Oct 24, 2024 9 min read

American Collapse, the 1930s, the 2020s, and Human Civilization

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Today we’re going to discuss civilization, collapse, and the future, with a little focus on America’s election.

A lot’s gone on in the last couple of days. Let’s do a quick recap.

Trump’s own former Chief of Staff called him a fascist,
Kamala called him a fascist,
He reportedly admired Hitler.

Now. What does all this mean? Where are we, exactly? What’s going to happen next to America, and what does that imply for the world?

Big, big questions. Let me attempt to do them a little bit of justice.

How I Predicted American Collapse

It’s been a while since I predicted a thing I came to call American collapse. The story was simple, and I won’t rehash it for you, but in America I saw a repeat of the classic trends of the 1930s. Long-run stagnation, widespread immiseration, astronomical inequality: all of these are the classic recipe for fascism.

Not according to me. According to the greatest minds of the 20th century, like Keynes, whose book, “The Consequences of the Peace,” was about this startling insight: stagnation is the real drivers of fascism. This was a revolutionary insight. You see, back then, we didn’t understand. Why did Hitler arise? How had he seduced a society? What led Germany down this dark road, which dragged the world into war, and killed millions?

It was social science’s greatest question. Ever. Because World War was humanity’s greatest problem, ever, too, to date, and I don’t mean to belittle slavery and so forth, I’m just discussing how thinkers thought then. Nobody had much of a clue. All kinds of explanations were offered. None were very satisfying. It was Keynes who made the link between Weimar Germany’s stagnation, and the rise of Nazi Germany, as its consequence.

Hence, the title of the book that changed the world, “The Consequences of the Peace.” How did that book change the world? It remade the post-war world.

Leaders and thinkers of all kinds agreed that Keynes was right. And so they agreed, to, try and design a world where World War would never recur, ever, full stop, period, and to do that, they attempted to design institutions that would “never again,” in the famous words, allow fascism to rise.

Those institutions were things like the IMF and World Bank and UN and international courts and charters and treaties and trade organizations, plus America’s sort of soft control of levers of power, like back then, the gold standard, or international diplomacy, because back then, it was the last man left standing. Doesn’t matter—I can explain those later, and I’ve discussed them before.

The point is that we understood something back then.

This was the greatest lesson of the 20th century.

The Lesson We Forgot, and Why

I emphasize it because I want you to learn it. I think it’s important that you grasp it, I think it’s crucial that everyone gets it.

Right now, let me assure you, we don’t, and I’ll come back to that.

So. Now let me put Keynes great lesson, and remember, this is something that literally changed history and human civilization, to you in its simplest form.

Long-run stagnation causes fascism.

Causes. That is a causal link, and that matters, because it gives power. The powers to prevent, to ameliorate, and to predict. If we understand what causes something, we can do something about it.

Now. Some people will dispute this. Some people will “disagree” with it. They are only really flouting their ignorance. This isn’t an opinion. Keynes proved this, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is knowledge. We know this, and to deny it or dispute it is to be the equivalent of a climate denier, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s foolish, so understand, this is something we should all know. In the way that it is a great lesson and a grave truth.

So. These are the roots of fascism. What do they tell us?

What they told me was that in America’s case, we were about to have big problems. That was years ago now. I saw stats like the middle class becoming a minority, people struggling, generations doing worse than the last, massive inflation for housing, healthcare, retirement, all the basics. These reminded me of Weimar Germany, not in a metaphorical way, but in a statistical one. Sure, things weren’t “as” bad, but in terms of the causal link I’ve explained to you, that doesn’t matter.

Stagnation causes fascism.

When I saw that in America, for example, incomes had stagnated for half-a-century, I was convinced that something ugly was right around the corner. This was Keynes’ point, after all. It was what centuries of social thinking and science had culminated in. Keynes stood on the shoulders like Rousseau, De Tocqueville, Hume, and many, many more, and his insight remains the single greatest idea we have ever had about society. How do we prevent World Wars?

How we keep democracies?

I became convinced something ugly going to happen, because all the statistics told me so. And the deeper I looked, the more they converged on the same story: long-run stagnation, hardening across generations, deepening across social groups, imploding the middle, turning society pessimistic, afraid, dark, easy meat for demagogues.

I understood, too, that something paradoxical had happened. After the last World War, other countries had built guardrails against fascism recurring. Strong and robust one, or at least as strong as they could have been made, then. But America hadn’t. Because of course last time around it was the last man standing, and the thinking then was that it was the only country that didn’t need to be hardened and protected, so that its democracy would endure.

So America didn’t build the protections that Europe did, for example. Which today everyone can see, generous social contracts, expansive safety nets, all of which prevent long-run stagnation, and thus, avert the hand of fascism from developing a killer grip over society. America never built any of those because it didn’t think it needed them.

And so something truly paradoxical happened. The country that led the last fight against fascism is the one that today is on the brink of it. It’s not me calling it fascism, it’s Trump’s own Chief of Staff, Kamala, historians who disputed using the term until right about now, a long, long list of people, who finally all agree what this is.

So this is happening for a reason that’s one of those strange ironies of history. Sure, America has a checkered history with social relations—but most societies do. Where my ancestors come from? Caste is still a thing, and those at the bottom are “untouchable.” Human ugliness is universal.

What happened in America was paradoxical, ironic, and different. Nobody thought it needed to be hardened against fascism, after the last World War, and so it wasn’t. Italy, Germany, Japan—LOL, pretty obviously they did. France, Holland, Belgium—they didn’t want to end up like those guys.

