Transmission of empire happens in universities, in big business, and in the halls of power. The new guard has gone through that process just like their predecessors. That their behavior is more erratic, again, speaks to the psychology of the voters more than the psychology of the officials.
Their predecessors cut their teeth on the Cold War, this new cohort did so on the War on Terror. Rather than having experience competing with a world power, their only experience is in colonial management. It’s like how the Zionist army only has experience managing the occupation and has no experience in actual warfare. They’re ideologically similar, but their actual professional experiences are far different. Psychology is irrelevant imo
Even during the cold war the USA lost constantly. I don’t think it’s incompetence. I think guerilla warfare is simply superior. It’s not like the USA was effect during the cold war. The USSR was famous for it’s ability to hunt Western spies far more effectively than the reverse. The USSR defeated the most powerful Western army ever fielded while they were still trying to modernize their agriculture to stop the centuries-long cycle of famine. The USSR failed not because of the West but because of their own failures to manage reaction and revision in the party.
The cold war was colonial management. So I don’t see why you think managing empire back then made our politicians strong but managing empire now has made them weak. You’re over indexing on present-day failures and last generations successes. They were just as loony in the 70s as they are today, we just don’t keep that stuff in the forefront.
The most significant and most important difference is global financialization and the outsourcing that came with it. The politicians from the 30s to the 70s had to manage domestic industry and the business leaders did too. Since the 70s, with new economic policies allowing freer movement of capital, more financialization and abstract derivatives, and then China identifying the economic angle to kill the empire, todays politicians have never had to deal with real productive forces. I don’t think that makes them better or worse in this case. I think it makes them more prone to abstract thinking with fewer moments of contact with reality.
But both parties have that problem and it manifests not fundamentally as forgetting they are on the same team but rather deepening the contradictions inherent in the system through their domestic policy and rhetoric.
The USSR failed not because of the West but because of their own failures to manage reaction and revision in the party.
I must disagree. Reaction and revision in the party were consequences of Western actions taken against them. It wasn’t some internal failure of the USSR that caused it to collapse, it was the Cold War and Western aggression. Back then, the West was actually a formidable colonial power - they weren’t just managers, it was a shrewd and effective system of colonial conquest.
That’s why the new imperial age with the War on Terror is different. Yes, the West lost battles before, but today they can’t even present a unified front. Now other colonial actors and capital interests act in defiance of the empire to make their own rogue moves for power. Brexit, for example. I think this shows internal divisions within the empire and that this is reflected in partisanship. The material base has changed and this has changed the political superstructure, the voters didn’t just choose to become partisan on their own. While you’re right that much of this partisanship is coming from voters, the voters’ partisanship is actually a reflection of the changing material interests of the ruling class coming into contradiction with each other.
You’re right that this comes back to financialization but this, too, is a shift from conquest to management. They don’t run real industrial forces, they manage imaginary money.
