Here we are, exactly one month later, finally nearing the conclusion of my rather long-winded Descent-induced analysis of how the United States of America rapidly transformed itself into a den of moral and political turpitude.
So what, exactly, have we learned?
That 238 years after producing its fabled Constitution, the USA finds itself deep in the throes of precisely the sort of authoritarian, structure-dismantling regime that that very Constitution had been explicitly constructed to avoid, driven by a powerful corporate media determined to conflate news with entertainment in order to maximize profits from its celebrity-obsessed viewing audience and significantly aided and abetted by a hypocritically grasping religious establishment, all while the vast majority of the nation’s many experienced political experts did effectively nothing to halt this previously unthinkable societal-wide act of immoral self-destruction.
Well, it’s fair to say that most of us knew that basic story already.
The key question, of course, is, What, on earth, can be done about it?
A relatively straightforward thing to identify – and one I’ve primarily focused on in this series of substack articles – is what not to do:
Don’t confuse the terrifying genuine threat of an authoritarian American regime that’s actively destroying the vital structural checks and balances of American society with vapid, hand-wringing phrases like “protecting our democracy”.
Don’t forget the actual history of the founding of America, why its justifiably storied Constitution was created the way it was and what made it work so well for so long.
Don’t waste your time listening to Hollywood celebrities or rock stars or wildly self-aggrandizing, supremely ignorant, manifestly self-interested “media analysts” give their opinions on the situation.
Don’t be numbed into distraction by the deluge of “news” stories that somehow manage to drastically lower the bar with each passing day so that yesterday’s once inconceivable injustices become today’s “accepted norms”.
In particular, don’t forget – never forget – that Donald Trump committed one of the most heinous acts imaginable for an American president: consistently inventing wholly baseless claims of a “stolen election” to jeopardize the fundamental peaceful transition of power, before finally inciting a mob to storm the Capitol in his name the day those election results were being officially recognized (torturing police officers en route); and then, after being somehow re-elected four years later, granting the rioters full pardons.
So there’s that. That’s the easy part.
Now it gets drastically, almost impossibly, tougher.
Back in 2021, when I wrote Exceptionally Upsetting, I was hardly optimistic that Americans would be able to right their leaky societal boat, but it seemed at least logically possible. Trump was finally out of office, and reasonable, competent people were now back in control in Washington. Over time, despite the overwhelming pressures of a debilitating global pandemic, it was not inconceivable to envision that Americans could slowly come to their senses: put their toxic, artificially-induced animosities, raging conspiracy theories and servile tribalism behind them, grieve for their many COVID dead, and eventually come to appreciate the full extent of the terrible destruction that their dalliance with an unhinged megalomaniac had wreaked.
But that didn’t happen. To put it mildly.
Of course, many mistakes were made.
If you’re dealing with a dangerous demagogue who’s constantly screaming to his adoring fans that he’s the victim of a politically-motivated conspiracy, you don’t first indict him for improperly misallocating the line item for hush money to a porn star (I mean, really – who the hell cares?) and then indict him for the relative misdemeanour of taking confidential documents to his home after leaving office, before finally getting around to charging him with the colossally significant act of vigorously attempting to subvert a presidential election.
Doing things that way only served to convince his adoring supporters (a particularly low bar, of course) that his conspiracy theories were bang-on, that every indictment was just one identical bullet after another coming from the guns of his jealous opponents who now had the momentary upper hand.
And by needlessly clinging on to power for far too long, Joe Biden went a considerable distance towards reinforcing the caricature of the “selfish career politician” that Donald Trump had long argued necessitated his “outsider” presence to begin with.1
But still and all, the results were nothing less than astounding: Donald Trump not only won the Electoral College vote (312 to 226), this time he also won the popular vote (49.81% to 48.34%).
After cozying up to Russia’s dangerous dictator and publicly ignoring the results of his own intelligence agencies,2 after having been impeached for withholding congressionally-approved military aid to the president of Ukraine in an effort to get him to investigate the son of his political rival, after having knowingly misled the American people on the severity of a global pandemic that almost certainly resulted in the additional deaths of tens of thousands of citizens, after blatantly lying about a “stolen election” and inciting a riotous mob to storm the US Capitol and after being indicted on repeated occasions for a variety of crimes, this guy won the popular vote in the following American presidential election against an educated, articulate, experienced opponent.
What, exactly, is it about your precious democracy that you’re so concerned about preserving?
