The Monday Lament: America’s End

So ends the great American Experiment

CoPilot and author

I wish this were a sad surprise, but it is not. The Great American Experiment has gone the way of bankruptcies in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Gradually and then suddenly”.

Ah, but isn’t this premature? The US government has not collapsed yet. Technically, the system is still in place, and many insist it can be repaired. See the above Hemingway quote or ask anyone who has experienced bankruptcy.

The American Experiment with the European Enlightenment-era ideals of limited representative government was tenuous. The other famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: As he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” There is no record of this as it is presented, which is from a much later newspaper article, but it was a very real question at the time.

At that point, most modern states were constitutional monarchies modeled on England. Two centuries later, that question is absurd, showing the complete collapse of the iconic nation-state of the Modern Western World. No historical political or economic models will survive on a planet facing imminent diverse disasters from the climate-driven crisis, resource exhaustion…