There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the place the US will find itself in three decades, when the world finds itself celebrating New Year’s 2050. In this context, it’s been noted that Americans remain pessimistic about many aspects of life in the land of the free. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, most Americans expect income inequality to worsen over the next three decades. The majority of them say the economy will be weaker, the nation’s debt burden will be heavier, the environment will be in worse condition and healthcare will be less affordable than it is today, and it wasn’t in a particularly good place to start with.
However, it’s curious that most Americans recognize the steady decline of Washington’s influence in the world, as they believe the US will play a less important role in the world by 2050. Moreover, two-thirds predict that domestic political divisions will become more pronounced.
The research would also briefly touch upon the anxiety that US citizens share over the steady decline of moral values within society and their lack of confidence in the capabilities of local elites to overcome the challenges of tomorrow. The situation is aggravated further by the modest wage gains of the past year which failed to requite the income backlog of US households after two decades of unusually low wage growth.
Over recent years, the US media has virtually committed public suicide by spreading blatant lies, although one has to recognize that it has never been completely free or impartial before. As soon as Washington became scared of the wraith of revolting US citizens, the oligarchs in control of these media sources ordered them to defend the failing elite at all costs. However, the most disturbing part in all this is that the absolute majority of these sources swallowed the bitter pill without mounting any resistance to their superiors. Even those TV channels that would remain liberal in the past couple of decades have now turned into a mouthpiece of Western propaganda, after mocking communist journalists for the entirety of the Cold War for doing precisely the same thing.
In a fool’s race to the bottom, Western social media sites are pushing the MSM aside, while doing everything they can to silence the alternative media that had the courage for telling the uncomfortable truth, when nobody else would.
This propaganda hysteria led by bankrupt Washington elites, resulted in the media and social networks accusing Russia of using untraceable trolls for “attacking US-style democracy.” All this is nothing but a futile attempt to divert US public opinion from open discussion of the true causes of national decline driven by short-sighted US policies. As a result, both the MSM and Western social media have burned their credibility to the ground.
Much lauded American intelligence agencies, which used to make Americans proud of their law-enforcement agencies, have also joined the stupefying craze of the media. Instead of fighting internal enemies, they decided to launch a crusade against imaginable ones. As a result, the Russiangate narrative was sold to the general public as the investigation of the century. However, the overwhelming majority of crimes registered by the Mueller investigation falls into the category of misleading testimonies provoked by the investigation itself. As for the so-called Russian meddling in recent US elections, by this point it’s crystal clear for pretty much anyone that there was no such thing, as after two years of groundless accusations against Moscow a grand total of 17 US intelligence agencies have failed to present anything even remotely resembling evidence.
At the same time, Mueller hasn’t come to grips with this fact that his investigation opened a Pandora’s box, and the consequences of his actions are going to continue affecting US political life. The problem is that he revealed that American politicians see nothing wrong with selling influence for money, while offering questionable services to outside players. After all, if Saudi sheikhs can get away with doing pretty much anything, what prevents Nigerian rebels from buying total immunity in Washington? It’s no wonder that these days in the capital of the land of the brave there’s a separate street – the K Street that serves as a home for a multitude of various lobbying groups, which are steering the US political machine by fueling it with laundered cash.
But Muller’s investigation has also shown that behind the veil of the restoration of McCarthyism and the massive anti-Russian hysteria in America there was a much more sinister agenda. All this Russia-bashing was nothing but a carefully placed smokescreen aimed at concealing the true meddler in the most recent presidential election – Ukraine. As a matter of fact, this country sold most of its national wealth in hopes of buying enough influence in Washington to get away with promoting its Nazi ideology. It’s no wonder that Trump would state on Twitter that:
As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.
The most curious aspect of all this is that as American politicians are gaining a reputation as cheats that would carry on their anti-social endeavors no matter what, of this blatant lie of the ruling political elite and the antisocial policies of the authorities, the concept of socialism gradually entrenches itself in the minds of the American youth. This fact was revealed by the results of a public opinion poll conducted by the Harris Poll research agency, that revealed half of all millennials and representatives of the Z generation (people born from 1995 onwards) would like to live in a socialist state!
Against this background it’s hardly surprising that The Washington Post would run an article stating the United States is edging closer to a civil war. And although some analysts would describe such evaluations as extreme, the absolute majority of Americans are capable of recognizing where their problems originate from. There’s an avid decline in confidence in the democratic institutions of the country, especially in a situation when the federal government is basically at war with itself. According to Freedom House, last year would be associated with the fastest erosion of America’s own democratic standards more than at any other time in history.
According to the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Victor Davis Hanson:
We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife.
However, the saddest part of all this is that faced with the prospects of a new civil war erupting in the US, the current political elite of the United States can launch yet another war of aggression against a sovereign state under some dubious pretext. And Venezuela looks like a prime target these days.
But the most likely course of action is an attempt to launch a war on Tehran that would be advertised as a “necessary step in defense of Israel.” This explains Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, followed by the announcement that Washington wants to hand over the Golan Heights to Tel-Aviv.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.
