The End of America

Would you agree that JFK's assassination was the end the America? At least, the America that is often romanticized as beautiful, free, mighty; the America invoked by naive but well-meaning Republicans? His death and the ensuing radical social change of the 60's seem to have dealt a fatal blow on the America that we once knew.

I've been doing a lot of contemplation and research about this particular view of the USA that now seems like a dimly remembered dream. A nation now fabled like a kingdom long swallowed by twilight. So easy is it to slip into "land of the free, home of the brave" when really we are not either of those anymore. Maybe I'm looking at this from a philosophical perspective though and Veeky Forums can fill me in with a more objective basis.

If it matters at all, I'm a far right libertarian that believes the Unabomber did nothing wrong: I strongly believe that humanity must dismantle the industrial system if we want to survive to 2100. And I'll disclose that I like Trump for his belligerent personage but I don't see his administration improving the nation by any significant amount. Hopefully my question and position make sense.

Other urls found in this thread:

theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/deaths-of-despair-us-jobs-drugs-alcohol-suicide
nber.org/papers/w14969
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

They've been predicting the end of America for a while now. They called the 1930'a the red decade for a reason.

It's just something that butthurt conservatives say now that they've lost the culture wars and are in a full rout. I consider myself to be something of a moderate libertarian, and I unironically see the social liberalization of society as a good thing, people are happier and more productive when they're pursuing their own interests and don't have to worry about moral busybodies barging into their bedrooms.

When you look at where all the big money is still hedging their bets on the future of the globe it's not in China, Russia, or Europe, it's right here in America.

I agree that conservatives have lost the culture war in the popular sense because that's pretty objective. Turn on the TV or radio or go to a popular site's main page and you'll get pozzed from the leftist vitriol. Certainly explains why so many conservatives are at odds with their some of their own beliefs: they're brainwashed by the schlock that's in media yet still they cling to that idealistic version of our society that only their grandparents were a part of. But these people, these commoners, aren't "in rout," aren't going away. None of them are making a decision to stop reproducing because they perceive the world negatively. It's just making them more agitated. Spend any amount of time around normals and listen to their conversations: when they say that "the world is so crazy" they mean they're fed up with leftist bullshit that's imposed on them in everything that they do. They know they're being attacked from every angle yet they don't know it explicitly.

But I strongly disagree with your view on social liberalization. Not sure where you're seeing happier, more productive, fulfilled people. Perhaps a select group that you know personally? People that I observe are more miserable than they ever have been. There seems to be this nebulous evil hanging over them that that saps all their energy and dampens their will. They speak in cliches about life being a bitch and then you die, been working for the man, hey that's just life for you, can't win for losing. Even those that I've known in years gone to be staunch optimists.

I'm talking about people between 30 - 75 with families to take care of. Not millennials that live in a cramped city apartment and who go out to bars every night. This perspective of mine is what I was talking about in my original post. All that brings me to my original post though: are we living among the cold ruins of America without being aware that it's been dead and rotting since JFK's killing?

Most people nowadays self-identify as independent. They don't want a government too far to the extreme, they want a government that functions. All it takes is a simple double-blind test and people quickly become some shade of centrist. They want bipartisanship for programs that are going to help them, the average person, and they are tired of politics being a game of whose billionaires is going to get the economy rigged for them. They don't like that Republicans are in the pockets of fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex, they don't like that Democrats are in the pockets of lawyers and celebrities, and they don't like that Wall street, AIPAC, and big Pharma give handsomely to both, and neither party would dare cross them. However, the forces of political tribalism inspire people to take a side, and that leads them to believe themselves further to one extreme on the spectrum than they actually would be, because there are those who are profiting handsomely from a divided population being pit against each other.

And no matter how you cut the mustard, it's just the cold, hard truth that people who gravitate towards creative fields tend to harbor left-wing views, it's as true a facet of their psychologies as the truth that people in government uniforms (police, firefighters, soldiers) tend to be conservative: always been that way, only now people are more sensitive to it and they're having a difficult time reconciling viewpoints because of political tribalism. You're not going to force them to change their views, all you can do is compromise with them.

