The Origins of America’s Violent Decline

The riotous events on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, January 7, have rightly been identified by Michael Lind in a recent essay as another symbol of America’s slow and painful decline. Lind perceptively traces recent incidents of mob violence on both the Left and the Right to five crises that currently affect American society at a deep level: a political crisis, an identity crisis, a social crisis, a demographic crisis, and an economic crisis.

What Lind is diagnosing is the peculiar combination of social factors that make up the neoliberal order — an order that is supported in various ways by the elites of both of the political parties that dominate the American political landscape. The lives that have been ruined or lost because of the riots perpetrated in this last year by either MAGA Trump supporters or Antifa/BLM fanatics must be lain at the feet of America’s contemporary ruling elite.

The poisonous rot at the heart of our country transcends the division between Republican and Democratic parties, who are both complicit in the crises that have given rise to intense popular resentment on all sides. At this point, it is entirely unproductive to attempt to defend either party against the other; both have discredited themselves, not only by implementing a bipartisan agenda to entrench the neoliberal order in the social fabric of America, but also by…