The Social Contract - is it broken?

The Social Contract is being assaulted and is tattered and torn.  We can rise to repair it or sink inexorably into a Police State.  The Social Contract, when pervasive, mandates that we willingly submit to the rule of law.  At a mundane level this might mean we sit at a red light at 2 am with no traffic in sight.  Going up the scale we pay our taxes, refrain from punching our obnoxious neighbor in the nose, stay in our highway lane, stow our trash, pay for items we want at the store, etc.  At the top of the hierarchy we accept the results of certified elections even if we suspect Russia put their thumb on the scale as happened in 2016 (this was validated by a Republican led Senate committee, 17 intel agencies, and common sense).

The Social Contract is only partially enforced. There are simply not enough police in our society to force compliance up and down the scale.  It is rather embedded into our way of thinking. When freedom is threatened by oppressive rule, the contract begins to break down and the numbers of police, paid informers, spies, military personnel and regulators skyrockets.  Public trust in government and each other plummets.  Wealth, property and privilege, become an ever greater barrier to equality.  

Even in a Police State it is hard to have enough police. Two common methods used to leverage the efficacy of police are brutality and fear.  Beating a protestor to death goes a long way toward discouraging dissent.  Fear driven by threats and follow up brutality is transactional but it is not a contract.  A contract is a two way deal, a win/win.  Fear becomes the currency of compliance and a society ruled by fear loses its soul.

But why does a society dissolve its Social Contract?  How does a Police State arise?  Ironically it often relies upon a popular uprising characterized by fear, hatred and lies and fueled by inequality.  The forces in support of the Social Contract do not simply disappear overnight.  Hitler, for example, failed repeatedly during the 1920’s in a Germany worn down by war reparations.  He persisted until he finally wore down the system using thugs dressed up in brown shirts to bully the system.  He still lost the election in 1933 but was close enough that the leaders decided to let him be Chancellor where they could keep an eye on him.  (Does a minority vote putting in a despotic leader, sound familiar?)  The rest is history. 

There is nothing like a gun to turn a person who feels powerless into a thug. The majority then can be overwhelmed by thugs, armed thugs with torches. Add in a uniform, and give them a leader spewing hate and lies and you have a movement.  The Social Contract becomes lopsided with some desperately trying to keep it in place while foundations beneath their feet turn to sand.

So we turn then to the question of whether or not the Social Contract in the United States of America is broken?  Has Trump flouted so many social and political norms and spouted so many lies and touted his own prowess so senselessly that we are in serious danger?  Maybe so.  But before we lay all of this at Trump’s feet, we should look more deeply at the conditions that allow for such things to happen.  Why was Germany so vulnerable in the 1920’s?  Is the issue primarily fear and hate or is it the underlying condition of inequality?

Let us boldly state that the Social Contract is not dead.  The pool of good will may be narrow but it runs deep.  However, let us also boldly state that the system will break within ten years if the underlying conditions of racism and inequality are not addressed.  Broadly speaking we prospered and began addressing injustices for 25 years following WWII.  But for the last 50 years reactionary forces have driven down low end wages, rolled back civil rights gains and set the stage for Trumpism.  Jim Crow was cowed but not erased in the post WWII era.  The .1%, MiLords* we call them, were checked but started clawing their way back with Nixon setting the stage and Reagan acting on it (pun intended). Trump did not create racism and inequality, he merely rode them into power (with a little help from his Russian managers).

Biden enters the fray sporting a Centrist hat, riding a Left tilting lame horse into a dark alley.  An arena where the Social Contract is in deep trouble.  Proud Boy thugs, Qanon Republicans, Christian hypocrites, aspiring 2024 candidate traitors, dark money (foreign and domestic), and gullible Trumpers lurk in the shadows ready to feed watery lies into mud pits that would bog down a Clydesdale.  The Social Contract is not broken but it will only survive if patriots rise to the occasion and defend truth by brandishing their own torches, torches of light penetrating the dark corners of our national soul.

Let the light shine.

       * MiLords are defined in earlier posts being one in a thousand (mil) who control.

The Big Lie Exposed

 When what you really want to do is overthrow the Government, any excuse will do.  Trump is not the leader of a movement that stormed the Capitol.  The energy behind the mini-uprising has been brewing for decades and Trump has come along and provided space for it to bloom.  He stoked the anger embers of sullen malcontents with bellows and bellowing and he did it with unprecedented ease using a new tool called social media.  And in the end he backed down.  He didn't march with his followers to the Capitol, he rather jumped into his Presidential motorcade and hustled back to his bunker to watch, to see if chaos and violence could impact the real game, the vote count.