>Spend any amount of time around normals and listen to their conversations: when they say that "the world is so crazy" they mean they're fed up with leftist bullshit
They're also abandoning organized religion in droves, that door swings both ways.

>People that I observe are more miserable than they ever have been.
That's because people are overworked and underpaid. Bosses are under razor-thin margins and can't afford to give larger paychecks to employees who still can't make ends meet. These are material problems with material solutions, not moral problems solved by betraying people's natural born right to pursue liberty and happiness according to the dictates of their conscious.

Republicans say tax cuts to billionaires is the silver bullet which is going to fix our society. Democrats say that more welfare is the solution. I say that reinstating Glass-Steagall, strengthening antitrust laws, and campaign finance reform is the key, because the malaise afflicting our society is the concentration of economic and political capital into fewer and fewer hands, so less people are owning their own business, nor do they have access to the capital necessary to start one. Fix that, and excessive taxation funding bloated welfare states becomes unnecessary.

And this is where I differ from orthodox libertarians: they think that free markets is something that sprinkles down on the heads of the true believers like manna from God, until that big bad government came along and started telling people what to do. I say it's the inverse, the laws create the markets, a market is only as strong as the laws and regulations sustaining it, and a "free market" describes a regulatory ideal, not something that arises from some kind of natural law. Anarchy is not freedom, anarchy is the counterfeit of freedom. Markets without laws are markets dominated by mafia families, and these are not free markets, they are conspiratorial oligarchies where the big dogs work together to stifle free and fair competition

>People that I observe are more miserable than they ever have been
So you've been visiting different eras and quantifying the happiness of their inhabitants? Impressive. You're making baseless claims about quality of life and misattributing your misperceptions to social liberalism. You could win Olympic gold with these gymnastics

Literally just google it, depression and unhappyness is soaring

The Kennedy's were a family that gained their wealth by being bootleggers and gangsters. They weren't great. They were pieces of shit that deserved no power from their ill gotten wealth.

Good post

>A nation now fabled like a kingdom long swallowed by twilight.
Camelot.

>depression
Depression rate is due to detection of it though.
>and unhappyness
Post proofs

Never said anything about the Kennedys being reputable. I was referring to the impact of the historical event of a US President being assassinated in front of his people.

I appreciate you taking the time to give me a serious reply and give your point of view.

In short, I think we agree on a lot of the same things but just see them from different directions. Hadn't considered your idea about most people really being centrists but it's logical enough. Certainly true that politics have become a team sport, even Facebook normals are aware of it now. And it's certainly true that there's a group of elites that profit from all of the division and anger. That can lead into a separate topic altogether though.

I've been a musician and writer since my early teens and I had left-wing views until I was 21. That's when I started discussing politics on Veeky Forums and learned a ton of stuff about the world that I'd always suspected. Since then I've completely flipped on the spectrum. Your observations are absolutely spot-on. Artsy types see the world through their emotions and how they wish it would be. Working people see the world through the harsh logic of reality and see it how it really it is. And again I agree that we have to find a compromise if both parts of society are ever going to get along. But look at how well that's going. If we could all be civil and understanding with one another we wouldn't be in this awful morass. Unfortunately this is another result of politics becoming a team sport.

We need the creatives to dream and we need the strong to build. Have a silly and reductive /pol/ pic while I think of my response to your other post.

>artsy types
Nope. I'm a piano prodigy, love music but my POV is extremely detailed and I use economic interests as analysis. They are always spot-on on politician ghost-companies and patrocination.

>White males are terrorists
>Is a white male

I don't...

Well user a piano prodigy is a person with actual skill. When I say "artsy types" I mean those who are loosely associated with creative hobbies and use them as their main personality trait. For example: long hair 16 yr old that can play guitar okay that doesnt want to go to church with mom and dad, college age girl that claims to be a painter and refuses to get a job because "anxiety." That sort of person.

But he's a good ally that will gladly castrate himself for the possibility of a chance that a smelly protester girl will stomp on his dick.

Until Trump, the US has been better than ever.

