Please elaborate on the anti-entrepreneur shifts that have occurred in the US in the last 15 years that would disrupt this trend. I’m not aware of them.
If this were true, 15 years would definitely be enough time to show up in some form of data you can cite about the death of American startup culture.
Not sure how young you are, but I highly recommend not making decisions based on the hysterical 2-year swinging pendulum of American political rhetoric.
American media is just as innovative as the rest of their economy, meaning they are constantly finding ways to prey on your emotions and your eyeballs with stories and content.
In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The US government has been trying to get Europe to invest in its own defense for 50+ years. It's been trying to solve immigration for 50+ years. It's been trying to come to a solution on healthcare for 50+ years. Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
How naive are you? I mean seriously.
Your post is one of the worst faux savvy takes I have seen. A true classic of the genre. The US Government is not an independent thing: it is made up of people. And if you haven't notice the current set of people are doing lots of gigantic, unprecedented things.
You either have a truly massive case of normalcy bias, or you approve of their lawlessnes and are running cover.
Your argument might hold some more weight if it weren't the exact same flavor of hysterical rhetoric that we all saw back in 2016...where...not much changed.
But I totally get it, this time is different! The US is in crisis! How could I not see the obvious signs?? It's all over the headlines!
According to his other comments, he's straight up in denial about everything that's been happening lately and thinks literally nothing is going wrong. If most Americans also hold that view, we really have no chance of getting out of this situation.
> The US government has been trying to get Europe to invest in its own defense for 50+ years
Blatantly untrue. America has spent 50 years ensuring europe is reliant on America for security, because America likes the economic benefits that brings.
Joe Biden on the floor of the US senate over 30+ years ago complaining about how Europe has no coherent common strategy on defense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA9eMKNCRuQ
> The US has warned that greater military co-operation between EU countries would be a “dramatic reversal” of three decades of transatlantic defence integration, in the latest sign of the fraying relationship between Washington and Brussels.
That's 2019. When Trump was in power.
> It said that Washington was “deeply concerned” that approval of the rules for the European Defence Fund and the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or Pesco, launched in 2017 to plug gaps in Europe’s military power, would “produce duplication, non-interoperable military systems, diversion of scarce defence resources and unnecessary competition between Nato and the EU”.
They are both true. America engineered the previous world order, where the West relied on American protection, which at the same time helped keep the dollar the world currency and America the most influential and powerful nation.
At the same time, they complained about Europe not doing enough and shouldering enough of the burden, and I find it plausible that they legitimately did wish Europe would do that, the above paragraph notwithstanding.
> At the same time, they complained about Europe not doing enough
Except whenever Europe did try to, America used its soft power to dissuade Europe from this course of action, and instead continue funneling money into American arms manufacturers.
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The changes in that past couple of months are, objectively, enormous disruptions to the previous status quo (of the last 50+ years).
NATO may still exist on paper, but not in the world. The US has estranged almost all of its closest allies that it's had for my entire lifetime — I'm 50 — and in ways that are offensive, threatening, and simultaneously weirdly petty, and which would take a decade or more to repair even in the unlikely event that somehow the current administration was somehow replaced today, and efforts began immediately.
The US president has also opened up avenues for corruption and out-in-the-open bribe-taking (meme coin, banks of hotel rooms, his wife's vanity projects, etc etc etc) that are absolutely unprecedented in US history, of the ilk historically seen more in places like Malaysia, Peru, or the Philippines under Marcos. (Even Silvio Berlusconi was substantially more tactful and less obvious about it.)
At the same time, the administration is performatively flouting the rule-of-law, in ways completely unprecedented in the past 50 years. Openly defying judicial orders. Disappearing people without due process (yes, like all fledgling autocracies, they are starting with the already marginalized; purported gang members, brown-skinned or Asian permanent residents).
The childhood parables like "The Emperor's New Clothes" never actually, like, literally occurred in the America I knew, until this guy. Last time it was just "my crowd was bigger than Obama's" but this time it's "Ukraine started the war" (somehow arranging to be invaded by a murderous dictatorship waging a campaign of rape, torture, and mass child abduction).
> Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Way more than "nothing" has already happened. More substantial, self-directed change has already happened in 2-3 months than in Trump's entire first term, or any term of any president, in 50-100 years. I strongly suspect this trend will continue.
As you can no doubt infer, I am not a huge fan of this administration. But neither am I a partisan; I would characterize this administration as worse than any administration, Republican or Democrat, of my lifetime — and by a lot. (I include Trump's first term in that, but only because that static, glacial-pace US government you think still exists did still exist then, so even though the graft and weird dictator-fetish/emulation was present then, too, it didn't have the impact that it's already had in this term.)
Whether you think it is worse or better, I mean, we all have different priorities but it is unarguably very different — and has already made the US government very different — than anything seen in the past 50+ years.
A whole lot of words to justify an emotional feeling that's going to change in less than <2 years when the mid-terms inevitably flip the senate and house towards the democrats, as always happens when the pendulum swings one way in US politics.
Washington is and always has been corrupt, and political battles no matter how hilariously trivial in context to history have always been "the most important of our lifetimes."
Well, I hope you are right, but I suspect your hypothesis will be disproven, and that you might, in fact, be the one who is confused by the hysterical American media that you decry, conflating its ratings-driven amplification of every conflict to existential crisis level — the informational version of the "loudness war" in music production — with actual events.
Sure, the TV and social media will tell you that every year's crisis is "the most important of our lifetimes", and that isn't true. But obviously, it sometimes has to be true, right? I mean, at least once, and probably several times, depending from when to when we are alive.
"Important" is a matter of perspective, and also desired outcome, so YMMV but in my 50+ years of life there have been 3 such events driven by or pertaining to the US government:
- the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
- response to 9/11 and the aftermath
- 2025 US table-flip of the post-WW2 world order, pursuit of autocracy, and assault on the rule of law
Every government is corrupt; it's a matter of degree, and the reason you can't name a US government as corrupt as this one is because there hasn't been one. Watergate? Iran/Contra? B.J. Clinton? It's not close to the same degree.
Lesser disruptions have included the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007 financial crisis, the internet, AIDS, maybe crack cocaine in the 80s, ... but those are more emergent side effects of human behavior than things done with intent. Things we deal with, not things we do.
Everything is fine? Disagree. Everything is going to be fine? Well, whew, good to know.
But I understood your point to be that everything is the same, and will be the same, broadly speaking, as it's been for the past 5 decades.
But it's not. It's wildly different, already. And even if, as you suggest, the 2026 elections somehow happened without egregious interference from the ruling administration (unlikely), and flipped control of congress to the opposition (maybe) — there's still no way to go back to the "before" times.
