It is true that a cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and anticommunism everywhere, but a cornerstone of any communist revolutionary state must be to be able to deal with it. However, I disagree that the color revolutions created revisionism. They did not bring Kruschev to power, they did not create Kruschev and his posse, nor their political positions.

So while reactionary elements in the Eastern Bloc were supported by the West, in the central committee during the days of Lenin and Stalin I don't think you'll find much evidence of it. The failure of the USSR was in the central committee and the ascendance of the counter revolutionaries who were motivated and powerful in their own right. The vast empire supporting them seemed to work at a distance, primarily creating external pressures, not internal ones. The empire made the USSR suffer economically, caused brain drain, caused the focus to be on proxy wars instead of domestic development. It's not like the situation in Iran in '53. The counter-revolutionaries in the USSR weren't backed directly by the CIA, they weren't brainwashed, they weren't directed.

If the USA has gotten soft, then it’s not the formidable power it once was.

My words were unclear. The USA has not gotten soft. It's just that the whole idea that it was a formidable power in WW2 is sort of just not true. The USSR defeated 80% of the Nazi forces, the rest of the Allies combined fought 20%, the USA only a portion of that. The rest of the US's "formidable power" was spent killing peasants, and they still lost to guerilla warfare. The Nazi army was the most advanced and powerful army the world had ever seen, not the USA army. The USA continues to operate the strongest spy network in the history of the world, it's still as strong or stronger than it was in those days. It's just that the material reality is that this strength is not enough and perhaps was never enough. The Western Europeans were already struggling with colonialism by the 1800s and had begun developing neocolonial superstructures long before the USA unseated them. Once the USA unseated them, the USA inherited a world where the development of advanced guerilla warfare was showing North Atlantic military strategy to be fundamentally incapable of sustainable occupation.

And it certainly has gotten soft. As I’ve said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS and AFRICOM, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire’s decline.

There's a huge difference between the empire getting soft and the periphery getting strong. Everything you're saying is evidence of the periphery getting stronger. You could propose the hypothesis that this is all the fault of the USA getting soft. I find that hypothesis underwhelming. It takes away agency from the periphery. The hypothesis I think has more evidence behind it is that the strength of the USA is now irrelevant in the face of the contradictions of empire. Neocolonialism and neoliberalism were attempts at solutions to those contradictions, but they don't seem to have worked out for the empire. I think the periphery has gotten better at analyzing the material conditions and are exploiting those conditions to finally turn the tide against empire. I would not characterize that as the USA going soft.

Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban

This didn't happen: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/10/13/trump-ordered-rapid-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-after-election-loss/

Instead, here's what we see: https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/ "The fact is, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were both eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end what Biden referred to in his Aug. 16 speech as “America’s longest war.”"

Your belief in the conflict between the parties can only be formed by filtering out evidence like this. Which, not to blame you, is actually what most people do.

Trump pulled out of the TPP

The TPP was never approved by Congress. Trump formally pulled it from the table. I don't have a full analysis on the whys and wherefores of the maneuvering here. Congress is mostly millionaires. They come together all the time for the interests of the rich. The fact that they didn't ratify the TPP tells me more about the flaws in the TPP than it does about the conflict between parties.

this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding

Obstruction of Ukraine funding is perfectly timed to fit the timeline of other proxy wars. The Ukrainian's don't have enough soldiers, the Russians have destroyed everything the West has given to Ukraine. It no longer serves the interest of the USA to keep the proxy war going, so it's Congress's job to stop it. If Biden and his cabinet stopped it, they would publicly have to take up a position the Ds are not willing to take publicly because it will cost them votes. So now its Congress's fault. The reality, however, is that this is continuous with the history of US proxy wars and quite frankly it's the only way the Ds could stop funding Ukraine if that's what they wanted to do. It seems that it's exactly what they want to do.

limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU

The UK doesn't want to be harmed, so they protected themselves. They aren't opposing the USA by doing it, not in any meaningful way, they're just following their profit motive and risk profiles. There's no chance the UK attempts to assert dominance of the empire nor that it attempts to undermine the empire in favor of the Axis of Resistance, and there's no chance it's going to ride it out alone without the support of the empire. What you see as a schism I see as merely bureaucracy.

It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.

Maybe you’re right, but they didn’t need to do that before.

They did, but differently. There was a time when one party was all about the working class and the other was not. There was a time when one party was all about industrialization and the other was not. The history is rife with sloganeering, minor rebellions, etc. I think you're correct that there's something distinct about its character today. I think your diagnosis is off. I think that the culture war is all that's left to them, and I think the nature of the culture war is that it is self-reinforcing, creating a runaway schism. But that schism is rhetorical and electoral for leadership, and personal, emotional, and moral for the populace. If the USA had a way out of the contradictions of empire, political energy would go towards that path, but I think we're seeing that the empire is trapped and all of that political energy has to go somewhere that is infinitely expansive - culture war.

trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.

I think this whole thing is being carefully managed. The timing of it is ridiculously obvious. It always needs to reach critical points at specific electoral windows that are too short for anything to actually happen but long enough for it to mobilize voters. It's a total choice whether Trump ends up in jail or not, and that choice is going to be made on the basis of the consequences for the maintenance of empire.

These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.

I just don't think TPP and Brexit make it more difficult to manage empire. Empire is more difficult to manage because BRICS, the BRI, Chinese debt forgiveness, and the productive capabilities of the periphery are all taking up the space the empire needs to inhabit.

How about the so-called “labor shortage”, which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship?

This is part of the set of contradictions that go along with the labor aristocracy in empire. From a purely economic situation, they would just flood the nation with migrants and tank wages, but there would be revolt. The migrants would eventually revolt as well, developing solidarity with the working class, so we need jingoism against the migrants. Now we both need cheap labor and also can't have cheap labor. But the evidence of what I'm saying is here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/biden-urges-bipartisan-border-deal-00138206 Both parties want the same thing.

The rest of your contradictions are things I agree with. I just don't think it's the ruling class in contradiction with itself. Capitalists are all in on the US Dollar. Europe is primarily consumer market at this point. There will be rifts in the empire as European politicians attempt to stay in power by courting BRICS for energy and goods, but capital is going to stay with the US. This is because the USA is strong, not weak, but also because that strength cannot resolve these contradictions.

Texas blocking federal border patrol agents

That's one to watch for sure. Balkanization of the USA points to some interesting conclusions. But this is long enough. Thanks for the chat.