Fading Frontier

[Beet]

There's always some crisis or another. People are tearing their hair out over a place that, only a generation ago, we naturally accepted would forever be a part of a Communist dictatorship, as we did everything east of a line "from Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic." What we are seeing is not some fearsome aggressor (provided no nuclear escalation), but a former superpower-turned wounded, cornered animal in a desperate existential struggle to stave off a future where NATO missiles are 5 minutes from their capital city.

As far as Tesla, Apple, and crypto, there may or may not be a sense of "American identity" around them, but the fact remains that they are American companies. America continues to push the frontier regardless of whether people identify with it in some sort of mythical sense or not. Capitalism continues to push on, and today the American economy has greater capabilities than ever. The reason that people may not identify with this progress is because increasingly they themselves are not benefiting from it. The average American family is not necessarily going to see better times if Apple's profits increase.

The root of the problem you refer to, IMO, is due to the emergence more than ever of "Two Americas." There's the America of the Acela corridor, the tech companies, the upper middle class and their newly minted million dollar homes and fat stock portfolios, and those who never had those things and see a middle class lifestyle further away than ever. On one hand, there are those who participate in the benefits of the empire, and on the other there are those who merely live in it.