>because "anxiety"
Literally me. I was obsessed with music since I was a kid, yet I had an interest in math, sciences in general. I'm literally an artsy type. I understood what jazz artists were resembling with several sections of their improvisation, and I knew about it.

It's not being artsy, it's being lazy.

People have been abandoning organized religion since the beginning of the 20th century. Again, that can trail off into another topic entirely.

>people are overworked and underpaid because thin margins
Objectively true and anyone that has held a job for more than a year has probably intuited this. But I don't think any amount of reform is going to help us get out of this mess. I think it needs to be decimated; level it all and obliterate the ruins. Man has not proven capable of overcoming his greed so I think instead of time-outs we need to call the whole game off.So I disagree that anarchy is a "counterfeit of freedom" but I see where you get your perspective.

Man this thread was supposed to just be about defining historical eras.

Antitrust laws and basic regulation of financial banditry have proven effective both at creating a middle class and a strong economy.
Without keynsian economics, there is no romanticized american 40's and 50's.
Campaign finance regulation degradation has allowed elites to ensure democracy acts in their interest.
See the yale study that showed american policy was not reflective of public opinion but was in line with what wealthier people openly advocate(polls).

Society may not need a welfare state, but corporate welfare and merger-monopolization acting solely in the interest of the few won't even help the economy in aggregate. Feedback loops such as the military industrial complex aren't sustainable unless military conquest leads to a fantasy style world domination(it doesn't, nukes render military little more than boast).

>Hollywood ratings all time low
>NFL ratings all time low
>Democratic party collapsing
>Twitter scrambling to ban everyone who doesn't promote leftist narratives
>"Hitler did nothing wrong" is a normie meme

Tell me more about how the right has lost the culture war.

The right lost the culture war because they have already forfeit their moral & traditional roots in order to pursue policies that are morally indistinguishable from the mainstream left. Modern conservatism is a sham that supports little else besides the unbridled pursuit of wealth--ultimately encouraging and promoting the same forces responsible for the deterioration of the family and the degradation of the middle class.

So what's your solution? I sure hope you don't intend to save capitalism from itself like FDR did, only to have all his reforms slowly reversed in less than 100 years. Plus it was a Standford study.

Fair point to say the mainstream left and mainstream right are working for the same people. I wonder (((who)))... But I don't think that's an indication that the culture wars are over. I mean look at who the president is... He may have been cucked now, but he was not elected on the same "let's have permanent war with the middle east" platform that all other republican candidates were.

The point is that the primary disagreements between the elite left and the elite right are distributive (i.e. entitlements vs tax cuts) as opposed to moral. Both parties espouse the same gospel of material progress: increase the GDP, provide the right amount of benefits, regulate/deregulate our way to prosperity. Despite the acrimonious rhetoric, "Identity Politics" is less about a fundamental moral disagreement as political maneuvering to attain the best publicity and image.

To say the "the right is winning" begs to question 'what right?' The only right represented is the one totally divorced from any kind of historical traditional 'right-wing' that has clear and definable moral goals; who schemes instead for little else than to invigorate the corporate world at whatever cost to family, environment or tradition.

>DAT PERFECT PREPPY CHIC

Was he the most Veeky Forums POTUS?

Fuck you

I'd have to say the death of the romanticised America was the rise of suburbanism. Which led to our over-reliance on cars and our inefficient way of organising our services. But that's just me.

JFK was a sign that it was already over. The Summer of Love in '69 killed it.

Fuck off Jerry Brown. Go ruin California some more.

"Man has not proven capable of overcoming his greed"

Mans nature is unchangeable; destroying everything will lead to no utopia rising from the ruins.

I think you have to look at the economic factors that created this large boom in the 1950s, 1960s. Most of the world was recovering from complete destruction after WW2. America had virtually no competition in most industries and dominated global trade until the 1970s. You could not replicate this today with all the Keynesian economics in the world. Add in competing with the third and second world more and more for labour costs combined with rapid innovation eliminating lower middle class jobs and there is little you can do to increase wage growth for most of the population. Stealing it from the wealthy will not help either.

