A Country On Fire: America Slips Into Chaos As The President Threatens Mass Murder

When the American experiment was still formulating, the spark that lit the fire of the Revolution was a change in thinking. Long under the boot of a monarch, the world before was defined by hereditary and military power. The events of the world were at the whim of individuals who could be, in alternating moments, merciful and cruel. Sometimes those kings and queens helped their people. And most often, they did not.

America was supposed to have been founded on the concept of sovereignty originating from the people. In Rousseau’s social contract, that sovereignty was given as long as the state served the people’s interest. John Locke, a voice critical of the British crown and influential in the founding of America, characterized the monarch or the state as being at war with the people when they ignored their will.

Of course, America was founded on deep and entrenched inequality. Racial. Economic. Sexual. The Constitution, as written, was a document of law determined explicitly to make these inequalities concrete and permanent and part of the operation of the country. The moment it was ratified separate classes were made permanent. Separate racial existences were made permanent.

America’s failure to rectify its paradoxes and prejudices has caught up to it. Today, we live on the precipice of a failed state. Our government has no interest in fighting a generational pandemic or fixing a disastrous economy. Our legislatures have been interrupted and intimidated by white supremacist terrorists hellbent on overthrowing the government and installing a fascist dictatorship. The president is a criminal with no intention or goal besides personal profit and power.

And now, Donald Trump has threatened to use his powers as president to order the murder of African Americans protesting the needless and senseless death of another of their own at the hands of law enforcement. Instead of addressing a deep-rooted problem, namely white supremacy within the law enforcement community, Trump is now promising to deal death and destruction on a level never before seen.

And for what?

Property. Wealth. The interests of a monied few, the same elite class that inherited power from the monarchy it rejected.

Consider, for a moment, what seems to be coming. Trump, facing a pandemic he has no interest in fighting and an economy he has no interesting in fixing, looking at a possible electoral defeat, now has a choice. That choice is to either ease tensions or inflame them for his own purposes. We have seen him, time and time and time again, choose the latter. Trump’s only talent is to spew toxic cultural poison and profit from the chaos. As has been reported here since the beginning of this crisis, Trump is an authoritarian and these things work in predictable cycles.

Authoritarians are inherently incompetent and cause crises.

Their insecurity and narcissism and prejudices make these crises worse.

They will inevitably scapegoat their failures on vulnerable populations and conspiracies.

Authoritarians will blame their failures on a lack of power and seek more and more power from their fascist movements.

That’s what we’re looking at. A fire that has been raging in a country for centuries and a madman who is destined to throw more and more gas on that fire because it is who he is.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.