Killing always follows dehumanization. Always. There are many examples of this immutable fact that litter history, and will continue to do so. The loss of national memory around what happens after dehumanization begins is an astonishment of this era.
American society is careening towards an abyss caused by a series of profound ruptures that are all rooted in a betrayal of trust and a breach of faith. The simple truth of the matter is that vast geographies of America are unseen, unheard, invisible and voiceless. Many of these places were once vibrant and joyful. Today, they are barely surviving. They have been hollowed out and left behind.
What does toughness look like? Great movies always stand as monuments and reflections around deep truths of their era. Let’s use the iconic performance of Michael Douglas as Wall Street vulture Gordon Gekko competing for the soul of Charlie Sheen, whose father Martin Sheen, is cast as a union man and airline mechanic. “Greed is good. Greed is right.” This became the ethos of an era during which toughness became associated with economic predation. The tough guy wasn’t the steel worker. The tough guy was the junk bond scammer.
The economic predator was mythologized and became an avatar of a type of transgressive, soft guy toughness in which the suit became armor and the MBA a sword. The union jacket became a mark of loss — and Americans don’t like loss. They look away from it. Toughness isn’t associated with loss in America; it’s associated with winning. It was beyond true that one group of people was winning, while another group of Americans was losing. The losers became increasingly disdained by the winners, who treated them with contempt and mockery — before forgetting about them all together.
What grew out of the collapse of the American social compact was a great taker class of elites who sit atop a grotesque concentration of power across the whole of the economy — from agriculture to technology. The sum result of the collapse of America’s manufacturing economy was the destruction of the American middle class and the concept of upward mobility. The pursuit of happiness was wiped out for tens of millions of people. The strength of the country is not derivative of its hedge fund billionaires, tech moguls, media moguls or the prosperity of five per cent of the population. It is rooted in the American middle class. The economic destabilization of the American middle class has destabilized the whole of the nation. It has created the conditions for a demagogue to ignite an extremist movement grounded in malice, scapegoating, lies, dehumanization and ultimately violence. We stand at that hour and it is the responsibility of one man above all others in America.