Member-only story
The Great Unravelling
Things are coming apart too fast to put back together
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 11, 2021
It is suddenly being discovered that America is not just polarized but exploding into fragments. This has seemed inevitable to me from early in Trump’s regime, but polarization was the official problem. With a two-part divide, the answer was simply to reach out to the other group. Pundits and commentators stated this as the answer while normalizing Trump’s fascist nature and avoiding recognizing the disintegration of the Republican Party.
The language of polarization used the old capitalist versus socialist markers simplified as red and blue making reconciliation seem reachable. Of course, this was natural as there can be only two political parties in the US,, both built on the European liberal economic tradition. The only real difference was social issues tied to archaic racist reaction or educational diversity, with the only options greater or lesser authoritarianism producing greater or lesser human suffering.
Neoliberalism was the tool used to destroy public control of the economy ending the growth of the middle class created by the New Deal and constant expansion by the functionally nationalized military industries. The second party's shift to racism and reaction allowed the emerging…