Seen from the outside, I have to tell you, there is not much sympathy for America’s current plight. So now the narcissistic criminal you knowingly re-elected has felt sufficiently emboldened by his experiences to adopt increasingly authoritarian measures. Well, what else could you have possibly expected?
But again – and this is the point I’ve been trying to stress throughout – the problem is not Donald J. Trump. He’s just one guy – and frankly, a pretty laughably pathetic guy at that, George Clooney’s “charismatic celebrity” characterization notwithstanding. The problem is the 77,303,568 people who voted for him.
77,303,568 people.
And while it’s undeniably true that there are many obviously unhinged individuals in the Trump camp – white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and so forth, with several of them currently in Congress, as it happens – it’s quite frankly impossible to seriously envision that there are 77 million such Americans. If that’s the case, you clearly have even bigger problems.
So here we are. What to do with these 77 million people? How to explain them? How to meaningfully move forwards in a society that has somehow wilfully opted to partition itself into two very large non-overlapping groups, with the slightly larger one resolutely determined to avoid any form of rational discourse, convinced as they are that any objective criticisms of their heroic leader can only be interpreted as attacks against them personally?
Because this is the flagrant asymmetry that we are dealing with. Every time someone who, bemoaning an unprecedentedly divided America, urges those on opposite sides to “seek common ground”, there is a false equivalence being established, as if both parties are equally obstreperous in their determination to avoid a rational discussion. That’s simply not true.3
Only one side is like that. The vast majority of people who voted for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris were quite willing to concede that their preferred candidates, and the policies that they adhered to, were far from optimal – a natural consequence of the fact that they represented something other than a mere cult of personality peddling persecution and division. Which is all to say that focusing on the merits of dispassionate rational discourse isn’t going to get you anywhere under these circumstances. It takes two to tango.
When I wrote Exceptionally Upsetting four years ago, I tried to offer a prescription of how things might, conceivably, get better. I didn’t believe for a moment that what I was recommending was going to happen, and I didn’t even think that if it somehow did happen it would be the slightest bit effective, but I felt that I needed to suggest some concrete prospect for hope. If you’re going to take the time to diagnose a serious societal problem in detail, you owe anyone willing to spend the time plowing through it the prospect of some sort of possible solution, if only a flighty, hugely unlikely one.
My thinking at the time was that somehow something needed to be done to get Americans weaned off the inflammatory so-called “news programs” that were so deliberately fostering division. My solution was admittedly both naive and unfeasible,4 but I remain convinced that my diagnosis of the problem – how we must find a way to minimize the pernicious effects of a perpetually schismatic media culture – was the right one.
A year or so later, when I produced a documentary on the coronavirus pandemic, while we were still stuck in the middle of it,5 I was struck by the fact that University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson made a very similar assessment of the problem, but her proposed solution was to somehow find a way get Americans to move out from behind their respective CNN/Fox News barricades to talk directly with each other and share their stories.
As soon as I heard this, I realized that she was absolutely right. If there was any conceivable way forward this was it: to find a way to get Americans to directly encounter one another again and connect on a personal, emotional level. It wasn’t about rational argumentation or stimulating intellectual curiosity. It was about empathy.
Because the thing about Americans, one of their long-defining attributes that’s often overlooked, is their fundamental sense of decency. I don’t know how to rigorously define this, let alone justify it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Here’s one revealing way to look at it: there’s nowhere on earth that you’re more likely to have a concerned waitress come up to you and ask you if you’re alright when you’re staring bleakly at your coffee cup at 1 am.
I’ve visited the United States many times throughout my life, and I never came without a strong sense of excitement. I’ve often stressed the importance of America’s world-leading research culture, which was frequently linked to the official reason for going in the first place, but that wasn’t, in itself, the cause of my personal enthusiasm. I was excited at the prospect of meeting people, of having new experiences, of sharing a laugh. Because that almost always happened whenever I went to the US, often when I least expected it, and just as often in “red” states as “blue” states.
But that America is now precipitously close to becoming extinct, thanks to the reinforcing combination of a deliberately polarizing media and a deliberately antagonistic president with the empathetic capacities of a hammerhead shark. When the rest of the world hears the word “American” in 2025 many things leap to mind, but “kind”, “generous”, “fun” or “decent” – all words that have long been inextricably associated with Americans, and subtly tied to its genuine former greatness – are no longer on our lips.6 Instead we now think of blind hatred, intolerance, tribalism and conspiracy theories.
If I have to live in a world with a bitter, petty and overwhelmingly unempathetic America, I’d naturally much rather it be led by a well-balanced government that respects the rule of law and isn’t driven by the narcissistic desires of its authoritarian leader and his spineless enablers (not least because it would surely be safer for the planet).
