{"id":70692,"date":"2021-06-25T18:40:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T22:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=70692"},"modified":"2021-06-25T18:40:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-25T22:40:20","slug":"everything-thats-occurring-is-designed-to-distract-the-citizenry-from-this-final-and-raging-class-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=70692","title":{"rendered":"Everything that’s occurring is designed to distract the citizenry from this final and raging class war."},"content":{"rendered":"

America’s Social Order Is Unraveling<\/strong><\/h1>\n

by Charles Hugh Smith via
\nOfTwoMinds blog<\/p>\n

The unraveling of America’s social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract.<\/em><\/p>\n

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What kind of nation boasts a record-high stock market and an unraveling social order? Answer: a failed nation,<\/strong>\u00a0a nation that has substituted artifice for realism for far too long, a nation that now depends on illusory phantoms of capital, prosperity and democracy to prop up a crumbling facade of “wealth” that the populace now understands is largely in the hands of a few families and corporations, most of which pay little to support the citizenry they dominate politically and financially.<\/p>\n

The social order<\/em>\u00a0sounds abstract, but it is all too real.<\/strong>\u00a0The social order<\/em>\u00a0has two primary components:\u00a0social cohesion<\/em>, the glue of common purpose and shared sacrifice binding the social order, and\u00a0the social contract<\/em>, the implicit contract between the ruling elite, the state (government) and commoners (the middle class, the working poor and state dependents) that their labor, taxes and sacrifices will nourish a society with a level playing field, broad-based opportunity and security.<\/p>\n

America’s social cohesion has been lost,<\/strong>\u00a0ground under the heel of soaring inequality, a two-tiered economic\/political order, systemic unfairness and the elite’s\u00a0divide-and-conquer<\/em>\u00a0manipulation of the political and cultural orders.<\/p>\n

Historian Peter Turchin characterized this social unraveling as\u00a0disintegrative<\/em>:<\/strong>\u00a0people no longer find reasons to cooperate and share sacrifices to work towards a common national purpose. Rather, they find a multitude of reasons to offload sacrifices onto others, hoard their own wealth and seek to expand their power by accelerating the\u00a0disintegrative forces<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There is no debate about the collapse of America’s social contract, there are only varying levels of self-serving denial.<\/strong>\u00a0Commoners have awakened to the emptiness of the conventional promise to\u00a0get a college degree, work hard and you’ll be rewarded with security and prosperity.<\/em>\u00a0Huge swaths of America are a ransacked, decaying shell of a society reminiscent of developing nations suffering under the jackboot of kleptocrats.<\/p>\n

America’s fast-expanding class of billionaires are doing their best to mimic the clueless French nobility just before France’s convulsive revolution in 1789:<\/strong>\u00a0America’s billionaires bleat that they should pay more taxes while their lobbying bulldozes gigantic loopholes in the tax code, enabling Apple and other global giants to escape U.S. taxes.<\/p>\n

America’s billionaires are busy building $500 million private yachts and private spaceships while proclaiming their globally distributed sweatshops are raising all boats in a tide of money conjured out of thin air by the billionaires’ central bankers.<\/p>\n

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America’s ruling elite has rewritten the social contract to benefit itself at the expense of the bottom 99.9%.<\/strong>\u00a0Studies have confirmed that the bottom 99.9% hold virtually no political power, and the bottom 90% collect a pitiful 3% of all income generated by capital and hold an inconsequentially thin slice of the nation’s wealth.<\/p>\n

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens<\/a><\/p>\n

Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018<\/a>
\n$50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.<\/em><\/p>\n

Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age<\/a>
\nTen percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I pointed out in\u00a0Is a Cultural Revolution Brewing in America?<\/a>\u00a0(4\/9\/21),\u00a0actions have consequences<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.<\/em><\/p>\n

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When there is no relief valve in a collapsing social order, the explosive pressure is eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they’re threatening to the status quo and therefore suppressed at every turn.<\/p>\n

Put another way, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme of exploitation, suppression and inequality, when it’s released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

Those who claim\u00a0that can’t happen in America<\/em>\u00a0are safely outside the pressure cooker<\/strong>, protected by a delusional confidence that\u00a0since I’m doing great, everyone is doing great.<\/em>\u00a0Since real political agency is no longer allowed, the pressure will find release outside the political system. The lobbyists will still be haunting the hallways of governance, but no one will care, for\u00a0The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.<\/em><\/p>\n

The unraveling of America’s social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract.<\/strong><\/p>\n

___
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