We have become a nation of addicts. The drugs of our time are rage, fear, and cynicism.
We rage at the problems we face, rage at the AI video of some other person who is somehow, somewhere, not doing what we want, and rage at "the other side" for making it all this way. When the rage hits we get that sweet sweet feeling of certainty that we are not wrong, that we hate the right people, and the adrenaline that comes from lashing out. Rage has a nice way of focusing the mind on the object of our hate and helps us to ignore the very real problems around us, the complexity of life, and the need for hard work and compromise on a crowded earth. Once we could only get the rage hit by screaming at our TV. Now we can fight the enemy online, in the libraries and classrooms, and increasingly in the streets through violence, trolling, and other performative cruelty.
Behind the rage of course is well-nurtured fear, fear that society is breaking down, fear that our children, or anyone else's children won't be like us, or that for all our anger our lives won't ever change. Whole industries exist to feed our fear reminding us every day what those other people said, what they did, and what they will do given half a chance. We must always know their boot is on our neck so we don't notice who is picking our pocket. And so we huddle inside mainlining podcasts and gossip news wondering what our neighbors or families, or coworkers have planned and afraid to listen to their point of view, question our prior beliefs, or to find a middle ground lest it all come crashing down.
So we lash out, or give in.
To protect ourselves from the torrent of hate and the constant waive of fear we retreat into cynicism. We tell ourselves that we should not worry because we are screwed either way. We tell ourselves not to be angry when the "representatives" we elect do not represent us but do screw us over for their party and for their careers. We stop being willing to discuss or work for policy or real improvements in the world or even to work for good policy because good things don't come our way and even if they did, we expect the other side to destroy it and hate us out of spite.
Like heroin this cynicism corrodes our nation to the point where we can no longer have, believe in, or even discuss, nice things. So we stop trying to build them and sit angry, fearful, and high trying to hold on to whatever we have while the dealers bleed us dry hooked to devices that monitor our every step.
Like all drugs they provide power to the dealers and distract us from productive action and the hard work of life. In such an environment the fastest way to win a political campaign is to lean into the hit, paint your enemy as the monster and prevent any discussion of substance, and then bludgeon them with your power to maintain your place. Because if we are honest there is no principle that "values voters" will enforce and no law for "the other side". But like porn, the edge from each hit soon wears off and the algorithms put us on to the harder stuff.
Addiction keeps us locked in toxic relationships.
It makes us sure we are on the same team because we hate the same people, right up until we too are singled out. It makes us certain that leaving would be too traumatic, too destructive, and too difficult so we do not do it for fear of losing what little connection we have. Above all, it makes us so certain that every other option is worse so we can ignore the promises that were not met, the empty trolling that leads nowhere, and the lies without end. Most of all, it lets us sacrifice our own character and principles as we accept one more lie, repeat one more awful line, and make excuses again, and again, and again for things we once said were forbidden. Until one day when we are confronted with the fact that we are just another abuser with nothing left at all.
As the cruelty, cynicism, fear and hate build up in the nation there is, increasingly, nothing we can do. The very idea of a nation is under attack because once you are surrounded by "enemies within" it is simply much easier, certainly more satisfying to dance to the dealer's tune, and beat on the other side. We cannot go to school with "people like that" we cannot pray with, or worse yet for, those who disagree or increasingly walk down the same street without forcing them to know they are wrong.
Trump, if we are honest, is the true president of our time. He is a natural born bully with an innate insinct for cruelty and acts of submission. He deals our drugs of choice in a pure constant stream, triggering rage at the drop of a mic and keeping followers and opponents alike distracted by fear. The cynicism he creates leads those around him to normalize the unthinkable and over time, to break down the cohesion that would cause anyone to hold him to account. He is the ultimate dealer.
But Trump did not invent this drug trade and he isn’t solely responsible for its continuation.
He studied the past masters in Limbaugh and Fox and learned to copy and expand their market. Trump did not wean the lawyers and judges who would make him a king above the law, he just paired with their movement and learned to pick out the ones he could use. Nor did he staff the Republican party with amoral opportunists or the Democratic party with aged consultants he just read their weaknesses and used them for his rise.
What Trump saw was an entire movement of opportunists and addicts who had been trained to fight endless wars over holiday greetings, and who were ready to move on to harder conspiracies; and he saw single-issue marks like the anti-abortion movement who would bless anything he did from sex assault to violence so long as he gave them their white whale. Now even the dealers he once worked for are falling in line because it is all just business and they too care nothing for the sheep they eat.
An angry, fearful, cynical populace; a degraded rule of law led by judges who have given the dealer immunity and now fear him; partisanship that rewards actual murder; and a dealer presiding over all while we make excuses for his insanity, attack each other, and wonder what will happen next. These are the conditions in which anarchy arises. These are the times that bring dictators and their mass movements to the fore. And some of us have spent so long online fantisizing about civil war and great resets that they are determined to bring it about.
If we don't turn things around now, we never will.
I would like to say that I know an easy way out of this mess, a way that we can come together, kick our addictions, and accept that people who are not like us are still Americans after all. But I know there is none. The national fabric that once united us, and the pragmatism and distribution of power that let us fuinction has been deliberately poisoned by opportunists who rode our fears to power and wealth, and rotted away by an impotent class of pols who came of age when rotary dials were still around and don't understand the world they made.
That unity was hard won and hard built over long, bitter, and yes violent struggles and, if we are honest, supported by fortunate times. Can it be remade in a nation that is aging, crowded, cooking planet? Can it be rebuilt with an economy that is more unequal and more brittle than ever before, and where the very very few who pay nothing and hold the wealth think little of funding hate to keep their place?
I don't know.
I don't know, and I don't even know if I want to. But I have no choice but to fucking try. Because I cannot, will not, raise my children in a world that is cooking them to death and parching just so we can make AI porn and mine fake coins. I cannot let them grow up unequal while 1% pay nothing, get everything, and leave them ignorant and alone. I will not let them learn to follow the examples of reactionaries, thugs, and misogynists or, like some of my childhood friends did, fall asleep listening to Rush's gleeful hate and wake up as assholes. I cannot watch their future die.
Nor will I turn to their grandparents and great-grandparents who dug their lives under the rock, chased death on the oceans, and fought for their rights and laws to make a free democracy and tell them I let some reactionary dictator steal it all away.
I have no choice, because failure is not an option.