A house of cards

Or: shut up already.

On the 23rd of March 1933 the Weimar republic fell, having lasted less than 15 years.

It was born in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war: a war most Germans believed they were winning until the collapse of 1918. For the entire existence of the Weimar republic Germany was subject to punitive reparations by the victors of that war which had terrible economic effects. At the end of 1922 a loaf of bread cost about 160 marks: by late 1923 it was around 200 billion marks. At various times people in Germany were starving.

After the hyperinflation was tamed the economy limped along for a while, still under the pressure of reparations, until it was hit by the fallout from the stock market crash on the 24th of October 1929 and the ensuing great depression.

Things went rapidly downhill from there. For its entire existence the Weimar republic was being hit by people with sledgehammers, and it eventually fell apart as a result.

It’s not yet clear that democracy in the USA died on the 20th of January 2025, but at the very least it has been severely wounded. Perhaps it will recover. Perhaps. Let’s assume it will not, because the odds don’t look good.

What terrible external pressure caused this collapse? America is rich, although not as rich as it thinks it is, having a median household wealth lower than, for instance, the UK. But rich. It has not experienced a cataclysmic war since 1865. There has been no hyperinflation, there has been no economic depression that compares with the events of the early 1930s. America is still prosperous. There has, in fact, been no external cause at all.

Instead a large number of people seem to have somehow lost their minds and fallen victim to a morass of overlapping conspiracy theories. I suppose this has happened as a result of poor education combined with the deliberate weaponisation of political argument by social media companies. This isn’t helped by America’s long-standing infection by a cult which its adherents call ‘Christianity’. It’s not Christianity.

To make things worse, the reason median wealth is so low is that a huge proportion of the wealth of the country is in the hands of a minute number of plutocrats, many of them the owners of the social media companies. The plutocrats have all the money. The thing to understand about plutocrats is that all they care about is accruing more wealth and power: you don’t get to be a plutocrat unless you are a ruthless financial parasite. What sort of politics do you think these people like? The sort that gives them more money and power at any cost.

These plutocrats have inevitably fallen prey to rockstar syndrome. This is what happens to young men¹ who bargain some small talent into great wealth, becoming socially isolated but for armies of unquestioning groupies and people whose jobs depend on telling them only what they want to hear and ensuring their every demand is met. It traditionally ends with expensive cars in swimming pools, followed by exclusive rehab clinics and death. Remove almost all the base talent and multiply the money by three orders of magnitude and you have a techbro plutocrat. Worse, the techbro plutocrats, despite believing themselves very gods, are not terribly smart, and have fallen prey to the lies and conspiracies spread by their own platforms.

So now you have a group of rather stupid but very rich and powerful financial parasites who think they are godlike geniuses, believe in various idiot conspiracy theories and are exclusively interested in making themselves more rich and powerful at any cost to anyone else, including destroying the system that supports them. They’re not smart enough to have learned what tends to happen in countries where the parasitic wealthy push things too far: it tends to involve guillotines.

These are internal, not external, causes, and are things that the government could have dealt with at any point in the last half-century, but chose not to. Now it has, itself, been captured by a narcissistic, senile, fascist, supported by the plutocrats, some of them now play-acting as nazis.

Americans like to go on, at great length, about how unique and special their political system is, how the ‘checks and balances’ mean it can never fail, how America prizes liberty and equality (well, if you’re white, and male) above all other nations. How it was right and proper for them to export their magnificent system to other countries, even if that meant killing large numbers of people and then, conveniently, leaving when things got too hard.

Well, American democracy has just failed, eight years after someone started seriously trying to destroy it: all that triumphalist crowing was just the bullshit it always seemed to be.

The only thing unique or special about the American political system was how unique and special Americans thought it was. Well, they can shut up now, because nobody ever wants to hear their self-aggrandising noise ever again. Seriously: just shut the fuck up already.