I believe the tariff fiasco has crossed a line that marks the beginning of the end of American Empire and there's really no going back. America is a one-party

I believe the tariff fiasco has crossed a line that marks the beginning of the end of American Empire and there's really no going back. America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Political discourse is dominated by culture war issues not economics. Race, gender, sexual oreintation, immigration status, etc are intentional distractions designed to divide the working class while the government steals from you to give it to the wealthy. As LBJ put it: > “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Southern states were so deeply concerned that poor white people would unit with freed slaves they went out of their way to sow these kinds of racial divisions. Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues. You're not meant to actually start messing twith the economic order. Trade is so intertwined on the global stage that no country stands self-sufficient. China can wield an extremely large stick here. Rare earths are just the tip of the iceberg. The US produces very little now and that's mostly weapons (and some commercial airplanes). You might say tech products but they're almost all produced in China. We have a dysfunctional economy that teeters on the brink of collapse where basics like food, water and shelter are getting out of reach for many people. Take out data centers being built and our economy is in decline and that's another theft from the public too as we're all paying for the electricity. Now that might be fine if those AI data centers actually produced something but... they don't. The capitalist dream here seems to be to produce AI to displace workers but where does it end? Who buys your stuff if nobody has a job and those who do have no disposable income? AI data centers, weapons and private equity firms. That's the modern US economy. Compare that to China where the government is building infrastructure at an incredible rate and is investing in public services. I feel like the epitaph for the United States of America will be something like "For a brief time we created a lot of shareholder value."