Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

Last Thursday, a practiced persona of cruelty and vindictiveness appeared to saturate the only mug shot of a former president in the history of the United States of America. “The Face,” his employees had called the scowl they had seen too often. We might wonder what that implies about his worldview and behavior, if that represents the self-concept of ‘the boss.’

“If you come after me, I’ll come after you,” he had tweeted soon after the latest indictment. Threats and intimidation are still his calling card, the standard response by any fascist or would-be autocrat to a challenge. The Fulton County Sheriff had vowed he would treat the celebrity boss just as every other American arrested and booked for an alleged crime. As the obnoxious infomercial so commonly says, “But wait, there’s more!”

What more could we want? It is not as if we had a shortage of local, national, and global crises to fill the nightly newscasts and sustain a historic level of national anxiety. We can look back in history and find plenty of crises, but is our current ‘situation’ any different from predicaments of the past? Well, on several counts, it is.

Cultural Collapse: Really?

Just how well can a society function if it is driven by spite, vindictiveness, resentment, retribution, and rage? You cannot really tell from looking at the level of lies, cheating, retribution, and violence in the U.S historically compared to now. Once upon a time, there were boundaries. Nevertheless, the nation built itself by engaging in conquest, confiscation, and domination. Violence has always existed here at a rather high level.

However, it seems that the mass shootings by lone gunmen toting the latest ‘civilian’ model of the AR-15 assault rifle—a military weapon designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible—just purchased “legally” by a disturbed young man at the local gun store without a background check, are a mere indicator. Such shootings and other forms of both public and private violence seem to have an unusual tone and character today. They seem more vicious, and at the same time more indifferent.—often expressed as narcissism with a complete lack of empathy. Despite cries of protest, the ‘stone cold killer’ attitude has become a dominant cultural value in business and life, not just in crime.

Look at the recent surge in smash and grab robberies of jewelry and department stores in broad daylight. Or the gang that swoops through a Walmart grabbing anything of value—or of not much value—and boldly walking out the door to the dismay of employees and security guards who have no incentive for being shot in the face. However, we would be mistaken to think that these increasingly frequent incidents are just examples of “the crime problem,” which itself ebbs and flows over the years, not much correlated with changes in law enforcement policy or practice. There has always been crime and probably always will be. But today both crime and politics are qualitatively different.

The very structure of modern industrial-consumer society lends itself to disaffection, disorganization and decay. Who really belongs, and to what? Allegiance has shifted from family, community, and nation to oneself only and/or to one’s gang, and among MAGA disciples to the ‘mafia boss’ who I cannot avoid calling the former ‘fake president,’ down to the street gang executing the much smaller form of smash and grab—grifters and robbers all. A political smash and grab mentality has become emblematic of the Republican Party.

It is all about taking what you can from whoever is within reach and never mind about who might get hurt. That has become today’s core cultural value. From the “Davos Men” of the billionaire class who are trying to grab up the land from the victims of the Lahaina firestorm, who lost everything except the land, to the scam artists who try to steal your identity by posing as Social Security or bank officers, or grandchildren in trouble, on the telephone, it is all about greed. Telephone and computer scams are rapidly becoming much more frequent and sophisticates, some already deploying artificial intelligence to mimic family members of victims. I cannot avoid calling that a new kind of cultural collapse. Trust is vanishing from the social landscape. Democracy cannot take much more of it.

The Autocratic Attempt vs Democracy

In this context, one might characterize the January 6 insurrection as a twisted cultural cry for help, despite the cruelty directed to the Capitol Police and anyone who resisted the desecration of the U.S. Capitol. Clearly, the insurrectionists who stormed the capitol are politically if not mentally disturbed. They took on their role as outcastes and identified with the self-description of their leader as victimized by the ‘deep state.’

Trump’s tactics of election denial clearly added up to an autocratic attempt. His call for retribution was loud and clear. That is why they responded with enthusiastic sadism to the call by the leader of the autocratic attempt to overthrow the presidential election with violence as he failed to overthrow the formal process of the congress certifying of the election, all in the name of trying to ‘take back our country.’ Throughout, the undertow of white nationalism was palpable.

Mugging the System

Everyone knew that the person who thought he should be president for life would market his belligerent mug shot provided by the Sheriff of Fulton County. Tee shirts and coffee mugs were for sale online the very next day. It was easy to exploit the resentment of a system that almost everyone has experienced as unfair in one way or another. The irony, of course, is that he who mugged the system by presenting that evil snarl actually represents the very hierarchy that has damaged democracy so severely, especially over the past half century. He exploited the growing resentment of the dominator elites, in attempting to become the permanent dominator in chief.

The nearly successful coup, plotted by the aspiring autocrat and a collection of clown-car lawyers and sycophants, was the culmination of an administration the core principle of which was plunder and domination. However, it is too easy to simply blame the former fake president, even for the disarray and cowardice shown by most of the eight ‘candidates’ who would replace him if he is convicted of any of the many state and federal crimes for which he has been indicted.

Really, it is ultimately not about him; it is about the collapse of a culture and its devolution into chaos and corruption of the political system itself, which has blurred the line between politics and crime. When a system weakens from decades of decay, an opportunist is always waiting in the wings to step into the role of autocrat, claiming that he alone can fix things. Most disturbing of all is the fact that this level of cultural collapse makes it all the more likely that the nation will continue failing to respond effectively to the greatest challenge in human history: the man-made destabilization of the climate, the ecosystems, and the other elements of the Earth System upon which all humanity depends for our survival.

The only way to initiate effective action to stabilize climate and ecosystems is to fix American democracy itself, which would enable us to respond to the greatest existential threat to humanity ever. We must make the system democratic instead of elitist to achieve an ecological civilization—the only societal form through which our survival has a chance.