I was talking with a friend the other day and he said the problem with democracies is that policy can swing 180 degrees with each election.
And in some ways that’s true: Trump’s switch on Ukraine is a good example.
But it’s not true when it comes to the core goals of western government since 1979 or so.
The ur-rule of neoliberalism is that the rich must always get richer.
Trump’s budget cuts 600 million from Medicaid and other health care in order to give tax cuts to the rich.
Trudeau’s big change from previous Prime Ministers was to massively increase immigration. The effect was to depress wages and increase rent and real-estate prices.
When European countries talk about increasing military spending there is the inevitable comment that this will require slashing social spending. Somehow the idea of taxing the rich and corporations more is never raised, even though that would easily cover the cost.
DOGE’s civil service cuts will lead to massive outsourcing of whatever the government really has to do, which will cost more than doing it in house and profit the rich.
Starmer’s extate taxes on family farmers will force them to sell their farms to agri-business or developers (and, overall, make the UK even less able to feed itself.)
Trump’s proposal to cut the military budget massively in concert with China and Russia would open up more room for tax cuts. The savings won’t be used to help poor and middle class Americans, you can be sure of that. (It also isn’t going to happen that way, because China can easily afford its military budget. More on that in a later article probably.)
This isn’t to say there are never exceptions, but they are exceptions.
This is quite different, by the way, from China.
China used to be willing to mint billionaires, but they figured out it was harming the majority of the population, so they are dealing with it. This is one of the reasons why China has won, and the US has lost. (Another part is that China doesn’t talk about free markets, but actually has them, while the West talks about them but makes sure they never happen.)
Neoliberalism is in the process of ending, but until the ur-rule of always making the rich richer by screwing everyone else ends, the most important part of the oligarchical state will continue. What’s really happening under Trump is the tech-oligarchs taking lead trace away from the banking oligarchs. It’s an internal shuffle of power, while the looting continues.
Since a board prosperous population combined with massive industry is what actually makes post-industrial revolution societies powerful, American and Western decline will continue as long as the determination to fuck over ordinary people remains.