But America was the country that saved the world from fascism. It was the one that nobody thought, therefore, needed to have all these new institutions—new constitutions, new social contracts, new systems—to prevent it’s rise, in some distant future.

That future is right now.

The Next Stage of American Collapse

So is this the next stage of American collapse?

The answer to that question is: yes. But not in a simple way. In a conditional one, and then in a marginal one. That means: depending on the election, and then depending on what Trump does next. We all know that he’ll enjoy the powers of a dictator, that he wants them, and plenty of people, again, not really me, are worried that he’ll abuse them.

All of this is missing the point.

This isn’t about Trump, and I know that’s hard to hear, but I’m trying to teach you how these systems called societies and civilization work. If it wasn’t Trump, it would’ve been someone else, and if it wasn’t 2016, it might’ve been 2020. That part’s almost sort of random, and that was Keynes’ point, too—that stagnation causes fascism, remember, and in that sense, demagogues are going to arise. Doesn’t really matter who they are, though of course we remember their names, like Hitler. But it’s these laws of history that create them.

So. In America’s case, we have a society that repeated the mistakes of the 1930s, because, ironically, it was the one country that nobody thought would, given that it saved the world from the last stagnation-depression-fascism-war cycle.

If you see all that, then the question becomes much clearer, and easier to answer. America’s now poised to enter a very different phase in a society’s evolution, or devolution, and thanks to that, our civilization well could, too.

Let’s imagine an America that’s not really a democracy, or in our modern terms, a “significantly flawed” one, or one that’s, worse, downgraded formally, to an autocracy.

What happens next? A lot of things. Democratic institutions cease to function. Rights stop existing. Society is chilled. It’s controlled, in overt terms, for the purpose of a singular social mission, and I don’t have to tell you which one.

Beyond that, though, many things happen. Autocracies don’t tend to have very good credit ratings, and while America’s currently holding the global economy together, it’s also coming apart as America does. America’s credit rating is likely to be downgraded, and that will cause shocks emanating around the world.

As much as stock markets are booming right now, autocracies don’t tend to be—chuckle with me—very safe places to keep your money. That’s why debt ratings get downgraded, but its also why they don’t have shall we say stock markets wise people want to put their money into. As capital leaves, investment falls, and as investment falls, economies slow, jobs disappear, and the cycle of stagnation hardens.

This is all sort of what the world’s better economists are beginning to warn about when they say, no, Trump won’t be good for the economy. They mean it in a narrower sense, which is that raising tariffs is going to spike inflation, but let’s think about that in a broader sense, too.

What happened during the 1930s? To turn Weimar Germany into Nazi Germany? Germany was trapped in cycle of stagnation, and people had lost hope in having stable, let alone prosperous, lives again. And then the Great Depression happened. As it did, the world turned isolationist—tariffs and trade wars erupted. This made Germany’s cycle of stagnation worse, faster and faster, and all that is what really propelled Hitler to power.

In America’s case, we risk a sort of repeat of all that—a nation trapped in a cycle of stagnation, making precisely the wrong moves, and hardening and accelerating just that cycle, with more isolationism, which causes trade to stop, investment to flee, and even just people to flee (how many Americans are going to run to Europe and Canada if they can if election goes the wrong way for them very shortly?)

All of that hardens an autocracy.

It’s how you lose a democracy. Not in the simplistic sense of “Trump bad!,” but in the much, much deeper one of historical forces, self-perpetuating cycles, causality, and Keynes’ magisterial insight about what causes fascism.

American Collapse, the 1930s, the 2020s, and Human Civilization

Why did we want to prevent fascism?

Remember with me. Not just because “it’s bad.” Not just because “democracy’s better.” Not for political or even moral reasons at all.

For pragmatic ones, and genuinely civilizational ones.

We wanted to prevent fascism, because last time around, it led to World War.

So as a civilization, we appear to be heading back on the road to the the unthinkable.

These are the civilizational stakes of what is happening now, the culmination of historical forces, and the meaning of these great macro-trends of the 1930s repeating themselves, with this ironic, deadly sting in the tail—the country that saved the world and ended its last World War was the very one we didn’t think needed to be hardened against the very conditions that led to that very sequence, since it was the last man standing. But because it wasn’t, history could repeat itself.

This is where we are today.

None of this is about Trump in this sense, it’s not about his hangers-on, it’s not about political sides anymore, even. It is about history, in this deepest and grandest—and most dangerous—of senses. I want you to really understand that, because right now, very, very few people do, and this is why we are where we are, watching history repeat itself, baffled, bewildered, unable to understand why, its greatest lessons lost.

We were already on a pretty risky trajectory civilizationally. But all this? It adds to this quantity I call civilization risk immensely, multiplying it by another factor entirely.

That’s not a warning. It’s something I want to teach you. That I want you to reflect deeply on. Not just react to, in the petty way we’ve come to hurl at one another. Just today, someone on Twitter said to me angrily, for no reason whatsoever, “you write like a twelve year old.”

My man, I thought to myself. I am just trying to teach you things every twelve year old should know. But most of us adults don’t, and more’s the pity. This person was panicked about fascism. Because they don’t understand how we get here and what happens next.

Now you do. In that knowledge is the only form of power we have right now. The point isn’t just to use it wisely. It’s to have it, and to give it, so that we don’t watch history repeating itself impotently, puzzled, shocked, dumbstruck, forever, as we are doing right now.

How I Predicted American Collapse

The Lesson We Forgot, and Why

The Next Stage of American Collapse

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