On Monday, Oct. 5, our occasional contributor James G. Jatras gave a lecture at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade entitled “Does America Have a Future? Options Before a Declining Hegemon.” He presented a complex and rather bleak picture of America’s condition to an audience of some 30 scholars and analysts from Serbia’s leading research institutions.

Jatras opened by saying that millions of Americans are gripped by the sense of foreboding, the feeling that “something big and wicked this way comes.” They don’t know what that “something” is, but they feel its presence. The process is not deterministic: there are more variables than constants. The COVID-19 Plandemic, BLM/Antifa, etc. merely reflect acceleration of preexisting pathologies which are moving to a tipping point.

At the same time, we are facing a paradox: America’s social dislocation—her organic destruction—leads to growing social control, to matrix construction. A weakened society is subjected to ever-tightening mechanisms of anarcho-tyrannical supervision. It is still uncertain whether all this is heralding the Big One, or represents just a foreshock of the “Fourth Turning” as predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Some keep crying “wolf,” claiming the end is near… any minute now. Others see the trajectory of a thousand and one days in the life of a Thanksgiving turkey, which ends in a sudden surprise.

Preexisting comorbidities, Jatras went on, are social, economic, political, and geopolitical. They affect America’s social organism in different ways, but all of them are detrimental to its well-being. Financialization has taken us from a production-based economy to a debt-based one, a levitation game with no reflection of real value. It has resulted in deindustrialization and stagnant wages where two-earner families are living check to check.

At the opposite end, there has been a massive shift of wealth to the rentier class, from the heirs of 19th century barons to the U.S./global nomenklatura. It is not composed just of President Dwight Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but also of the financial sector, IT, entertainment industry, etc. They are not capable of change, and there is no pathway to change.

“We’re all in this together!” does not apply because there is no “we.” There is declining public trust vertically, against them (however defined). There is horizontal polarization: people on the opposite sides of political and cultural divide live in different worlds. In the Civil War there was a broad agreement between the belligerents on the core issues of the human condition. In today’s America there is none. Externally, the edifice is fragile. It is weakened by trade imbalances, dollar seigniorage, and geopolitical overextension exemplified by the attempt to confront China and Russia simultaneously.

At home there is demographic and moral decline. It is manifested in decreasing longevity, out-of-control immigration, feminism/LGBT ideology, demonization of “toxic masculinity” and “whiteness,” and in suicide and drug use. We are witnessing the unraveling national self-awareness of the American ethnos, facilitated by treason of our guardians and combined with the centralization of their power.

Trump has shown himself to be the disruptor rather than visionary, a Gorbachev rather than an Octavian. He is powerless against the nomenklatura that loathes him, so rot progresses like it had done in the final decade of the USSR. Trump’s inability to turn a new corner was partly due to his inability to appoint people who share his often ill-articulated but nevertheless potentially coherent vision of what the real America is and how its vestiges may be preserved.

COVID-19 has accelerated all these trends, according to Jatras: we are doubling down on the faulty structures of society. Public discourse is curtailed by surveillance, censorship of fake news, conspiracies, and hate speech. Corona has accelerated deplatforming, demonetizing, doxxing, cancel culture, instilling irrational fear and panic. Obedience to therapeutic edicts has become mandatory, manifested in virtue masking.

By contrast, no opposition is tolerated to mandatory vaccines, digital passports, screening checkpoints, biometric IDs, IT-driven contact tracing. We have a permanent “new normal.” It includes, but it is not limited to social distancing, personal isolation, immunity decline, further fertility decline, isolation, depression, suicides, and more crime.

The U.S. economy is crony capitalism on steroids designed to bail out investors and let the proles sink. It has given us a rolling debt bomb. The 9/11 attack triggered the 2008 financial crisis; COVID will give us a Great Depression or worse. Reduced economic self-reliance and universal basic income lead to serfdom. “Whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” (Matthew 13:12)

All along, the system is characterized by irrationality and arbitrariness. Anarcho-tyranny means releasing criminals and aliens at alleged risk from infection, while locking up ordinary citizens who do not obey the lockdown fiats. Of course, resistance is demonized. “Deniers” are Nazis, in fact everybody to the right of “me” is a Nazi. The final station is a post-human society, such as described in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

The key segment of Jatras’s presentation came under the heading “The Death of a Nation: Race, Language, Religion: Ethnos/ethos, Cultus/Cultura.” Speaking fluent Japanese, appreciating and even writing haiku poetry, mastering the tea ceremony…cannot make any one of us a Japanese, he said. Try as we may, we’d never be accepted as such. In a nation based on self-awareness of shared ancestry, civic nationalism is an epiphenomenon of ethnic self-awareness, and civic values reflect ethnic awareness.

