A term I first encountered while reading a writer named R.J. Eskow, who weighs in periodically on various political blogs. I think the terms refers to the state of ecstasy some writers appear to achieve while composing jeremiads to the imminent downfall of Western Civilization. Eskow cites as a prime example James Howard Kunstler, whose "Clusterf**k Nation" is linked right here on this page. Admittedly, there is something orgiastic about Mr. Kunstler's weekly downers, in which he excoriates the United States for being fat, tattooed and stupid, calling America a "clown nation" that cannot do anything right. He is also absolute in his conviction that we're incapable of any sort of technological fix for the problem; to make certain there's no hope, he relies upon his deus ex machina, Peak Oil. So even though electric cars are actually right around the corner, and entire countries like Israel are figuring out how to run a national fleet of electric cars on an electrical grid powered by wind and solar, he'll have none of it. It cannot work, he says, with religious conviction. It's so obvious that he doesn't even bother to explain why it cannot work.
I think he's wrong about that, way wrong in the way that those who are confident about foretelling the future are usually wrong. The imagination of a single person is unequal to the task of encompassing the unfathomable permutations of scientific discovery in advance. There is much too much interplay among ideas, synergies of discovery, unanticipated brilliance, breakthroughs, genius - indeed, it is quite arrogant to discount it all on the basis of an emotional predisposition to be pessimistic. Hamlet was right when he told Horatio that there were more things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in his philosophy.
What's causing the collapse of the U.S. economy right now is simpler than Peak Oil or Conspiracies among the Illuminati. What we're seeing is that an entire country, acting collectively, has behaved in ways depressingly similar to a procrastinating, careless individual. Mr. Kunstler, for example, derides the USA for not doing "productive" things, but he himself is a novelist and a writer of doomsday books. Knocking the U.S. is a gig, in other words, but it is not a "productive activity" of the kind he urges on the rest of us Americans. Neither is blogging or the Blogosphere in general. These are more symptomatic of what's wrong than they are "productive activity."
The United States, as a nation, succumbed to the temptations of great affluence and power. We have numerous historical antecedents for this behavior, most particularly the Roman Empire. Take, as one simple point of entry, the current "crisis" involving Social Security. Congress, to its initial credit, saw this one coming back in the early Eighties and upped the FICA tax to create a surplus. Congress then proceeded to spend this surplus; one can measure the amount of surplus spent by reference to the multi-trillion dollar portion of the national debt owed to internal "trust funds." Among other things, the surplus was spent on defense and security. Seminal economics work, such as that by David Aschauer of the same period (1989), demonstrated that military spending by the government is the least productive form of "infrastructure" investment, and that growing economies, such as China, instead invested in schools, mass transportation, improving the electrical grid and water supply, etc., instead of an army and weaponry. It's a commonplace observation that the U.S., spends as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, so it is engaged either in (a) complete irrationality or (b) complete corruption by MIC lobbyist influence. Either way, this form of waste has crippled all other social spending and has foreclosed our ability to have a humane medical system for the citizenry.
Similarly, it was obvious that doing nothing to protect Americans from the huge numbers of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs sent overseas, and even providing tax incentives for multi-nationals to do so, meant that the USA would devolve into a "consumer society" dependent on imports with our own productive capacity hollowed out. This "globalization" mania, urged on by President Clinton and his advisor team of Casino Capitalists (Rubin, Summers, etc.), and cheerleaded by "influential" writers like Tom Friedman, left us with no alternative but to ship all our money overseas and hope foreigners would lend it back to us.
We did nothing about the energy problem, of course, despite the clear warnings from President Carter in the late Seventies. We allowed dependence on foreign oil to hit the 70% level. But with or without the added insult of Peak Oil, these other trends have come home to roost. We invested in what is really the least productive form of capital "hardware," vast subdivisions of new houses. Houses are good for living in, but they are not places where a country makes any money or gets things done except when they are (a) being built or (b) being bought and sold, and then only at the margins.
Analyses of how we got here tend toward the excessively Byzantine. It's not really all that complicated. No one was minding the store. No one was planning. It was plain as day what was coming, and many people described it in highly accurate detail. Nonproductive societies cannot create wealth out of thin air by financial games, not forever anyway, and certainly not by taking on excessive debt.
America is actually one of those charmed places on Earth which probably could be almost totally self-sufficient with enlightened leadership. We could grow all of our own food and we could meet all of our energy needs by harnessing sun and wind, bridging our way there with the use of natural gas, coal with sequestrated carbon emissions, cellulosic ethanol, nuclear energy and geothermal. There would be plenty of work and it would be economically sustainable.
Instead we got what we got. We're broke, dependent on the kindness of foreigners, and we're entering a prolonged period of completely unnecessary shortages and privation. But I don't feel "philiac" about it all; it's a damn shame.
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