No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’…

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1 https://t.co/m0DL6Cmo1G https://t.co/NZjNYySapn

It shows something fascinating, which I’ll link to the ideas about how status runs all societies, in every way. American is under-policed, and over-imprisoned. What that means socially/culturally is a key that unlocks the US catastrophe. /2 https://t.co/BRSUk1pPEg

As Lewis and Usmani describe, the US does policing differently to much of the rest of the world. Policing is more at arms-length, reactive to events as they unfold, rather than preventative and visible. I think the reason for this is that key. /3

It’s the same fundamental hostility to institutional, ‘public’ life that the US was founded upon, in its Puritan-led escape from Europe. US life is fundamentally hostile to collective institutions, which are consistently portrayed as restrictive to ‘freedoms’. /4

The individual and his (nearly always his) God is pre-eminent. His rights and freedoms. Everything else is an ‘authoritarian’ attack on these freedoms and rights. Which is why most of the current authoritarian hysteria about Trump is a bit of a yawn. /5

Yes the Trumpian movement is transforming America into a more authoritarian society. But it’s not the taking over of a previously ‘democratic’ society, by Trump. The society was already, in its deepest DNA, Trumpian. It’s why he’s so hugely popular. /6

Trump tapped into the deepest passion of the US, as a nation. All sides of political team sports sign up to it. Trump is destroying institutions. But his opponents run campaigns to defund police, for example. Down with institutions! /7

Which takes us back to Lewis and Usmani. I suspect the reason the US is under-policed is pretty simple. Visible policing in the way the rest of the world takes for granted is a direct assault on the culture of ‘freedom’, the hostility towards public institutions. /8 https://t.co/BkPCGQFVHA

So instead, the US throws astronomical numbers of people into jail, for astronomical lengths of time. Just look at that line. The absence of basic ‘keeping the peace’ policing means everything boils over into unchecked violence and criminality. /9 https://t.co/pX92mmFN9L

Leaving the US no other option but to lock the offenders up, after the horse has bolted. Or execute them. Which in turn is entirely consistent with man-and-his-God moral life, vengeance rather than basic public order. /10

I think America is much more easily understandable by noticing its absolute obsession with ‘authoritarianism’. To American culture, the bar for that is almost hilariously low. Even the most progressive pursue anti-trust politics, to bring corporations to heel. /11

The enemy is always collective, institutional anything. The outcome is always supposed to be restoration of the freedom of the individual, with or without his God. The US is collapsing right now not because it’s being taken over by fascists. /12

It’s at war with itself. It always has been. Until Covid, its own Civil War was easily its most lethal event. Public health action against Covid ran aground on all the same freedom nonsense, so overtook it. The culture itself is the problem. /13

Now magnified exponentially by the merging of an anti-establishment counterculture going on for 60 years, with a technology (social media) that gives this culture a framework to extend into every tiny nook and cranny of life. /14

No need to have a society at all, if you can all ‘mobilise’ your glorious individual freedoms on social media, to form your own mini-societies. We live inside social media now. That cancer has spread globally. /end