Degenerate America and Its Cure

 We are living in a dark time when the fantasies of 79-year-old toddler may get us all killed. He has our own track for the same fate as his casinos, his university, every other venture he has embarked upon: ruin.

America's jungle law, at home and abroad (China Daily) lets into the mind of the Chinese government:

From invading a sovereign country and forcibly seizing its sitting president, to the fatal shooting of a woman by an ICE officer in Minnesota, a chilling logic emerges. The US government is now sliding into a Hobbesian state of nature at home and abroad, where force replaces law, and power overrides accountability.

Once, Washington at least offered excuses — democracy, freedom, human rights. Now, even that pretense is fading.

With plans to raise US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027 while withdrawing from 66 international organizations, the US is dismantling the very rules-based system it once claimed to lead.

So people are asking — quietly, uneasily: Is the United States preparing for another world war?

And you think the rest of the world is not thinking the same thing - that America now threatens human existence?

Empire of Vice by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Boston Review) works the same line.

At first glance, virtue signaling and vice signaling might appear to be opposites, with virtue signalers associated with do-gooders and vice signaling with more cartoonish villainy. And indeed, vice signaling is related to cruelty, schadenfreude, and evil generally. A virtue signaler is trying to look good and a vice signaler is trying to look bad—but not to everyone. A vice signaler typically violates moral or other standards of an out-group precisely in order to look good to the fellow members of some in-group. Vice signaling, then, is typically a version of virtue signaling rather than an alternative to it.

But there’s an important catch. When we virtue signal, we are appealing to our tribe’s own values, however shallow or hypocritical such appeals might be: it is the fact that our in-group treats supporting this charity or using those pronouns as a demonstration of kindness and respect that allows one to try to gain clout by adhering to the rules despite having less savory motivations in one’s secret heart. But when one vice signals, the out-group’s values take center stage—in order to be shirked rather than lived up to. The moral commitments of the in-group are basically irrelevant: all that matters is owning the enemy, in Trump’s case the libs. And the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior.

Consider now how Donald J. Trump says the only limit is his morality. What moral character has he shown during his lifetime?

Back to Táíwò's essay:

Unlike complex strategic objectives that involve prioritizing and maintaining strong diplomatic relations, the thrill of vice signaling—and the training—is heightened by saying the quiet part out loud. That is exactly what Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff, did on CNN earlier this week. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,” he told Jake Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” 

That is a Hobbesian viewpoint. 

Signaling vice: Trump appears to flip off Ford worker calling him a ‘pedophile protector’  (The Hill).

Some here might see the danger Trump is putting us into: Republicans vow to block Trump from seizing Greenland by force. Time will tell. I think Trump wants to turn Minnesota into his version of the Reichstag fire.

But others continue to feed his vicious desire for attention and the power it gives him: Venezuela’s Machado says she presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump during their meeting. Like a toddler, he responds to bribery.

The danger he presents to us may survive, even if he is stopped from making himself , and the rest of us too, an ass in the eyes of the world: Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota after protests. 

Why I Try to Be Kind:It’s an axiom that technologies reshape ethics by James McWilliams (Hedgehog Review) offers a cure.

If such an explanation for the death of kindness seems dauntingly decentralized—as if meanness has metastasized in every organ of the republic’s body—there’s actually an empowering benefit to thinking in these terms. When we understand kindness to be dying in the trenches of daily life, it imbues discrete acts of kindness with targeted political force. It becomes a way to resist the increasingly popular call to “f**k your feelings” while establishing a habit of discourse rooted in the virtues of attentiveness and empathy. 

As such, it invites everyday citizens to make the personal act political and to pursue reform through coalition building as an alternative to the echo chambers of hate. To appreciate how the recovery of kindness in the public sphere—one act at a time—is the absolute essential prerequisite for reclaiming a politics of virtue, we first need to better appreciate the deeper reasons for the demise of decency. 

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It might seem simplistic to argue that a more empathetic political process begins with being kind. What might happen if the majority of Americans figured out how to make kindness cool, decency a radical virtue, commonality common. Why might that then lead to a real reason to fear empathy?

Because kindness softens us into unity; it is in itself a commonality, and it leads us to other commonalities. Even Trump said after a meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” We tend to think that we are deeply polarized—as if we are on opposite end zones of a football field—when we are in fact on opposite 40-yard lines. The hateful rhetoric just makes us think that we’re further apart than we are. It instills ideologically the distance that, in Madison’s day, existed geographically. 

So overcome the distance, choose to be kind. It’s an act of rebellion. And the implications for human happiness and democratic politics are immense. Maybe even enough to save us. 

 Fascists think strongmen protect them. History proves them wrong, but they pay no attention to history. These types always think them special, that they are not restrained by the rules of human nature. Strength is not talking tough; it is born of action - against the strong. Bullying is the work of the weak. Strongmen never attack those they think are strong. Bullies despise democracy because the demos will not recognize the self-aggrandizement of the bully.

Democratic societies succeed because they are not reliant on the delusions of the bully.

 The lack of resilience in society has negative consequences beyond the financial impact. The armed forces cannot fulfill their mission for long without public support. It is resilience that enables the government to fulfill its mandate of guaranteeing external security. However, for a society to develop the willingness to become resilient, its government needs to communicate very clearly to them what is at stake. Democratic societies are threatened by hybrid warfare, and ultimately what is at stake is nothing less than the defense of the democratic form of government—or, to put it more dramatically: defending how we live and how we want to live.

What Happens if Russia Wins the War it Started in Ukraine? 

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