The unraveling of the social compact leaves us "staring down the barrel of Armageddon"

How we got to this dangerous place, however, is a story in itself

It’s been a long time coming.

But after the last two weeks, we can truly say that it has arrived.

It is here now. Right now.

Some would call it righteous anger and protest. Some insurrection. Some “class warfare”. Or others might go so far as to characterize it as anarchy, or even civil war.

Maybe even the Apocalypse..

But none of these familiar descriptors truly what is happening today in America, and by extension on a global scale.

The cognoscenti, who function as a secular clerisy ritually sanctifying the prevailing, dysfunctional order through a captive news media and a minute-by-minute, mind-numbing avalanche of academic double talk and fulsome expert-speak, try to convince us it’s all because of that one, big thing - Donald Trump, “authoritarianism” (whatever that really means), “fascism” ( a word nowadays as meaningless and fraudulent as those who constantly bellow it), “capitalism” (another term that has become theoretically vacuous and overdetermined, “imperialism” (i.e., what European colonialism had become prior to World War I, then abused by orthodox Communist palaver, but abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union until clueless pseudo-Marxists took it up again quite recently).

So what is actually happening – at least in a more nuanced sense?

And we’re not even making allusions to the war between Israel and Iran, which launched on Friday and offers real-world relevance to the line from Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning that we’re currently “staring down the barrel of Armageddon”.

First, we need to take a hard look at the recent events in Los Angeles and begin to view them neither through the lens of conventional and social media nor through the statements of our calamitously polarized political establishment.

Although there has been a superabundance of hyper-partisan and ideology-soused bluster from these sources, one prominent expert at the non-partisan Center Security Analysis happens to be right on target.

According to an interview with the center’s director and senior analyst Kyle Shideler, the protests that erupted last week against ICE for its mass arrests in Southern California was not by any stretch of the imagination some sort of spontaneous outrage on the part of the local Latino community and their supporters.

Shideler observes:

…for a while, the hard radical left - the campus communists, the Palestinians, the pro-Hamas people - has been focused 100% on the Palestinian issue. And that was largely aimed at the Democrat establishment. Now we’re seeing the onus of street action shifting from the Palestinian angle to the ICE/immigration/Trump angle, which is where the establishment left would much rather have the conversation. So this seems to me like an attempt for the traditional American establishment left to reclaim control of the street radicals.

Investigative journalist and retired Georgetown University professor Asra Nomani has meticulously documented this claim in a recent article entitled “The $2.1 billion machine behind 'spontaneous' anti-Trump protests”.

She writes that the coordinated demonstrations on June 14 dubbed “No Kings” by its handlers “is being organized by an estimated 198 groups, all of which are aligned with the Democratic Party and many of which claim tax-exempt, ‘nonpartisan’ nonprofit status.” A list of these groups can be found here.

Other writers such as Jonathan Turley have made the same argument.

Nomani’s research initiative known as The Pearl Project (named after The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who was kidnapped and murdered by Islamist radicals in the aftermath of 9/11) has also launched a database to track the different groups aligned in the more expansive aim, she says, of “weaponizing identity and cause-based activism, like immigration, to undermine civil society.”

Nomani’s article is eye-opening. But it can only be savored as sweet glaze on a patisserie of more penetrating insights into a configuration of scarcely perceptible forces that have been converging behind the scenes for well over a decade now.

In her book Woke Army, published in 2023, Nomani offers a tell-all on how we came to the present pass.

Born in India and raised herself in the Islamic faith, Nomani characterizes the “army” as “an unholy alliance of Muslim radicals with mostly radicalized elites from the professoriate and professional classes, indoctrinated college kids, anarchy-inclined Antifa thugs, and perpetual race-baiters”.

She warns:

They mean business, and their business is a radical transformation of America in which noble-sounding ideas like ‘social justice’, ‘income equality,’ ‘equity’ and protections against ‘hate speech’ are code for upending the very pillars of American democracy with principles of censorship, racial division, polarization, and Islamism, or Islamic governance. They would do away with the First Amendment, the concept of equal treatment under the law, and the concept of your ability to confront your accuser.

