What we are witnessing is unprecedented
The Almanac guide to the latest American Revolution
We observe history from a moving platform that constantly changes our perspective. While it was happening, the 2011 “Arab Spring” seemed like it would usher permanent political change to the region. What actually emerged was something altogether less spectacular.
The media’s role in narrating that history — live as its happening — is fraught. They are, after all, sitting with us on the same moving platform of the present. Ostensibly, they have better seats, but that makes them an impediment as much as anything else. We have to crane our necks to see round. (Not everyone will want to try. Some will take their word for it.)
The historian, sitting at the back of the platform, has the grandest view. All of history recedes before them. Staring into the long sunset, they know its lessons better than us. But they do not have any better view of the future than we do.
I started The End of the World Almanac to help us understand our historical moment, a moment where the platform is picking up speed. History, like evolution, does not proceed at a steady pace. It never stops moving forward, but it often does so in fits. We are living through one of those fits, more important even than 9/11 or the Second Iraq War or the financial crisis or COVID because what is changing is the mechanism that determines whether or how all of those things happen.
Or not. Like the Arab Spring, it’s possible that what comes out of this turmoil is something not all that different than what went in. But that’s what makes it so exciting to witness. None of us — not the narrators, not the historians — knows how this will end.
If things are going reasonably well for you (or if you are strongly deferential to authority), all this turmoil won’t seem worth it. But there are a lot of people — and an increasing number of them, whole communities even — whose fortunes have been declining steadily for a while, and for them turmoil is a chance for change.
If this frustrates you, consider that these people have been consistently asking for change without turmoil since at least 2008. (Despite their obvious differences, the Occupy movement and the Tea Party had a lot in common.) All economic protests have been told to sit down. The economy is great. Or at least the best it can be. Your struggle isn’t real. Or if it is, it’s your fault. Or if it’s not your fault, the international order is just too big and too important to alter.
When, in 2016, the Panama Papers revealed widespread corruption and tax evasion and linked wealthy political figures, business leaders, and sports stars to organized crime, then-President Obama gave a press conference where he basically shrugged. I watched it. Those things weren’t technically illegal, he explained, and so nothing could be done.
After the Second World War, the US had the only major industrial economy not blown to smithereens. Under the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation, America built a vast sphere of influence that some have called an empire. (If so, it’s a funny empire.)
All empires are basically state-level protection rackets, where local leaders trade tribute for some ill-defined security. Sometimes in a protection racket, the people you are being “protected” from are the racketeers themselves — in the sense of “Pay me or I’ll break your legs.” But other times, there really is a rival gang, and you are paying to stay out of a mess.
The American empire promised to protect you from the Soviet empire. This was not always true or desirable, but it was the justification. Vast markets were opened, which we could rapidly supply.
The American people tolerated this because it benefited them. It meant jobs and an ever-increasing standard of living where, as long as you kept your head down and your nose clean, you could be reasonably assured that you would do better than your parents and your children would do better than you.
That is no longer the case. The younger generations now are the first in American history to do worse than the ones before. There are many reasons for this, and I’m oversimplifying, but in general, this is because the Soviet empire went away and with it the justification for tribute at the same time other countries rebuilt or industrialized (think Japan and China) such that America no longer held a consistent competitive advantage.
Under this erosion, imperial elites, who always benefited most from “empire,” maintained their wealth by taking a larger and larger share of the tribute. They did this not by growing the economy, as under Manifest Destiny, but by cutting costs — offshoring industry, importing cheaper goods and labor, etc. Note how Western business didn’t start investing heavily in China until a decade or so after the Berlin Wall fell.
This is reflected in the economic data. After a period of explosive growth, real wages have been effectively stagnant for decades. The middle class has shrunk, even as a greater and greater share of households survive on two incomes rather than one (meaning families are pedaling twice as fast and still sinking).
In short: For the last 30 years, imperial elites have continued to benefit from “empire” while the American people increasingly have not.
Empires have to be administered. Local intelligence has to be gathered. Bribes have to be made and tribute collected. All of it has to be kept secret. That requires personnel. Personnel also have to be paid. Their security status has to be approved and monitored. And so on.
America had had intelligence services before World War I, but they were typically attached to the military and were always short-lived. In 1917, three weeks after we declared war on Germany, we created the Black Chamber (officially: the Cable and Telegraph Section), and it survived all the way to 1929.
