So what we did there with the "real GDP" graph was subtract out the price portion of the value of goods. That graph basically shows that America makes cheaper stuff than it used to. It says nothing about what we make.

So could it be that instead of making 1000 high tech jobbies, we make 1000 packs of chewing gum?

Please explain so I'm not totally sunk in utter bullshit.

Jesus, you're in a lot of pain, aren't you?

Yes, but I don’t see a route to hyper inflation in NATO countries. — Punshhh

You don't? The US is at full employment. As labor demands higher wages, capital has a choice: raise prices or take a hit. So they raise prices.

That was already happening before the oil shock. Doesn't that situation look unstable to you?

I think in this World many countries can be "nationalist", but yet participate in international cooperation. It doesn't have to go in hand in hand with American liberalism (free markets, individual freedom etc.) — ssu

Sure. And in general, he wasn't saying that all countries are headed to being post-modern, although he says America will tend to influence some countries in that direction.

But he says that when Britain became post-agricultural, it had the effect of increasing the agricultural output of the countries that hadn't industrialized, because Britain became a bigger consumer of their products.

In the same way, the US, by being post-industrial, increases the production of cou tries that are still industrial. In 1992, he was thinking of Japan and Germany. Obviously China is in that role now.

So a country doesn't have to fit the American model to participate in the UN or the IMF, but American liberalism is the platform for those entities.

I guess I'm left wondering if China will eventually embrace liberalism enough to take on that central role in the global economy, or if it's native nationalism will make it turn more inward.

Agreed, like the high inflation in Russia in the late 1990’s to bring it back on topic. — Punshhh

It already was on topic Punshhh. The oil shock is expected to continue and worsen. This means the West is hurting Russia at the cost of hurting itself, which is something Putin spoke of.

So he knows, even if some of us are clueless.

The radical right isn't new. They have phased in and out of importance ever since Reconstruction. Think of the KKK and the late 19th century authors of the Jim Crow laws; think of the violent reaction to the labor movement; think of Father Coughlin (an odd-ball fascist in the 1930s), think of Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and so on and so forth. They tend to be hateful bastards, and they have a much larger base than the sad left, which might fill up a good sized church if they all got together in one place. — Bitter Crank

So they aren't a sign of national disintegration. Kurth might have been exaggerating.

Forgive me, then. As your OP was called 'the post-modern state', I thought it might have been. — Wayfarer

The OP references an article written by a professor of political science. I mentioned that in the OP.

It's not about postmodernism, and television has been central to American politics since Kennedy.

Well this is one of various 'official stories' available about geopolitics that you can accept or reject, — Tom Storm

Well I've never heard it before, so I guess I'm out of the loop.

Wasn't Trump ultimately good for corporations? — Tom Storm

I honestly don't understand why everybody on this forum is fixated on corporations. Corporations are for raiding. It's all about finance now.

We have a highly cohesive political class which reinforces the power of the bureaucracy — Bitter Crank

Is it cohesive? Maybe it depends on how you assess Trump. Is he an anomaly? Or a representative of the part of America that truly believes Democrats have been infiltrated by baby eating alien reptiles?

And that's not a joke.

It not only takes time to judge events, it takes time for events to happen. — Bitter Crank

:up:

Americans just assumed that this new prosperity would transform China also, just like the Fukuyama's argument wen — ssu

I also found this interesting in Kurt's article:

"Liberalism can provide a common ground, a least common denominator, for many states in one international organization in a way that nationalism, by its nature, cannot.“

Liberalism creates a motive for reaching out to the rest of the world with organizations like the UN and the IMF. Plus there's a moral imperative to spreading democracy from an American point of view. To admit that people in the middle east don't want or need democracy seems either insulting or it's a betrayal of middle eastern women, gays, etc.

And so there's an inevitable clash between a culture that isn't good at being a nation-state vs. cultures that know a kind of nationalism that Americans don't really have for lack of the religious, ethnic, or even linguistic unity to pass for a nation.

Is any of that true?

I meant high inflation.

Sure. He would say the ever-waning commitment of Americans to foreign wars is a side effect of diminished national cohesion.
— frank

Wouldn't that be due to an increased national cohesion? If a broken up cohesion, there would be too many counter parties that would disagree with foreign interventions. Its expensive and costly to the citizens. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. I'm not sure a nation with low cohesion could continue to support such a foreign war with the changes in elected officials — Philosophim

Yes, but

"Observers have argued that the mission in Afghanistan was hampered by a lack of agreement on objectives, a lack of resources, lack of coordination, too much focus on the central government at the expense of local and provincial governments, and too much focus on the country instead of the region.[541]". - Here

This isn't how the British handled these things. Americans tend to go in clueless, win dramatically, commit a few war crimes, then it all falls apart. That's what Kursh means by "post-modern“

I'm quite sure I'm missing something or not understanding the full context. — Philosophim

I think he was ultimately just whining about American education. I love patterns, though, and the one he provided was intriguing.

As of the modern day, the United States aggressively uses its military for regime change as well as deterrence. Iraq and Afghanistan were not acts of deterrence. — Philosophim

Sure. He would say the ever-waning commitment of Americans to foreign wars is a side effect of diminished national cohesion.

would re-read the history of the founding of America. America was so divided and multi-cultural that we initially had the articles of confederation which granted extreme power to the states with an incredibly weak federal government. The reason for this was the identities between the states, (And the political elections within the states) were so different from one another. America has always been a multi-cultural and non-cohesive political entity. If you read history, there are constant struggles and debates on how the country should be run over time. — Philosophim

You're basically agreeing with Kurth that the US is an example of federalism. It's not much of a nation-state.

but the last two decades have shown something else. Americans loosing the war in Afghanistan shows the obvious limits of the tech approach to war and it's obvious perils, how it can all go wrong. — ssu

Right. Kurth would say that points to one of the many limitations of being post-modern. If you can't deal with a problem with missiles and drones, you may ultimately just give up and go home.