And now this invidious, albeit self-imploding, concoction of pseudo-Marxism, identitarianism, and overhyped faux revolutionary bombast fortified with jihadist sloganeering has attained, as I myself explored in a recent essay, its own dark zenith of depravity in its pullulating penchant for antisemitism.

Yet for the vast majority of those caught up in what can best be construed as a “The Resistance” 2.0 finally facing off against Trump 2.0 all of the above is nothing more than “right wing” conspiracy-mongering designed to frighten and dissuade them from taking a conscientious stance.

What we are witnessing is the phenomenon of George Lakoff’s “moral politics” hypertrophied through undetected and unforeseen historical dynamics into a whole new and “hyperreal” (as Jean Baudrillard puts it) socio-political calamity.

Or possibly tragedy!

For Lakoff the present profound, “hyperpartisan” divide between American liberals and conservatives arises from fundamentally incommensurable moral worldviews, which tend to emerge from competing paradigms of family life and child-rearing. According to Lakoff, these familial and moral tropes unconsciously determine how individuals understand politics, government, and society.

However, as Aristotle reminds us in his Poetics, it is a single, seemingly inconsequential, “natural” difference between certain human beings that contributes to their undoing and eventually their downfall.

Aristotle famously calls such a difference a “tragic flaw”.

It is the one almost imperceptible difference that in the end makes all the difference.

Interesting, the Greek word (hamartia) Aristotle uses for “tragic flaw” is the same one found in the Bible commonly translated as “sin”.

The subtle shift in meaning from classical to Hellenistic Greek during the half millennium before the birth of Jesus may be dismissed as something of only an eccentric and esoteric interest for scholars. But it raises for us today a much more compelling question.

Is the present, increasingly hysterical disconnect in Western culture between the moral “frames” of large segments of the population leading us toward catastrophe?

Is our own “tragic flaw” – or “sinfulness” – our commitment to the kind of “values pluralism” that each side has weaponized sufficiently to demonize the other and slowly, but inexorably, lay the groundwork for violent, existential conflict.

We are all familiar with the long-surviving cliché that one person’s “terrorist” is his adversary’s “freedom fighter.”

But as the social compact unravels at an accelerating pace such a simple intuition takes on infinite variations.

For example, one individual’s “hate” speech” becomes the other’s “freedom of expression”.

One’s “welcome” to immigrants becomes the other’s enabling of criminal activity.

One’s realization that federal funding and entitlements must be slashed in order to save the national economy from disaster becomes the other’s cry of “moral cruelty” and even “fascism”.

And so on.

Once more, consider immigration.

As Charles Lane remarks, the only way these days out of the ever more dangerous immigration policy impasse is some kind of “grand bargain” that offers the “only solution to the chaos that is making the U.S. look more like the countries that many illegal immigrants left”.

Lane stresses how the inflexible stances of Republicans and Democrats over the years have taken us uncomfortably close to an historical point of no return, even though “a revised version of past efforts at compromise—a policy somewhere between ‘deport them all’ and ‘abolish ICE’—is what the broader public probably wants”.

The problem is that whether we locate ourselves on the right side or the left side of the barricades, we have let our own “moral politics” usurp what politics is ultimately all about – that is, compromise.

Furthermore, in our rage for the realization of our own fanatical “truth” commitments we have willingly become the strangest of bedfellows with those whom, if we candidly and fastidiously took stock of their aims and character, we would recoil in horror.

Pace those who simultaneously cheer Hamas and wave the rainbow flag.

We have all bought into the pernicious sentiment summed up in the Latin adage fiat iustitia et pereat mundus (“let justice be done, though the world perish”).

This past week’s headlines make it clear that the world is perishing much faster than anyone could have ever anticipated.