It wasn’t until after World War II that we created a permanent state security apparatus. This wasn’t because of the existence of threats. There had always been threats, including from the Soviet Union specifically (as well as the Nazis) in the 1930s. Rather, it was because of nuclear war. No prior threat could destroy us instantly. We could no longer wait until the onset of hostilities, as we did with the Black Chamber. We had to know in advance.
The post-war order and the state security services are the exact same mechanism. There is no distinction. Some of it, like NATO and the UN, is visible. Most of it is not.
It wasn’t just that the Cold War was cold and intelligence services have to operate in darkness. It was that America wasn’t an empire in the traditional sense. The fraction of the earth that it directly administered (outside its borders) was minuscule — Guam, the US Virgin Islands, Bikini Atoll. We conquered Japan and West Germany and South Korea, but as with the Philippines, we did not keep them.
But we kept a kind of indirect control over things that were important to us. And of course there was the matter of tribute. We weren’t doing all of this for free. But if we didn’t have vassal states, they couldn’t simply cut us a check. There had to be another mechanism.
These mechanisms are often exceedingly dark, complicated, and not easy to summarize, but they all involve the movement of value (not always money) in ways that are not easy to discern — although any good spy novel will give you an idea.
Under the American imperial system, money went OUT to secure economic and strategic interests. Does a certain country have exploitable natural resources, for example, and if so, where exactly? There have been enough geologic surveys by now that these days we typically know, but that wasn’t necessarily the case in, say, Africa in 1965, where there may not even be roads to the area in question.
To answer it, the US Army Corps of Engineers can’t simply land in a helicopter. Instead, a certain non-governmental organization (NGO) with an innocuous sounding name, like the Institute for International Cooperation, will receive a grant from a US government agency with an equally innocuous sounding name, like the National Endowment for Democracy. The NGO will in turn award a part of that grant to the geology department of a very respectable university (and keep the rest.) The very respectable geology department will send a very respected geologist to the wilds of Africa on the pretenses of A) advancing scientific knowledge of the globe and B) fostering local development.
You get the idea. By the end of the story, an American company will be in that country pulling those resources out of the ground for the major benefit of wealthy Americans. But they’ll hire some locals, so the grant will be stamped: SUCCESS.
Of course, now that we have secured an economic interest in the country, it’s very important to keep the communists out. Also, we want to make sure the local leaders don’t get any crazy ideas about actually owning their own country’s natural resources, so different government agencies with very peaceful names will give different grants, and suddenly there will be all kinds of Americans (or American-aligned people) in-country to promote children’s health or women’s rights or something so wonderful no one could ever possibly object, monies for which flow through the imperial mechanism.
Money coming in also has to be distributed, and it works a similar way. A teacher’s union, for example, might partner with another NGO which has received a grant from the Department of Education. Separately, the teacher’s union might buy 150,000 copies of a certain politician’s book to hand out to their members. That of course immediately propels the book to the top of the bestseller list, which generates vast additional sales. (To be fair, the book might even be half-decent since it will have been ghost-written by a professional author.)
Did the union buy the book because the politician supports teacher’s issues or does she support teacher’s issues because they bought the book? All we know for sure is that the grant the union received will be more than the cost of the books, although it might not look that way. The books might have been purchased at an undisclosed discount which the publisher logs as a tax write-off. Everybody wins — except for the people, who paid for the grant with their taxes and who might’ve also bought the book because it was on the bestseller list.
The point is simply this: Both money in (tribute, kickbacks) and money out (bribes, payoffs) have to be distributed by means indistinguishable from organic transactions. Everyone involved has to benefit but in a way that looks like they might’ve earned it. That requires a large, organized, well-funded bureaucratic mechanism.
In 1950, this system was comparatively small. By 2025, it has ballooned outside anyone’s full comprehension.
What we are presently witnessing — if it does not end up like the Arab Spring — is nothing short of the dismantling of the post-WWII system. Given that it was created as a response to the Soviet threat, a threat that hasn’t existed for 30 years, it’s probably overdue. I mean, did we really think in the ’90s that history was over? Like, nothing would ever change ever again?
I admit that I am in favor of some kind of change. That doesn’t mean I support everything that’s happening. But it is certainly the case that the people fighting against change are NOT offering an alternative vision. They are the major beneficiaries of the post-WWII status quo administered by a bureaucratic mechanism that long outlived its reason for being and which survives not just on taxes but ENORMOUS public debt. They have taken even from the future.
Regardless of where you’d like to see the country go, it isn’t 1950, or even 1980, or even 2010. It’s 2025, and history is back. We should not be fighting for the mechanism. It would’ve collapsed before long anyway. We should be fighting for what replaces it.
