This is What Imperial Collapse Looks Like

Price tag of a US mayor: $90 million. Meanwhile, the Party of Government Sachs gets clobbered.

To anyone with a functioning neural cortex, all this is utterly unsurprising. Conservativism and regression are the hallmarks of every dying market-based Empire, from 16th century Spain to 17th century Netherlands, all the way to post-Victorian Britain. In each case, all the social, economic, political and cultural factors which unwittingly conspired to forge a given Empire, turn at a certain point against that Empire.

Odd as it sounds, the closest geopolitical parallel to the US decline isn't Victorian Britain, but Russia's post-Soviet collapse. So far, Obama has followed the Gorbachev script of catastrophic dithering to the letter. The US has -- and the USSR had -- Federal superstructures pinned down by severe military-industrial overstretch; declining local state capacity (the fiscal collapse of California and New York, versus the collapse of state authority throughout the former USSR), and a disastrous occupation of Afghanistan. The only difference is that Obama's team is rebranding the assets of a dead banking system, where Gorbachev's team rebranded dead party-state dogmas (or maybe the equivalent is the Chubais privatizations, when the oligarchs plundered Russia's energy and mineral resources).

I've written elsewhere that there would be a three-month window at the beginning of Obama's term for mildly progressive legislation. This window has now closed. No card check, no health reform worthy of the name, no real banking re-regulation.

In place of those things, I fully expect the Dems to institute a major austerity drive beginning next year, and to be thoroughly thrashed at the 2010 polls -- we're talking possibly losing the Senate -- which will lead to more austerity, etc.

It's not the end of the world. The BRICs will pick up where the US left off, and the EU has finally figured out that it is indeed a genuine superpower. The semi-peripheries and the new metropoles will get the world economy humming again, and the US will bump along in tow, like the derelict supertanker it indeed is.