thesaker | I have lived in the United States for a total of 24 years and I have
witnessed many crises over this long period, but what is taking place
today is truly unique and much more serious than any previous crisis I
can recall. And to explain my point, I would like to begin by saying
what I believe the riots we are seeing taking place in hundreds of US
cities are not about. They are not about:
- Racism or “White privilege”
- Police violence
- Social alienation and despair
- Poverty
- Trump
- The liberals pouring fuel on social fires
- The infighting of the US elites/deep state
They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.
It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of “cause” and “pretext”.
And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at
least to some degree, and without looking at the distinction between
cause and effect), none of them are the true cause of what we are
witnessing. At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you want, but
the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of
the US society.
The next thing which we must also keep in mind is that evidence of correlation is not evidence of causality. Take, for example, this article from CNN entitled “US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts” which completely conflates the two concepts and which includes the following sentence (stress added) “Those disparities exist because
of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black
Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race,
ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a
left-leaning group.” The word “because” clearly point to a
causality, yet absolutely nothing in the article or data support this.
The US media is chock-full of such conflations of correlation and
causality, yet it is rarely denounced.
For a society, any society, to function a number of factors that make
up the social contract need to be present. The exact list that make up
these factors will depend on each individual country, but they would
typically include some kind of social consensus, the acceptance by most
people of the legitimacy of the government and its institutions, often a
unifying ideology or, at least, common values, the presence of a stable
middle-class, the reasonable hope for a functioning “social life”,
educational institutions etc. Finally, and cynically, it always helps
the ruling elites if they can provide enough circuses (TV) and bread (food)
to most citizens. This is even true of so-called
authoritarian/totalitarian societies which, contrary to the liberal
myth, typically do enjoy the support of a large segment of the
population (if only because these regimes are often more capable of
providing for the basic needs of society).
Right now, I would argue that the US government has almost completely
lost its ability to deliver any of those factors, or act to repair the
broken social contract. In fact, what we can observe is the exact
opposite: the US society is highly divided, as is the US ruling class
(which is even more important). Not only that, but ever since the
election of Trump, all the vociferous Trump-haters have been undermining
the legitimacy not only of Trump himself, but of the political system
which made his election possible. I have been saying that for years: by
saying “not my President” the Trump-haters have de-legitimized not only
Trump personally, but also de-legitimized the Executive branch as such.
[Sidebar: this is an absolutely amazing phenomenon: while for almost four years Trump has been destroying the US Empire externally, Trump-haters spent the same four years destroying the USA from the inside! If we look past the (largely fictional) differences between the Republicrats and the Demolicans we can see that they operate like a demolition tag-team of sorts and while they hate each other with a passion, they both contribute to bringing down both the Empire and the United States. For anybody who has studied dialectics this would be very predictable but, alas, dialectics are not taught anymore, hence the stunned “dear in the headlights” look on the faces of most people today]Finally, it is pretty clear that for all its disclaimers about supporting only the “peaceful protestors” and its condemnation of the “out of town looters”, most of the US media (as well as the alt media) is completely unable to give a moral/ethical evaluation of what is taking place.
