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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 1/24/22

How America Is Becoming Unraveled

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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

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The morbidly rich have taken over politics, nobody trusts anybody, violence is up, gun sales have exploded & our nation experienced its first armed assault from traitors within since the Civil War

"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 surprise 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 Republican Teddy Roosevelt.

For those who haven't been paying close attention, here's a quick, bullet-point summary of how we got to this point of crisis and disintegration:

  • Prior to WWII, there were "two Americas": one for white people and another for everybody else. They were strictly held apart by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v Ferguson "separate but equal" decision.

  • A postwar executive order by President Harry Truman, Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, "that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin" ended official racial segregation in the military and began the modern era of racial integration of America. Cue the rise of rightwing hysteria.

  • That old soldier President Dwight D. Eisenhower thought it would be good if racial integration went national, and so did fellow Republican Earl Warren, who Eisenhower had put straight into the Chief Justice role on the Supreme Court on October 5th, 1953. The following year, Warren organized a unanimous decision to overturn Plessy v Ferguson, ruling in Brown v Board that schools could no longer be segregated.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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