But I think you're right that his categories are kind of contrived. The perfect nation-state, always patriotically committed at the grass roots level to military endeavors, is an idealized figure. Even the British weren't always like that.

Now this is the more interesting line with Kurth. But let's start from the basics: Francis Fukuyama was (and still is) an idiot, so let's forget the "End of History" bullshit. — ssu

Why do you think that?

Kurth argues that the real fight will be inside America with "multiculturalism vs conservatism". — ssu

I don't think that's what he meant. I think he was saying that acting as a nation-state (so having a cohesive political class) has always been a challenge for America because it's so big and it's basically the world in microcosm.

He's saying the US was only a nation-state for a few decades, and it ended with WW2. Since then, he's saying it's been post-modern, which is clearly not a good thing in his view. He ends with the conclusion that the American education system needs to be improved to keep America from sinking further into illiteracy.

The reason this is interesting to me is that I accidentally saw a portion of a Fox News broadcast and it was a little shocking how stupid the comments being made were. It actually sounded a lot like the stupider streams of thought that get vomited up on this forum. I'd heard that Fox was getting worse, but I didn't realize how much.

I was interested in whether Kurth might be right: that the American culture is going through disintegration that can manifest as a lack of coherent foreign policy. What do you think?

:lol:

now completely broken - unlike it was in the 70s - and the US is a dying Empire so will do what it takes to prioritize its global reach over what is still seen as short term pain. — Streetlight

Their global reach is intact at the moment. The oil shock is expected to worsen, especially if the Chinese stop acting like they just discovered Covid19.

Capitalists hate inflation. How do you not know that?

Yea that's ridiculous

Nope. It decreases return on investment. Everybody's paying off their mortgages because wages are unusually high right now, and inflation makes that easier.

Nope. It's causing inflation. That's not good.

The article was written in 1992. I was just exercising his ideas with Trump in mind.

I'll get back when I have more time and have digested your comments. Thanks!

Kurth wrote this article in 1992. His view then was that one of the main factors undermining the US's status as a cohesive nation is media enterprises that turned the American society into a multicultural audience.

Thus the world never knows what its going to get from the US. We see the US leading a war of sanctions on Russia to try to force it to stop its invasion of Ukraine, but if Trump had won, the US would be cheering Putin on. Per Kurth, this is a sign of a loss of nationhood which is expressed as no clear foreign policy.

I don't know if you have access to jstor, but there's a good article on there called The Post-Modern State, by James Kurth

I'm no expert, but I've read enough history to know NOS4A2 hasn't. — ZzzoneiroCosm

:up:

:grin:

Talking about the US government and industry, in 2001 there was an anti-trust case against Microsoft which echoed another such case in 1984, which famously broke up the "Bell System.". The fact that nobody today even knows what a Bell System is testifies to the occasionally extremely antagonistic relationship between the US government and American corporations.

In other countries, like Japan, that relationship is totally different, with government doing its utmost to protect and accommodate industry.

The situation in America reflects a bloody labor movement and an astonishingly successful American left. Those days are gone, though.

Today, financial institutions are at the core of the US economy, not manufacturing. The story is all about Wall St.

That's my 10 second phone history. :razz:

Oh good.

Schopenhauer said there's no solution period. I think that's correct.

It's just an intro-post. You'll have to fill in the blanks with your own research.

From United Fruit to Rex Tillerson (read: Exxon) et al, big business is very much a part of the revolving door. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I was just commenting that "big business" usually refers to manufacturing, not finance.

Are you going to evolve into one of those brain dead leftist pit bulls? That would be a shame.

I do believe in something like the rule of law, that all people and institutions should be subject to the same laws, principles, customs, whatever, but that’s just another reason why it bothers me that states can get away with theft, murder, kidnapping, imprisonment, but anyone else would not. — NOS4A2

:lol:

This theory gained a new level of importance in the United States, following the 2008 crisis, when prominent government figures insinuated that previous and future hirings in the financial sphere manipulates the decision-making of eminent government members when it comes to financial matters.[2] — ZzzoneiroCosm

Note that while you referred to "big business" the hypothesis under examination is about financial institutions. "Big business" historically refers to private industry, not finance.

Since the financial sector is unusually prominent now, it doesn't seem odd that talent would go back and forth between government and financial institutions, just as the early to mid 20th century talent usually had military experience, so fostered military-private sector relationships which weren't always kosher.

But states also provide defense for the community, a sense of identity, merchant law, incarceration of criminals, social services, etc.

Why would you boil it down to just exploitation? That's seems pretty skewed.

And what about rule of law? Are you for or against it?

What is the state exactly? Could we have rule of law without one? Do we want rule of law?

From what little I've read, unless they can somehow use the Commerce Clause as a justification, any federal law will be declared a violation of State rights. — Michael

Could be. It'll be a talking point for Democrats until they pass something that works. They'll probably start transport assistance for poor people, free hotel rooms and so on.

Congress will pass a law shortly.

But the Normans were provoked by various Englishmen who shipwrecked on their shore.

You'd be worse off. The French brought you civilization. — Olivier5

Between burning people's crops and cutting everybody's hands off, they brought civilization.

:lol:

Lukashenko says nuclear weapons are a bad idea.

"It is also unacceptable because it might knock our terrestrial ball flying off the orbit to who knows where," he added. "Whether or not Russia is capable of that — is a question you need to ask the Russian leadership."

:chin:

More fetal cancer.