Interestingly (or perhaps not), I read the word “destabilitzing” in the title as “US is causing instability in other places” rather than “US is in the process of becoming less stable”.
I don’t actually disagree, but you could easily set the starting point much earlier than 1989. Riots in the 60s, Vietnam war failure and reaction to it, and Watergate are all likely contributors to the overall decline of belief in legitimacy of government. I also suspect the trend is worldwide, not just the US.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the trust and legitimacy that seems to have held earlier in history was ACTUALLY legitimate. There were large parts of the population seriously dienfranchised, poverty was common and much deeper than today, and it seems to have been common belief that the class and race disparities were God-given correct expectations. I find it easy to believe that things are unstable BECAUSE the stability we used to have was based on a bad equilibrium.
you could easily set the starting point much earlier than 1989.
OP is not asserting that the current period of instability started in 1989: his reference to that year is his (too concise?) way of saying that if the Soviet Union could suddenly unravel, it could happen here.
IMHO the current period of instability started about 10 years ago. Occupy Wall Street happened in 2011, and although it got a decent amount of press (and the most dissatisfied elements of society hoped that it would be start of a broader upturning of society) it had almost no effect on the broader society. Moreover, the mere fact that the more radical parts of the press put so much of their hope into it is a sign that in 2011 there was actually no hope for radical change.
In other words, I’m taking Occupy as evidence of stability: radical journalists are pretty smart as a group, so if the only thing they can find to write about is Occupy, that is a strong sign that there’s actually no hope at present of radical change.
George Friedman says that the US undergoes intervals of unrest about every 60 years. The previous period of unrest IMO ended about 1973, the year when the US military completely withdrew from Vietnam. Remember that during the previous period of unrest, there was an organization (the Weather Underground) of at least 1000 members actively trying to overthrow the US government using riots and bombs.
During the period from 1973 to about 2013, which I claim was a period of stability, the professionals that run election campaigns learned that conservative Christians could be harnessed as a powerful voting bloc because they’re “well organized” (i.e., can be effectively led by church leaders) and of course the liberals reacted against that (successfully, IMO) in what is usually called the Culture Wars, but IIRC the Culture Wars never went beyond words and votes whereas the 2020 BLM protests had a few politically-motivated killings, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the trust and legitimacy that seems to have held earlier in history was ACTUALLY legitimate
I mean, is it ever? All countries have good and bad sides; a country is not a person, it contains multitudes, and is under no obligation to have a single coherent moral code or personality. It has at best vague guidelines, often contradictory ones. Trust and legitimacy are often the result of focusing on some aspects rather than others. It would be bad to be completely blind to the negative sides of a country, but I also feel that utterly cynical “everything is rotten” thinking often tends to lead to nothing good. Yeah, supposedly the criticism is meant as a first step to improving things, but very often it actually never really gets to that part (also because once you’re too trained at rationalising why Things Are Bad you’ll find that every proposed solution is also Bad in some way). No sense of proportion leads to absurdities like arguing that the war in Ukraine is pointless because the US are as bad as Russia and it’s just two imperialistic powers dishing it out, no asymmetry, no way to tell which side is more right. That’s actually fairly nihilistic.
Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.
Interestingly (or perhaps not), I read the word “destabilitzing” in the title as “US is causing instability in other places” rather than “US is in the process of becoming less stable”.
I don’t actually disagree, but you could easily set the starting point much earlier than 1989. Riots in the 60s, Vietnam war failure and reaction to it, and Watergate are all likely contributors to the overall decline of belief in legitimacy of government. I also suspect the trend is worldwide, not just the US.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the trust and legitimacy that seems to have held earlier in history was ACTUALLY legitimate. There were large parts of the population seriously dienfranchised, poverty was common and much deeper than today, and it seems to have been common belief that the class and race disparities were God-given correct expectations. I find it easy to believe that things are unstable BECAUSE the stability we used to have was based on a bad equilibrium.
OP is not asserting that the current period of instability started in 1989: his reference to that year is his (too concise?) way of saying that if the Soviet Union could suddenly unravel, it could happen here.
IMHO the current period of instability started about 10 years ago. Occupy Wall Street happened in 2011, and although it got a decent amount of press (and the most dissatisfied elements of society hoped that it would be start of a broader upturning of society) it had almost no effect on the broader society. Moreover, the mere fact that the more radical parts of the press put so much of their hope into it is a sign that in 2011 there was actually no hope for radical change.
In other words, I’m taking Occupy as evidence of stability: radical journalists are pretty smart as a group, so if the only thing they can find to write about is Occupy, that is a strong sign that there’s actually no hope at present of radical change.
George Friedman says that the US undergoes intervals of unrest about every 60 years. The previous period of unrest IMO ended about 1973, the year when the US military completely withdrew from Vietnam. Remember that during the previous period of unrest, there was an organization (the Weather Underground) of at least 1000 members actively trying to overthrow the US government using riots and bombs.
During the period from 1973 to about 2013, which I claim was a period of stability, the professionals that run election campaigns learned that conservative Christians could be harnessed as a powerful voting bloc because they’re “well organized” (i.e., can be effectively led by church leaders) and of course the liberals reacted against that (successfully, IMO) in what is usually called the Culture Wars, but IIRC the Culture Wars never went beyond words and votes whereas the 2020 BLM protests had a few politically-motivated killings, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl
I mean, is it ever? All countries have good and bad sides; a country is not a person, it contains multitudes, and is under no obligation to have a single coherent moral code or personality. It has at best vague guidelines, often contradictory ones. Trust and legitimacy are often the result of focusing on some aspects rather than others. It would be bad to be completely blind to the negative sides of a country, but I also feel that utterly cynical “everything is rotten” thinking often tends to lead to nothing good. Yeah, supposedly the criticism is meant as a first step to improving things, but very often it actually never really gets to that part (also because once you’re too trained at rationalising why Things Are Bad you’ll find that every proposed solution is also Bad in some way). No sense of proportion leads to absurdities like arguing that the war in Ukraine is pointless because the US are as bad as Russia and it’s just two imperialistic powers dishing it out, no asymmetry, no way to tell which side is more right. That’s actually fairly nihilistic.
Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.
I think “The US is becoming less stable” is a better title, probably.