When will America collapse? Our best hope to avoid it is Investigative Journalism and more History Majors.

From Yale historian Timothy Snyder's book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America:

History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders’ accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions. In our time, as rising inequality elevates political fiction, investigative journalism becomes the more precious. Its renaissance began during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as courageous reporters filed stories from dangerous locations. In Russia and Ukraine, journalistic initiatives clustered around the problems of kleptocracy and corruption, and then reporters trained in these subjects covered the war. 

— 

What has already happened in Russia is what might [is already happening] happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom (p. 10). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. [published April 2016, fully two years ago]

In America, we are ALREADY seeing full scale development in our country of corruption and a kleptocracy seemingly trying to rival that in the Russian Federation. From The Atlantic (March 2019 issue):

For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States’ Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him—the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia—were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis. But from all the intelligence that washed over his desk, Palmer acquired a crystalline understanding of the deeper narrative of those times.

Much of the rest of the world wanted to shout for joy about the trajectory of history, and how it pointed in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Palmer’s account of events in Russia, however, was pure bummer. In the fall of 1999, he testified before a congressional committee to disabuse members of Congress of their optimism and to warn them of what was to come.

American officialdom, Palmer believed, had badly misjudged Russia. Washington had placed its faith in the new regime’s elites; it took them at their word when they professed their commitment to democratic capitalism. But Palmer had seen up close how the world’s growing interconnectedness—and global finance in particular—could be deployed for ill. During the Cold War, the KGB had developed an expert understanding of the banking byways of the West, and spymasters had become adept at dispensing cash to agents abroad. That proficiency facilitated the amassing of new fortunes. In the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Palmer had watched as his old adversaries in Soviet intelligence shoveled billions from the state treasury into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. It was one of history’s greatest heists.

Kal Penn, very recently narrated a very poignant eight part series on Amazon Prime entitled This Giant Beast Which is the Global Economy. Except it's not really about the global economy. It's primarily about massive scale money laundering, corruption and the entrenchment of inequality so deep into globalization that it may take revolution to get out of it. In other words, it's really about the global growth of kleptocracy.

I repeat part of the quote from Snyder's book, "In our time, as rising inequality elevates political fiction, investigative journalism becomes the more precious."

Just as Greta Thunberg is raising the alarm to call attention to the urgency of the Climate Crisis, Snyder has raised the alarm to warn that we are already on The Road to Unfreedom. It seems reasonably urgent. Would we be well advised to embrace that urgency?




America has been disrupted.

However, I also believe that we are living in times where disruption is not only being caused by technology or by innovation but also by society and political decision-making, which eventually has an impact on economic decision-making. The two most recent examples are the tariffs being imposed by leading economies on imports from other leading economies (for example, the tariffs war between the US and the EU) and the immigration issue.

History majors in university studies are crucial to obtain, grasp and maintain perspective on current events and politics. Embrace rational perspectives that are most obtainable from historians... like Timothy Snyder. Seek out books, articles and video talks made by credible historians.

As Snyder also spells out in the embedded video above, in our social media consumption, perhaps we could post more investigative stories. I applaud local investigative journalists like Craig Harris and Robert Anglen.

You can also look to (and support) non-profit investigative news websites like ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (which did the research and published the Panama Papers)*

(Civic) Apathy is curable. The cure is empowerment. My view is that empowerment is all about taking responsibility for your citizenship wherever you live.

* The Panama Papers documentary feature movie is available to view on Hulu, Amazon Prime and any cable/satellite provider that carries the EPIX channel.