Member-only story

The Monday Lament: Post American Collapse

I wish it weren’t so.

5 min readApr 14, 2025
Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash — Picture from Gaza, coming soon to a neighborhood near you

The time has come to admit that America will not recover. The problem is not the second Trump Chaos (a more accurate name for the Trump regime) but the decades of delusion and poor decisions that led to it.

The world has moved on from the American Century, while the population drifted in the capitalist fog of greed, limitless growth, and remembered exceptionalism generated by the great American post-World War II historical bubble.

It was great, and still, in its denouement, it continues to generate elements of transformative technology that proved impossible to use to prevent its collapse. The reasons for this are complex and historical and have produced attitudes that are impossible to change. These attitudes are petrified for a substantial segment of the American Empire’s population and made the Trump Chaos inevitable.

While the Empire tears itself apart and the nation-states that can take wing, we are facing the far larger disaster of the climate apocalypse. Our primary need is to isolate Trump’s Chaos from accelerating the catastrophes.

There are long odds against this, but there is hope. That hope is limited, as the overwhelming wave of climate disasters is our planetary reality. Still, we can work to retain as much value as can be…

--

--

Mike Meyer
Mike Meyer

Written by Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here and at https://rlandok.substack.com/

Responses (13)