America’s Erosion - Wages, Power, and the Illusion of Greatness

The Long Game We Refuse to Play

What the fuck are we even doing. People are running on rage, bouncing from one outrage to the next, never stopping to think. It’s like we’re addicted to being triggered. Nobody pauses long enough to ask why their wages are garbage, why healthcare bankrupts them, why they can’t buy a home without selling their soul. People are getting dumber because the system is built to make them dumber. The government guts schools, cuts funding, drives teachers out, and strips away anything that builds critical thinking. Kids grow up trained to memorize the right bubble on a test but not to connect dots. Adults scream about politics all day but don’t understand the mechanics of power, money, or diplomacy. That ignorance isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. Keep people distracted and uneducated and you can rob them blind.

Baseball has always been my reminder that strategy matters. You can’t just watch the ball. You have to know the count, the outs, the inning, how the pitcher has been working you, how the defense is set. If you only react, you get beat. The same is true in politics, economics, and diplomacy. America doesn’t think this way anymore. We react to every pitch without knowing the score. We don’t read a fucking book. We don’t train ourselves to think ahead. That’s why we’re losing on the world stage.

It kills me to see how critical thinking has collapsed. People don’t read, they don’t study history, they don’t even want to wrestle with ideas that make them uncomfortable. They’d rather fight about some culture war bullshit while the rich laugh. That’s how power keeps its grip. Yuval Noah Harari spelled it out in Sapiens. Kings controlled their people with myths of gods and promises of a better afterlife. They got populations to obey by dangling a story. Today it’s the same formula dressed up differently. Politicians and corporations keep people distracted with outrage, identity fights, and consumer dopamine hits. Same trick. Different packaging.

Daniel Kahneman laid bare in Thinking Fast and Slow how the human brain prefers quick, emotional reactions. That’s fine when you’re at the plate and a 95 mile an hour fastball is coming at your chest. But when it comes to planning trade policy, alliances, and the future of an economy, that instinct destroys you. The fast brain craves simplicity. The slow brain, the one that can work through complex systems, gets ignored because it takes effort. Politicians and corporations know this. They feed the fast brain garbage. They serve outrage and fear because it’s easy. People take the bait every time, while the real moves are being made somewhere else.

That’s why reading Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company is so devastating. Apple didn’t just build phones in China. They poured fifty billion dollars a year into the country for five years straight. That’s more than two hundred seventy billion dollars in capital, factories, supplier networks, and technology transfer. Apple was pressured by Beijing to do it, but they still did it. And what happened is simple. They built up China’s tech ecosystem to the point where the United States can’t compete. Compare that to the CHIPS Act here at home. Fifty two billion in total subsidies is less than Apple was handing China every single year. We’re not even close. Americans don’t know because they don’t want to know. They’d rather fight about TikTok or whatever stupid distraction is trending that day. Meanwhile, China got everything it wanted handed to them by one of America’s crown jewels.

Baseball has a scoreboard. You know when you’re down five runs. Global trade has no scoreboard you can see, but the score is real. Europe and China are racking up runs while we’re still trying to decide who bats cleanup. The average American still thinks China is a backward country or that Mexico is only useful for cheap labor. That illusion is suicide. China passed us a long time ago. While we congratulated ourselves and repeated the myth of American exceptionalism, others built the future. We were playing checkers while they were playing chess.

Mexico is the clearest example of what we refused to see. For years we treated Mexico like an afterthought, good for migrant labor and cheap produce but nothing more. We assumed they would always need us. Europe and China saw the gap and jumped in. Europe provided irrigation, sustainable farming methods, and training. China financed ports, rail lines, and highways. They built capacity. Now Mexico doesn’t have to ask for our approval. They are building independence, and soon they’ll be a competitor. That didn’t happen because Mexico suddenly transformed on its own. It happened because Europe and China practiced real diplomacy while America acted entitled.

Diplomacy is not about threatening tariffs or bullying people into deals. It’s about helping others get stronger so they want to work with you. That’s what Europe and China understand. That’s what we forgot. We keep patting ourselves on the back for short term wins that vanish while others lay foundations that last decades.