The state-building ethnos and ethos were deemed inseparable in early America, too. John Jay wrote in Federalist Papers No. 2 of “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government.” This is countered by two big lies. One is the myth of America as a civic-ideological “proposition” nation like the USSR. The other is that of America as a “nation of immigrants.” But English settlers were not immigrants.

Ethnic hegemony builds national ethos. As Samuel Huntington said, “Over the course of three centuries, black people were slowly and only partially assimilated into this culture. Immigrants from western, southern, and eastern Europe were more fully assimilated, and the original culture evolved and was modified but not fundamentally altered as a result.” Assimilation demanded accepting ethos to join ethnos.

That was America’s ethnogenesis. Now we are witnessing her ethnothanatos, Jatras said. “America is a corpse being consumed by maggots. Liberals are rooting for the maggots. Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.” Both ethos and ethnos were redefined in an eminently revolutionary manner in the 1960s. Its key pillars were sexual revolution, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, abortion, the early LGBT movement, and the 1965 Immigration Act leading to open borders and a demographic shift.

The cumulative consequence is de-Christianization. Decline of cultus means debased cultura.

There will be no “Kumbaya” reconciliation in contemporary America. Domestically, Americans are not just political opponents but aliens and enemies. There is no shared moral universe, no civic myth. Outmoded concepts of left and right mask fundamental issues of incompatible self-awareness and morality leading to burgeoning hatred. As the late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew once said, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” Stable ethnic hegemony leads to social stability. Tribalism, by contrast, leads to Hobbsean competition. At the national level it will lead to perpetual one-party rule once Texas flips blue, and the question is only “when.”

Overall, American politics is no longer about a narrow range of governing styles or competing economic interests. It is tribal. Today’s “tribes” are defined in terms of affinity for or hostility to the founding American ethnos characterized by a European, overwhelmingly British origin. That ethnos is Christian, mainly Protestant; and English-speaking, as augmented by members of other groups who have totally or partially assimilated to that ethnos or who at least identify with it. As for the “American experiment in democracy,” when can we say an experiment has failed?

One consequence of tribalism at home is that U.S. foreign policy is guided by corporate and foreign interests instead of “national” ones. It cannot be otherwise. As Huntington has noted, “Efforts to define national interest presuppose agreement on the nature of the country whose interests are to be defined. National interest derives from national identity. We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.” Since Americans have no nation (ethnos), the world is our country. It is there to be invaded, or invited, by the so-called Universal Nation.

The link between global empire and nomenklatura’s domestic hold on power is material as well as ideological. The neocon-neoliberal duopoly created an ideological empire based on democracy, human rights, and free markets. All countries are divided into satellites and enemies. At the same time, America is supposedly saving the world through degeneracy by promoting sexual subversion, primarily in Christian countries of Eastern Europe where U.S. embassies effectively answer to the Open Society Foundation and its allies.

Where does it all end? Various scenarios include inertia, war, repression, resistance, civil conflict, perhaps even restoration. Or maybe none of the above. The economy may recover. Things may stumble on but don’t essentially change. Maybe Thanksgiving Day is still a long way off, or never arrives. More likely we’ll get Rainbow Fascism: triumph of the therapeutic state, dictatorship of victims, and demographic endgame.

Intersectionality in ersatz America means an entity which is borderless, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious, multisexual, and ahistorical. In that entity the key principle is “who gets whom?” There is no common morality, and America’s ethnos is turning into the antithesis of its ethos. In bourgeois Bolshevism, the new villain is not the bourgeois, but the white, heterosexual, American, Christian male. And this new country demands a new people. After a few decades of this we won’t be ’Muricans anymore. Fewer natives born—65 million aborted since Roe vs. Wade—will be more than compensated by foreign replacements.

When and how does the crunch come? Neither side will accept the outcome of November 2020 election, but what will the losers do? Expect proactive moves by nomenklatura, including false flag attacks by “Russians” on our democracy to deny Trump a victory regardless of the count.  

Who will resist, considering the decrepitude and sterility of American ethnos? Chunky, screaming, pink-hatted, blue-haired thots; pathetic, incel soy-boys. Record marriage lows, amidst spiritual, slow-motion physical, and demographic suicide. Declining quality of human materials does not bode well when survival of the most ruthless is the norm. For the Remnant, Christianity is both a strength and a vulnerability.