!/bin/bash

Their focus on LGBTQ concerns is valid, but also missing the forest for the trees.

This is an obvious threat response to the fact that American hegemony is no longer uncontested. When analyzing the history of surveillance states such as the the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People's Republic or China or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, there is a common tendency to evaluate them in a vacuum, and to attribute this quality to a product of ideology or simply the paranoia of their strongman, but this simply isn't the case. The social model of these states was dictated by their circumstances, in all cases characterized by having been under consistent external pressure from an enemy that was seeking to destroy them; dictatorship follows from crisis, not the other way around.

What we are seeing is the early stages of the western powers reacting to three interelated facts:

1. The post Cold War period of uncontested hegemony is over; China is a superpower and Russia has managed to return to its position as a massive petrostate with its own industrial base.
2. Stemming from that, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract resources from the developing world through imperialism.
3. As a consequence, it becomes harder to cover up capitalism's costs through the cultivation of a labor aristocracy, since domestic exploitation must once again intensify.

Capitalism has been in an ongoing state of crisis since the 1970s, when stagflation hit, which far from being a freak occurence was a predictable outcome of the post-war boom having come to an end now that the United States was no longer the only industrialized country that hadn't been utterly devastated by WW2. This was "solved" through neoliberalism, which paliated the declining rate of profit through a combination of deregulation, outsourcing and plundering of public services through privatization. This created the appearance of a strong economy by producing a flow of inexpensive goods. After all, how bad could things be? Look at how cheap TVs are! But the real story remained readily apparent in the goods possessed of a constant demand and inflexible supply, such as education, healthcare and housing.

But this could not be continued forever; one must eventually pay the piper. Deregulation resulted in the worst financial crisis since the great depression, outsourcing ultimately amounted to selling China the rope and as for privatization, well the problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of the public's money. As such capitalism is returning to its historic norm, and the Liberal states begin the transition to their form in crisis: fascism.