I can’t shake the image of what happened with Hyundai in Georgia. The state bent over backwards to bring them here. Tax breaks, infrastructure, job training, billions of dollars spent to make it happen. For a moment it looked like a model of how to deepen ties with South Korea. Then ICE stormed the plant. Hundreds of Korean workers were dragged out like criminals in front of their co-workers. South Korea erupted. Protests hit the streets of Seoul. Lawmakers asked if they should keep sending their companies to America. All the goodwill vanished in a day. Years of work gone. Trust destroyed. That is not how you treat allies. That is arrogance. That is stupidity.

The same thing is playing out with John Deere. One of the most American companies in existence is building a fifty five million dollar factory in Nuevo León, Mexico. They’re moving production out of Iowa and Illinois. They say they’ll still invest in America, but we all know what that means. Mexico is the safer bet. Deere has already laid off thousands here while expanding there. That new plant will bring suppliers, logistics hubs, and trained workers to Mexico. It builds Mexico’s future. It hollows out ours.

China knows exactly how to manipulate us. Every time they talk about Taiwan, America loses its mind. We debate war, we churn out headlines, we lose focus. Meanwhile, China keeps building. They automate factories, they lay fiber in Africa, they build ports in Latin America, they entrench themselves in Southeast Asia. They use Taiwan as bait while they strengthen everywhere else. We eat the distraction and they collect the reward.

I watched the same play in manufacturing. We cheered cheap goods at Walmart. We thought we were winning. But China wasn’t just giving us bargains. They were building supply chains, infrastructure, and logistics networks that they controlled. They trained workers, built ports, and automated. They distracted us with cheap sneakers while they built the skeleton of world trade. Now the supply chains are theirs. The ports are theirs. The dependence is theirs. We talk about bringing manufacturing back but the truth is we’re twenty years behind.

Agriculture is falling into the same trap. For years China was the number one buyer of American soybeans. That market has collapsed. Now they buy from Brazil and Argentina. This fall they didn’t order a single cargo from the U.S. They booked massive orders from South America instead. Farmers here are losing billions. Crops are piling up. Politicians still trot out the myth of the family farm feeding America. That’s campaign bullshit. Farming is big business. It depends on global exports. And when those exports vanish because of failed diplomacy, the myth doesn’t feed anyone.

Mexico benefits again. With European technology, Chinese financing, and American companies like Deere building there, Mexico is rising. Nearshoring is accelerating it. American companies are shifting supply chains from China to Mexico, not back to the United States. Mexico gets stronger while we stay in denial.

I don’t believe in American exceptionalism. It’s a myth that has blinded us. We keep telling ourselves we’re unique and indispensable. That story is comforting but it’s a lie. Stephen Walt said it outright. The myth of America as the indispensable nation is just that, a myth. Our actions aren’t any more noble than other great powers. Believing otherwise has led us into mistake after mistake. That arrogance cost us manufacturing, it’s costing us agriculture, and it’s costing us allies.

Canada is already building trade routes that bypass us. South Korea is furious at how we treated their workers. China has cut us out of their crop markets. Apple handed them a technological edge we’ll never catch. Mexico is turning into a hub that rivals us. Europe invests while we raid. We wave flags while factories close. We’re being replaced and we don’t even want to admit it.

Baseball humbles players who think they’re invincible. You can hit three homers one night and go 0 for 4 the next. The game doesn’t care about your ego. The world works the same way. For twenty five years America has had its ego stroked. We were told we were the greatest. We believed it. While we were clapping for ourselves others were building the future. Now the scoreboard is catching up. Europe and China have been scoring at will. Mexico has been moving runners home while we looked the other way. We still think we’re ahead because once upon a time we had a lead. The truth is we’re down late in the game.

If we don’t change course, the world won’t just stop buying from us. They won’t need us. Once you’re not needed, you lose leverage. You lose power. You lose relevance. That’s the price of arrogance. That’s the price of failing to think, failing to read, failing to see the field. We told ourselves stories while others built systems. Now we’re the ones left wondering how the hell we lost a lead that once seemed impossible to blow.