This is How Democracies End

Many of its citizens increasingly lose faith in the governing class and the governing institutions.  The establishment counters with more media manipulation as well as more militarized police.  The national security state increasingly uses fear to justify its excesses and creeping repression — fear of “homegrown terrorists” as well as a world full of hating America “terrorists” everywhere so those who are “Muslims” or from a list of bad countries are automatically suspect.    Economic nationalism escalates on top of  nationalist xenophobia.  Foreign wars expand as the establishment class keeps trying to get its population to rally around the flag with ever greater fears from abroad.    Other big and smaller nations are blamed and threatened – Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Syria.    Meanwhile at home even critical infrastructure is allowed to crumble — the Metro and Memorial Bridge in the Capitol just two landmark examples, and oh yes the basic health care system.   Talk of World War escalates as the military-industrial complex demands more money and authority, more weapons and power.  While many citizens take to more flag-waiving  others escalate flag-burning.

Today we are in a situation just waiting for something akin to 9/11 or the Reichstag Fire or Pearl Harbor or the Cuban Missile Crisis or a foreign-inspired banking crisis.  This time in the globalized internet world it could well be something different — a cyber shutdown, an assassination, a dirty nuke, an internet collapse, a major “accident” (real or false flag).

Americans are always in denial that it could happen here in what they still so falsely proclaim to be the “land of the free and the home of the brave”.    Yet step away and just look at us and what we have become and the trajectory we are on.  Just look at how many in the public now so negatively view the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive Branch (the Pentagon,  CIA, NSA, FBI and  “Homeland Security” as well as the Presidency).   As a result during the Obama years there was the grassroots “Occupy Movement” and now there are tens of thousands on the streets expressing outrage and disgust and chanting “We Reject”.  The revolt in the Democratic Party resulted in an aborted rallying around an aging Socialist Independent Senator from Vermont.  The Tea Party revolt in the Republican Party has succeeded in throwing out those who just a few years ago firmly controlled it.

And along comes a one-of-a-kind psychopath narcissist who masters in manipulating despair and  fear while bombastingly and unendingly promising to close the borders, expand further the police and the military and “Homeland Security”, and repeating ad infinitum to “Make the Country Great Again”.