The basic presuppositions that would be considered incredibly revolutionary and far left some 50 years ago are the wisdom on the street in the modern age. It is quite hard to say that rapid declines in marriage rates, the emptying of churches etc is less important than a few neo nazis getting banned on twitter.

>The Left wins when society collapses.

>The right lost the culture war because they have already forfeit their moral & traditional roots in order to pursue policies that are morally indistinguishable from the mainstream left.
This is true. 40 years ago there were Democrats who were against abolishing anti-sodomy laws. and there's now plenty of Republicans (including Trump himself) who are okay with gay marriage.
That's the inherent problem of conservatism, they might be opposed to progress, but they still want to conserve the status quo, even though status quo was created by progressives of the past (homosexuality, civil rights,
The real answer is thus obviously not conservatism but reaction, not conserving the status quo, but going back. But there's almost not a single western politician in the last 100 years who was able to be successful with reactionary politics (even Hitler was pretty much just a progressive with extreme anti-semitism on top). The closest was probably Franco in Spain, and there's big nothing after him.

Innovation does not (necessarily) eliminate lower middle class jobs. Immigration and outsourcing do.

>Modern conservatism is a sham that supports little else besides the unbridled pursuit of wealth

MAKE IT STOP.

I feel my soul recoil a little when I hear normals talk about their jobs like it was a sacred and holy duty.

JFK was several years before that. If his assassination was a mortal wound, hippies were the death blow. Anyone who views it otherwise is lying to themselves.

This is literally what they want though.

>I appreciate you taking the time to give me a serious reply and give your point of view.
likewise, and thank you for keeping it civil

>but just see them from different directions.
Funny enough, my journey was the opposite of yours. When I was in college, Veeky Forums was just this shady little place where W.T. Snacks banned people for the fuck of it and CP was openly traded. I was a hardcore Ayn Rand fan in a school that was 98% conservative, and I remember being accused of being a liberal for making points like "who cares if you think homosexuality is disgusting? That's no good precedent for barging into someone's bedroom and arresting them for peacefully pursuing their own interests."

arguing from emotion is not exclusive to the left or right, it's how basic bitches discuss politics.

I reevaluated my political priorities after the crash of 2008, when even the Rand-banging Maestro himself admitted that it shouldn't have happened under traditional free market theory. It was also repeated failed nation-building in the middle east which made me realize the blind spots in Americans views towards people and government. We fancied ourselves tyrant-slayers, but all we did was create power vacuums filled by far worse individuals.

>That picture
Let me make this point with an anecdote:
>Yankee doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni
translation: dumb American poorfag thinks that a fancy hat makes him fashionable.
sound familiar? *tipping intensifies*
When the tide turned in our favor during the revolution, it was something we began singing ironically in order to troll the British.

Urban dandies and country hosses have been a part of this country since the beginning. Take away one or the other, and what you are left with is not "the United States". They are two sides of the same coin.

>People have been abandoning organized religion since the beginning of the 20th century. Again, that can trail off into another topic entirely.
But the high point of religious attendance in America was in 1984. In fact we know the precise moment when the mass exodus began: when the college of Catholic cardinals published a letter attacking Geraldine Ferraro for being pro-choice, and made religious identification a political statement. That was when women, who always made up a larger percentage of parishioners, began fleeing the churches. Evangelical churches managed to thrive and prosper by monopolizing the conservative Christian church-goers, but that was merely a consolidation, and their attendances have been plummeting in the past 15 years with very few new converts.

>Man this thread was supposed to just be about defining historical eras.
All historical eras follow the same basic principles of human psychology and economics. History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes.

> I think it needs to be decimated; level it all and obliterate the ruins.
I would refer you to my point above about nation-building in the middle east. A power vacuum is something that mafia dons fill, or the most ruthless and conniving members of society. We Americans were spoiled because of how orderly our revolution was, and Thomas Jefferson himself felt that there should be a revolution every 20 years and eagerly supported the French revolution until he saw what a shit-show it devolved into.

