Mike Prevost 💙 🇫🇮🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

The rot at the center expresses itself most clearly in what the civilization cannot do anymore. It cannot build infrastructure. The United States still has not completed a modern, dedicated high-speed rail line between two major cities comparable to those China builds as routine construction. Decades of announcements, studies, lawsuits, overruns, delays, and unfinished track, while elsewhere entire networks are built. It cannot respond to a pandemic without turning public health into a partisan battlefield. It cannot pass a budget on schedule. It cannot rebuild a city it allowed to drown. Twenty years after Katrina, significant portions of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward had not been rebuilt. It cannot house its own population. The wealthiest country in the history of human civilization has people dying on the streets of its richest cities in sight of buildings whose apartments are owned by sovereign wealth funds and left empty as investment vehicles. These are not failures of resources. They are failures of political will, institutional capacity, and collective imagination, all of which are corroded by the same process. When plunder is the economic model, you optimize for extraction, not construction. You get very good at taking. You forget how to build. And one day you look at your own country and realize that the society you were supposedly defending abroad, the society worth bombing other countries to protect... You forgot to maintain it at home. The empire went everywhere. And the republic quietly hollowed out while no one was watching.