The Moral Breakdown of America

 “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”  - Hanna Arendt

“The fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” - Elon Musk

“The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level….This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as…Marco Rubio and …J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.”  - Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How lucky we are to live in a society like Canada, where the country’s motto is “peace, order, and good government”.  Our coast-to-coast nation was built out of diversity, with the coexistence of  three peoples:  the French, the English, and the First Nations.  We have not always lived up to the ideal of  mutual respect but we have come a long way from our rough  beginnings. 

 President Donald Trump’s hostile attempt to weaken our sovereignty by raising tariffs against Canadian products is a clear and present danger for all of us. But this moment of existential threat has catalyzed a new understanding of who we are, as a nation, in comparison to our cousins to the south. It has brought us together, not pulled us apart.  We stand proud and united in the face of this threat against an obviously bigger  and more powerful foe.

Contrast our unity with that of the “United” States.  Even their name belies reality.  The United States is not united.  And that is because it is led both by a President and a political  party that has suspended moral and legal norms in the pursuit of authoritarian power. It began long ago with the widespread acceptance of lies, the denigration of scientific knowledge and the denigration of the legitimacy of government institutions.  Once the consensus on knowledge and legitimate authority was destroyed, the way was open for a demagogue like Donald Trump to spread lies and sow fear and prejudice amongst the population.  Chillingly, like Adolf Hitler, this demagoguery was focused on despised minorities and refugees, people already considered aliens by many within the country.

Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator himself, has continually stated falsehoods about refugees, claiming they are murderers, rapists, and the mentally ill.  He has so poisoned American society with his lies that a majority of the population supports his draconian plans to deport millions of immigrants. But this deportation scheme is a pretext for bringing about the moral collapse of American society, paving the way for an authoritarian government.

In a moral panic, such as witch hunts,  “satanic daycares”, and  “transexual grooming” political opportunists spread fear and induce public hysteria in order to seize political power.  These same fear mongers are noticeably silent about real dangers such as increased access to guns and automatic weapons, climate change, and the preventable spread of infectious disease.  By amplifying ignorance and lies they condition a receptive portion of the population to increase their receptivity to lies even further, so that they end up in an information bubble, consuming only  media that confirms what they already believe and rejecting objective information from more mainstream sources.

It then becomes easier to manipulate people  to further dehumanize those they’ve already been conditioned to fear, such as refugees, visible minorities, and LGBTQ people.  This is the same political technique that was used in Nazi Germany.  First dehumanize a low-status group such as trans people, then isolate them, taking their literature out of libraries, excluding them from school sports, and medical care.  The basic idea is treat them as less than human and deserving of bullying and mistreatment.  Next expand this process to other low status groups, so that more and more of the population becomes involved in isolating, dehumanizing, and persecuting a growing minority of people.  In this way more and more people become involved in the moral breakdown of society.

And make no mistake, that is what Trump and his followers are attempting to do in America, to level the moral landscape, destroying empathy, and encouraging bullying, hatred, and violence against “the other”.   Needless to say, in no way does this strengthen and unite a society.  It does the opposite, because getting rid of empathy and common morality destroys the cooperative underpinnings of a society, leading to the destruction of trust, accumulated knowledge, and goodwill, and to a regime of unaccountable corruption.