But I still wouldn’t ever want to visit.
So with all that said, here’s my proposal:
Let’s start a new movement. And to signify our adherence to the core values of this movement, let’s use hats emblazoned with a four-letter acronym.7 But unlike another energetically hatted group to which it will inevitably be compared, ours will be white8 and emblazoned in basic black with the letters MADA - Make America Decent Again.
The obligations of MADA members are reassuringly light: no rallies to attend, no TV channels to watch, no list of candidates to support. In fact, there’s only one tenet that all MADA members must subscribe to:
Whenever you hear a vitriolic denunciation of any individual or collective group, in person, on social media or elsewhere, you’re morally obligated to quietly smile (or use a smile emoji), simply say (or write) “MADA” and then leave the environment (real or electronic). Any MADA member seen engaging in any angry political argument risks having his hat legally confiscated by another MADA member and publicly exposed as someone bringing shame on the movement by acting indecently.
And for those who, taking a page out of my book,9 are curious to know which specific period I’m calling for us to return to, when, exactly, I’m convinced America used to be genuinely “decent”, here’s my answer: some time shortly before June 2015 or so when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 election, a time when the following 2013 clip struck everyone as both straightforwardly and transparently funny.
So that’s it: that’s my big plan, my grand solution. As ridiculous as it sounds, it’s the best I can do.
But here’s the thing. Right after I wrote this piece, we set up a link to purchase merch-on-demand MADA hats and Make American Decent Again hats, just as a joke. And you know what? We quickly discovered that several other people have already done the exact same thing (and not just hats; in the great American consumer tradition, there are MADA T-shirts, MADA cups, MADA thermoses, and much more).
In fact, one group even put together a website that, below their shop, outlines their mission statement (see here). I must confess that I’m not super-crazy about their choice of green and gold, and I’m still convinced that my added touch of being able to legally confiscate any MADA hat from an indecently-behaving member has a certain panache, but I can’t help but be impressed that many others have come up with the same idea.
Maybe there’s some reason for hope after all.
Howard Burton
It’s really high time we stopped the unreflective gushing about how career politicians have altruistically “dedicated their life to public service”, by the way. Joe Biden seems to me a decent sort of fellow, and it’s unquestionably impressive to have spent over 50 years as a US Senator, vice president and president, but it’s an insult to my intelligence to pretend that in doing so he has spent his life making enormous personal sacrifices for the benefit of his country.
Why, by the way, do you think that Vladimir Putin’s Russia elected to interfere in America’s 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton? This was the unequivocal conclusion of the Mueller Report (Mueller is a career Republican, it should be mentioned), but is now, like everything else, the subject of an aggressive historical rewriting agenda by the current administration.
It is a curious but undeniable fact that whenever a dangerous radical group emerges, after a few months or so the press begin to confidently identify its so-called “moderate” wing, thereby providing us with “moderate” members of ISIS, “moderate” members of Al-Qaida, etc. So it is that dozens of people who slavishly followed Donald Trump for years before suddenly waking up to the fact that he had “alarming authoritarian tendencies” are able to successfully position themselves as “moderate former insiders” in order to get a significant book deal for their tell-all memoir. I have no doubt that if a radical group would emerge tomorrow dedicated to the cause of murdering left-handed cellists, after a few weeks Anderson Cooper would be interviewing one of their leading “moderates” who “progressively maintains” that they should only be maimed.
I recommended that America’s universities, one of its clear sources of international excellence, step up and generate a wealth of high-level, stimulating, politically neutral programs to intrigue and captivate the populace. Of course, universities did nothing of the sort (i.e. nothing at all). And now they’re very much paying the price. But that’s another story.
Pandemic Perspectives (2022)
A point I tried to emphasize in a May 2021 Op-Ed in The Hill.
A provenly effective gimmick; one should never refrain from stealing successful ideas from any possible quarter.
I had first thought of purple, which seemed fitting given that it is, logically, part blue and part red and thus symbolic of bipartisanship. But it turns out that there’s considerable debate about what “pure purple” actually is, with some believing it to be closer to blue and others closer to red – and under the circumstances it seems idiotic to provide yet further opportunity for political conflict. So white – the colour of peace – seems much more appropriate. Plus, it will maximally reflect the sun’s rays this way, thereby further encouraging, hopefully, the notion that cooler heads will prevail.
See my July 30 substack post, The Benefits of History. And very good for you, by the way, if you asked that question.