and benefit of the former. The nature of such politics is to normalise oppression, as well as to divert any energies away from addressing this so that such inequality may persist. In my opinion, it is this which is the source of much of the (what I would personally characterise as reasonable) pessimism in Europe (and not, contrary some arguments, the temerity of the oppressed to occasionally ask to be slightly less oppressed – convenient though it may be for some to believe that). One reoccurring issue with anti-anti-egalitarianism (so to speak) is when the natural and reasonable tendency to focus energies and directions morphs into trying to address very specific issues within very specific frameworks, which subsequently leads to failure (promoting an egalitarian liberatory movement which ignores various oppressions of its members tends to be a poor recipe for long-term success). While it is possible things may turn around), and one can hope that the fractious nature of power struggles within the “right” will hinder their ability to inflict ever increasing degrees of cruelty and oppression on the populace at large, I am admittedly pessimistic any genuine improvements will happen in time to mitigate the exacerbating effects of climate change, increased instability as a result of geopolitical realignments, and the general retreat from broadly “more egalitarian” politics (which is not the same as actually egalitarian – we are talking relative terms here) to those which are decidedly less so. Nevertheless, one struggles onward – personally, in the absence of an effective approach at the state level, my efforts have been oriented towards community-level organisation, but as ever YMMV.