Nice blogpost you dumb fuck

>>Hollywood ratings all time low
Because Hollywood doesn't make movies for Americans any more: they make basic bitch movies that are easily translated for foreign markets, which is why they're still pulling in gigantic profits even as domestic attendance and ratings stagnate
>>NFL ratings all time low
Most liberals don't give a shit about sports.
>>Democratic party collapsing
That's what they said about Republicans in 2008, and the Supreme court is currently in the process of reviewing gerrymandering in this country. California's state government used to be majority Republican due to gerrymandering until they voted to adopt nonpartisan redistricting and got utterly BTFO, and Democrats have dominated since (and even brought the state back into financial solvency after years of 'governator' mismanagement)
>>Twitter
They ban people who are being openly divisive and hateful
>>"Hitler did nothing wrong"
It's been around since the early oughts. It just doesn't shock people the way it used to.

Also
>Church attendance at historic lows
>homosexuality widely seen as socially acceptable
>abortions still widely available
>"negro music" dominating top40
>being openly racist is a good way to get fired from your job
>confederate statues being taken down.
>Brownback utterly fucked Kansas with trickle-down-on-steroids

They're in a full rout, bruh.

The events during and shortly after the gilded age, including wealth inequality and the beginning of cumbersome regulations to "counter" it
Great Depression
Modernism (architectural planning)
People playing games with government power and funding conspiracy theorists dream of, the paranoid whispers that echo the few things we already knew but will never know the full extent of.

In short, we've "lost" something every now and then gradually, because despite how we're still pretty good as far as the world goes, we've shackled ourselves for corporatism and agendas that do not benefit us.

The unabomber has a few good points but is ultimately just a luddite

You are literally the most intelligent user i've ever encountered on Veeky Forums

I love you

>social liberalization of society as a good thing, people are happier and more productive when they're pursuing their own interests and don't have to worry about moral busybodies barging into their bedrooms.

I'm a former libertarian. I used to believe this.
Morality is a good thing because it leads to better lifestyles. When people abandon the old morals that disciplined their desires, they start living for pleasure and end up with worse lifestyles that make them unhappier. When left by themselves, without some kind of moral guidance, the end result for people is not happiness. It is despair.
The result of the social liberalization of the 1960/70's was not a happier society.

Take a look at this, for example (Angus Deaton is a Nobel laureate):

theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/deaths-of-despair-us-jobs-drugs-alcohol-suicide

As a libertarian, you are considering that material well being is too important for happiness. In the end, this is not really the case. There are many miserable Hollywood stars, who have great careers, financial independence, high status, etc. And there are people who live simple lives who are remarkably happy. The very belief that happiness depends that much on material well being is one of the beliefs of modernity that end up making people unhappier,

And there are also many teenagers, outside the labor force, who are miserable. More than ever, actually.

You can look at research on happiness and depression or also look at other themes related with misery, such as suicides, overdoses, etc

One interesting fact is that women are getting unhappier at a faster rate than men. And they had many "material conquests". They make more money, are more independent, have more freedoms, etc.

nber.org/papers/w14969

It wasn't so much the assassination of JFK as it was the cultural revolution in the 1960s

The society fundamentally changed and a lot of the "oppressive" glue that held 1950s America together as a coherent nation is totally gone.

Most people's interactions are now individual to individual rather than communal; the phrase "American people" is a legalistic rather than cultural or ethnic term. Its basically just a labor market.

There was something I read once that I felt made a lot of sense. That "modernism continues to live off of the capital of creeds it has rejected". Even as contemporary society abjures Christianity & its moral law as well as classic republicanism and the civic responsibilities of the citizen it still unwittingly depends on them. I think much of the contemporary cultural agitation is rooted in what is essentially an apprehension of whether or not the great liberal experiment will survive after it has exhausted the cultural prescriptions and proscriptions it was born out of.

I'm Before anyone says anything: yes, Angus Deaton considers economic forces important. I'm using the data he collected of the increase of deaths of despair to illustrate my point, not agreeing with his theory.

This reminds me of the Amy Wax controversy.

Death to america tbqhwy famiglia

t. Italian