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Philalethes's avatar

It seems only natural that one cannot see at this stage the contour of the new economic order. As G.W.F. Hegel wrote, “The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.” In other words, any given phase of history can be understood only in retrospect — after it’s over. However, the stress on the nexus between the rise of the New Deal Order and that the Neo-Liberal Order, respectively, with the rise and fall of international communism, suggests another possible reading. Capitalism, in an uneasy marriage with democracy, represents the ‘end of history’ (to borrow again from Hegel’s philosophy of history). Events such as the rise and fall of communism are shocks that can inflect, but not ultimately change, the essence of history’s end. While the US may not lack geopolitical or even civilisational rivals, none of them seems to exert any hold on the minds of the intellectuals and the public remotely comparable to that of communism in the past. The culture wars that agitate the US and the other Western countries are completely domestic in nature and in fact are deepening the divide between such countries and the rest of the world, as documented eg by value surveys. According to this reading, in spite of the decline of the Neo-liberal order, the position of capitalism is as safe as ever.

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Oscar Alx's avatar

Presidents Clinton and Obama became very rich for their services rendered, so did Tony Blair (probably the illegitimate love child of Milton Friedman and Maggie Thatcher). Most retired US flag officers (generals, admirals) found 7-digit employment within the armaments industry after their retirement. A paper from Princeton demonstrates reasonably well, that policies that are found desirable by the common voters are few and merely incidental. The whole thing reminds me more and more about a company going bust and the staff is kind of aware of that: people are ransacking the stationery cabinets, the little sideboard disappears and somebody "borrows" the tv set.

The economies of allies of the US, which are getting more and more reduced to unincorporated territories (kind of bigger Guams with Britain starring as Mega-Guam and Australia as Giga-Guam), are increasingly preoccupied with finding ever more money to satisfy US demands for orders to its arms industries.

How does one call such an era?

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