We need to set aside, at least for the moment, the deluded belief that the Vice President could simply refuse to recognize state certified vote counts from Electors chosen on November 3rd.  This strays into the mental state of Trump, his total lack of understanding of how governments work, his near total ignorance of history, and his mistaken belief that the mob was really his to command.  Peeling away the onion of motivations of those who gathered to use Trump for their own ends is fodder for a dozen entries and though it is far more important than the question before us, we must first clear the debris left by the mob, and expose once and for all "The Big Lie."  Suffice it to say that Trump, out of desperation and not by design, thought that Pence could pull a rabbit out of his hat and make Biden go away.

We also need to set aside the fact that Trump is the leader of a cult. Yes, there were many cult followers gathered at the Capitol on that Wednesday.  And yes they are a big reason why The Big Lie has been given so much oxygen to live and grow.  I can only assume that there are people who actually believe that Trump won fair and square and it is being taken away from him by hateful Liberals and traitorous Republicans.  But the question before us is not why cult followers will hand over cups of poisoned Kool Aid to their own children, it is another question altogether.  Was election fraud the true motivation for those bent on mayhem and murder?  Was the mob simply cult members who went amok?  

We posit that the answer is no.  Trump tried to use the mob for his own convoluted totally misguided plan, but in fact Trump and his cult is being used as cover for what we will call here The Boil.  The Boil is not a coherent movement but rather an infection that grows unseen under the surface only to erupt when the opportunity presents itself.  In this case it is not caused by a single pathogen but rather arises from a river of disease, some named and some unnamed.  Nazis, White Supremacists, KKK, etc. are currents that run in this river but they tend to disguise the true source of the malady.  A source so insidious and so pervasive that we need to set it aside for future analysis.

Finally we need to set aside power hungry Craven Politicians as the problem behind the The Big Lie, they are but another group trying to leverage it for their own means.  Yes they deserve our scorn and warrant further study but anger towards them diverts us just as truly as does our anger against Trump.  Like The Boil, they do not actually believe The Big Lie, but they are less dangerous to us because their motives are so transparent that sooner or later they will whither and die.

So how did The Big Lie come to be used by The Cult, The Boil and Craven Politicians culminating in a pitiful and tragic circus?  That is a question so complicated and rich we set it aside for now.  Our focus here is why did the confluence of these three streams expose The Big Lie for what it is? We put forward three explanations.

1. The Big Lie is simply too ridiculous for Craven Politicians to defend.  And the system held.  The courts laughed, the military stood firm and common sense prevailed.

2. Trump is a bully and despite his persistence and total lack of moral fiber, in the end he backed down.  He would have lost in any case but his cowardice did not go unnoticed and he never was really in charge of the mob.  Or if he was he gave it over to chaos.  A big lie is simply not enough reason to overthrow this government.  The Cult is hollow.

3. The Boil did not choose its moment wisely.  A cowardly bully is not a good front for a sustainable revolution.  Especially if that revolution has no focus and no purpose.  Anger and discontent and frustration and paranoia alone cannot feed a revolution.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that The Boil did not choose at all.  It erupted prematurely and will be lanced and bathed in antiseptic.  It will not be killed.  It will live to erupt another day in another way.

So what can we take from this?  What lesson can we learn?

Perhaps the most important lesson is that Trump is not the problem.  The Cult will fade, Craven Politicians will be voted out eventually.  But The Boil will not simply go away.  The propaganda which serves to preserve wealth and power and privilege also feeds distrust.  The resulting inequalities have not been managed well. Whiteness, education, and property have been exposed and will not last as markers to differentiate the elite from the masses.  The last bastion, the abstraction of wealth, will not stand forever.  The question is could The Boil, which is now totally disorganized, be harnessed in the future by someone far smarter and more sinister than Trump.  Can The Boil be cauterized, and cured?

Or will the abstraction of wealth not be the last bastion?  Will propaganda become old hat and new dynamics emerge that are driven by an ever more twisted Cable of connected cells fueled by pervasive technology?  Or will elites figure it out and curb their excesses to avoid a real revolution?  Will they neutralize The Boil but keep it alive?