How America Is Becoming Unraveled

“Conservative” columnists in America are bemoaning how coarse, violent and Third-World-ish the US has become in the past 40 years. David Brooks, for example, comes right out and says “America is falling apart at the seams.”

In that, he’s largely quoting data from Matt Iglesias’ substack newsletter Slow Boring, where he wrote:

“You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shooting, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety issues.

“Basically, the murders seem like the tip of an iceberg of bad behavior.”

Brooks correctly notes that it’s terrible (Brooks is a genuinely thoughtful guy) but:

“As a columnist, I’m supposed to have some answers. But I just don’t right now. I just know the situation is dire.”

The rapid disintegration of the nation that was once the world’s bulwark of democracy and beacon of freedom has been relentless and brutal — but it should not be a suprise to Brooks or other conservatives: it’s all happened right out in the open and most of it has been driven from the right side of our political spectrum.

How this came about is not a mystery, and progressives have been warning about the dangers of this kind of consolidated rightwing (racist, rich and corporate) power ever since the 1901 presidency of progressive…