Member-only story
It’s Midnight in America
January 2021.
You know me. Always doom-and-gloom. Always Mister “But Wait, It Gets Worse.” Been that way for a decade, and for the balance of my career here in public.
For reference, here’s what I first wrote four years ago today:
The neo-feudalist economy caused by unchecked, unregulated capitalism that turned at best a winking nod to social welfare, more often a blind eye, and at worst a joyous ax, has facilitated a nationalist, authoritarian rise in pitch, and an abrupt shift right in federal ideology. Donald Trump is both the drooping wilted leaf of this societal rot, and the root.
Trump the politician, for all his bluster, is the product of fractious wealth concentration among the global elite — men very much like Trump the businessman. It is no secret that this true elite (not the intelligentsia or coastal elite, mind you, they are mere interlopers in the club and not the backroom VIP lounge entrants) have a penchant for shuffling the deck of the world order, and a potential to set fire to it, if it suits their interests. They stoke the flames of racial tension, and ostracize those already precariously perched in society’s margins. So it appears that this has become our new reality.
It is quite easy to get lost in the “now.” For it is all we can sense, and it is all we are given. But…
