U.S. at Tipping Point
There are multiple indications that the United States is not just unstable, but on the verge of uncontrolled transition to a totally different form of society and government from that which the Founders envisioned and towards which most of us have been fighting.
Many of these signs have been visible for some time but are only now becoming sufficiently illuminated to place them in context.
In retrospect, one of the earliest was the 1960s series of assassinations of Malcolm X, President John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Senator Robert Kennedy – and dozens of other lesser-known political activists and societal change agents. While from one perspective these represent a continuation of violence as an acceptable expression of American political action, they led directly to the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the election of Richard Nixon. These in turn led to the steady demoralization of the progressive left, and the Right’s long-term program to render the U.S. into a managed democracy answerable only to plutocrats.
Many Americans -- notably women, African Americans, and LGBTQ people -- have correctly asserted that the U.S. was even then (1960s), at best, a managed democracy. Despite real victories for focused human rights efforts, the right’s concerted efforts since then to move society to the right has steadily succeeded in undercutting the democratic basis on which all rights exist and depend.
Unfortunately, the apparent progress masks the simultaneous slippage, and for far too long American liberals and especially white male liberals have been asking “where’s the fire,” while it’s moldering underneath them like a coal-seam conflagration.
Another indicator was President Reagan’s Houdini act in avoiding direct accountability for the Iran Contra fiasco. On the heels of Nixon’s pardon, both acts went far in establishing a type of Presidential immunity via precedent that contradicted that intended by the Founders. It also led the right to its long-term pursuit of impunity and non-accountability, which is now as well-established domestically as that which protects Putin in Russia and the drug cartels in Mexico.
Another ugly outcome of the trend towards political non-accountability is that that aspect of the right’s program appeals to Democrats too. Except for a determined and fearless minority, they have been more than happy to pretend to support progressive issues, so long as doing so does not jeopardize their funding streams or their reelection.
While Democrats are apparently getting away with this tacit subterfuge, there are indications that an increasingly larger percentage of Americans see through the veil. It’s just that, at present, they lack a meaningful alternative on the left. The right, however, offers a ‘logical’ alternative to those who are outraged by what they can be channeled to believe is purposeful political abandonment – perpetual outrage that satisfies a felt need for revenge. This sentiment further fuels the fire consuming what’s left of respect for American society and institutions, which in turn enables a deeper level of impunity for violence and further acceptance of unequal justice.
This erosion is felt most viscerally by those whose rights are less fully established – African Americans, LGBTQ, immigrants, and women. Driven by very real fears, these constituencies are the quickest to stand up for their particular rights and human rights in general. But their political positions are also the easiest to undercut, because traction requires the support of the mainstream press and white male liberals, and their support is limited due to fear of loss of social and economic standing if white males too far out in front of their peers and common sentiment.
The acceptance of the rightward politicization of the courts is a crushing blow to hopes of turning around the vicious cycle we have been describing. For far too long we have accepted the myth of juridical balance, when any honest review of American history concludes that the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, have been conservative in general and reactionary at the most inopportune times from a progressive perspective. We just watch while the current court cavalierly erodes away the last vestiges of a system of equal -- or even partly accountable -- justice. The very system for which we fought a War of Independence and for which millions of Americans have given the last measure of devotion. There are politically acceptable alternatives to such acceptance, we’ve written about them, but there are few takers.
My careers in the Military, National Intelligence and Federal Law Enforcement revealed to me that the U.S. is actually composed of two states at the governance level that mirror the societal divide between MAGA and liberal-progressives. At the time, the Army, the Intelligence Community, and much of the Federal Government Agencies were on the side of the angels, while Law Enforcement leaned heavily towards conservative and reactionary causes and emphasizes control over rights and responsibilities. Unfortunately, our work has revealed that the military has drifted dangerously rightward over the past 60 years for a number of factors including an increasing percentage of Evangelicals in the Officer Corps. Bottom line is that we are not aligned at the level of governance because we share two different sets of values – and this non-alignment de-stabilizes the nation.
The willingness of the police to use extraordinary violence to break up protests, from Occupy Wall Street, through Black Lives Matter, to Pro-Palestinian, begins to look suspiciously like the reactionary state’s realization that perhaps the right’s efforts might actually be so successful, and progress so rapid, as to bring attention to the man behind the curtain. The violent response is counterintuitive from the liberal perspective, and counterproductive to the right’s own cause. But the history of destabilized states shows time and again that such responses to de-stabilization are always chosen, even as they serve to further de-stabilize the polity.
Perhaps the arson started by plutocrats and spread by MAGA begins to appear dangerously close to engulfing the big houses, and we’ve already used up all the water in the reservoirs. Maybe, just maybe, after burning down the institutions, demolishing “the center,” and arming the mob, there begins to dawn a realization that we’ve drowned the baby in the bathwater. The recent legislative success funding Ukraine and the House Democrats’ protection of the Speaker may be additional indicators of a potential path forward towards meaningful compromise and re-stabilization; of course, they may be just more of the same jockeying for deck chairs on the Titanic we’ve been seeing for years.
It's hard to write history while it’s happening, so we might have this all wrong like H.G. Wells, Neville Chamberlain, and Frances Fukuyama. Well, and so what? What if we’ve got it right? If we’ve got it right, there’s an opportunity to seek a common way forward that doesn’t involve blowing up the last best hope of earth by continuing to appease the nihilists and excuse the cowards.