Thoughts on the 'fundamental restructuring of the American Empire'

The American soft power model became an extensive welfare programme for liberal arts, politics and law graduates.

It’s been a head-swivelling few weeks, hasn't it? Daring and unprecedented moves coming from the Trump administration like rat-a-tat-tat gunfire. But unlike the madness of the Biden regime, these moves look like the grown up, real world, hard consequences of decades of spoiled neoliberal posturing.

And so it was with the news that USAID was being shut down. I’ll admit, like many of my deeply disillusioned and a little bit traumatised former liberal-left peers, I felt a shiver of schadenfreude rush down my spine. We have been radicalised by a tsunami of life-destroying policies from well-intentioned (? lol not really) bureaucrats, and so we are not sorry to see an agency go to the wall.

But then I thought about it for a moment, and I realised that my feelings on this momentous change in the western professional managerial class are more complicated than just unmitigated glee.

USAID, as you probably know, was an agency founded by President John F. Kennedy, back in those idealistic days of American Camelot and young Boomers. It grew to be an absolute behemoth with a $50 billion budget, sending money to every corner of the world, with the ostensible aim of ‘long-term socio economic development.’ But really it was providing cover for nefarious American foreign policy machinations and it was accountable to no one.

It seems that pretty much the entire staff (over 10,000 people) has been terminated, employees stationed overseas in its over 100 foreign offices have been immediately recalled, and its website and X account were taken down.

As usual Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Online Freedom, had the most nuanced and deep analysis. He told Bannon’s War Room that the Trump administration was essentially ‘performing open heart surgery” on American foreign policy norms that have been respected for four generations. He called it the fundamental restructuring of the American Empire.

Social media has been awash in examples of terrible USAID programmes — ranging from the simply foolish to the downright dystopian. A brake absolutely had to be put on out-of-control American bureaucratic foot soldiers acting like the entire world was just another neighbourhood to be gentrified for the girlies and the gays; while doing the bidding of Machiavellian power players in the deepest corners of the Deep State.

But I can’t help but recognise, had my life gone in a different direction, I might have been one of the shocked and upset apparatchiks who find themselves suddenly unemployed. I cannot overstate the importance of USAID-type organisations to people in my general demographic — college educated, worldly but idealistic, and wanting to make a difference.

Photo credit: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/usaid-elon-musk-trump-shutdown-b2692984.html

There was a time in my life when a job for an agency like USAID would have seemed to me to be a dream come true. Cards on the table: in my before life, I tried and failed to get hired at the US State Department, NATO, Interpol, a few different US embassies, and the United Nations. And probably others that I am forgetting now. I spent about a decade under the weight of real grief at my failure to ascend the ranks of the professional managerial class. For many university educated people of my generation, the Holy Grail is an interesting government job, ideally overseas for a few years, with great paid time off and work-life balance. The ones who achieved that now face its professional extinction. Turns out, I feel kinda bad for them.

What are these people — possibly millions of them — going to do? I know there is billionaire money out there laundered through foundations, and I’m sure the neoliberal establishment will find a way to regroup. But be that as it may, three generations of people were told: to go to university, get into debt if you have to, and you will find rewarding work for the rest of your life. That turned out to be a lie. For a great analysis on this, I recommend Benjamin Studebaker, who writes about the ‘rump’ professionals — the ones who made it onto the ladder, barely; and the ‘fallen professionals,’ the ones who didn’t. There are a lot more fallen professionals today than there were a few months ago.

The terrible reality for people of my generation is that institutions many of us once longed to work for have absolutely engineered their own professional demise. My former professor Mike Rainsborough just published an extensive analysis of this professional capture, which he compares to Communist Eastern Europe. A place in which adherence to the prevailing order was enforced, not through Stalinist terror campaigns, but coercive control and a system that incentivised you to play along by offering — or taking away — status. Quoting from Václav Havel, he writes “The system, as a consequence, promoted only banality and the cult of ‘right thinking mediocrity.’” Employees knew their world depended on carrying out the assignment: “Confirm the system, fulfil the system, [be] the system.”

In a nutshell, the American soft power model has transmogrified into an extensive welfare programme for liberal arts, politics and law graduates. And while this is obviously a bad thing on the whole, it is part of a larger problem and that is: the massive over-production of college educated cultural elites.

This cannot be indulged any longer. The United States debt burden is simply too catastrophically large, its foreign entanglements leave it too overextended. It’s working class is decimated. I wish the progressives and the liberals could recognise this fact, but instead they continue to pretend they are all starring as resistance fighters in a World War 2 remake in which Trump is the new Hitler who personally wants to see children starving in Africa. The only way to make these people grow up is for Mommy and Daddy MAGA to take away their allowance.