America today feels like the last days of the Soviet Union

Umair Haque (previously) writes about how the last days of the Soviet Union were filled with "forced apathy" (an inability to care about what was going on because just surviving took everything you had) and "self-referentialism" (an obsession with domestic affairs to the exclusion of everything else going on elsewhere in the world)

Haque also remembers those days for the "one party rule" and notes that while the US is dominated by a single party (one that cheated its way into control over the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court and many state governments), it is technically a two-party system, but any Democrat who offers real progressive policies is marginalized and backstabbed by the Democratic establishment.

Other similarities include "power seeking" or structural corruption (think of the establishment's refusal to enact popular programs like universal health care or network neutrality) and the silencing of dissenting voices and the lack of a real public discourse on the failings of capitalism and the ways that other countries solve their problems.

Friends across the world often ask me: why dont Americans do more to fix their crumbling society? Theyre aghast, astonished. I tell them the reality of American life: Americans would, if they could, but they cant, mostly. Apathy is forced on them by a predatory kind of capitalism that forces them to live something like poor people in a rich country. Breadlinesinsulin lineswhats the difference, really? Americans are forced into being apathetic, weary, drained of energy and ideas and time, by a fatally broken political economy which makes them more and more of them live at the edge of ruin, more and more so every daybut that forced apathy, my friends, is the kind of trap that has led societies throughout history to collapse, whether the USSR or Rome.