Portrait of a Fraught America
Fall 2024
American Gothic, an AI generated monstrosity
The American people face societal decay on multiple fronts. They’ve lost their iconic imagination, paralyzed by fear and fed AI dreams from dull billionaires. There’s failing infrastructure magnified by an obscene lack of climate change preparedness, exemplified in the massive destruction caused by natural disasters. Add to that the state of increasingly unaffordable health care, crippling student loan debt, exorbitant housing costs, lack of affordable childcare, and stagnant wages.
Americans contribute to GoFundMe campaigns to pay for family members' and acquaintances’ medical bills while other developed nations enjoy socialized medicine through their taxes. Meanwhile, American taxes go to corporate welfare, global war, and private contracts for lobbyists. Campaign finance reform failed and corporations are people now.
The big banks, the car lobby, the NRA, Big Pharma, AIPAC, defense contractors, and other profiteers, own politicians in blatant moves of legalized corruption to disenfranchise voters. Anti-democratic tactics such as voter roll purges, gerrymandered districts, and pushing candidates from ballots go relatively unchallenged.
White Supremacy vs. the Social Fabric
Meanwhile, white supremacy erodes society from within. From suppressing votes and redlining, to gutting education, public transportation, and third spaces, white supremacists have usurped public goods in favor of segregated, privatized wealth, leaving communities depleted, not to mention the practice of selectively policing non-white communities to criminalize poverty and to profit from prison slave labor with increasingly militarized force. Mass shootings are bred from the alienation from an absent community, the easy violence of an armed society, and a government that sets an example of "solving problems" through armed conflict.
A Lament for Academia
Knowledge is gatekept, compromised, or fractured. Public intellectuals are rare. Sports are well funded at universities while professors remain adjunct without benefits for years. Academia favors publishing, not inquiry, teaching and public dissemination. The excessively specialized jargon of each discipline further obfuscates the work necessary for broad cultural cultivation. The capitalist co-option of research funding and the peer review process endangers credibility for bodies of knowledge, and fosters conspiracy theories among people with limited understanding of systemic issues. All the while, the intellectual class is occupied with careerism or superiority complexes over those in other disciplines.
A New Wilderness
The public is left to fend for itself in an environment of AI-generated content, paywalled journalism, and disinformation campaigns. At the same time, legacy media erodes confidence as it parrots government talking points or the framework approved by corporate heads. In the sphere of social media, Meta enacts its own censorship, and the government moves toward restrictions on free speech with the TikTok ban and "antizionism is antisemitism" legislation.
The Imperial Boomerang Era
Genocides rage abroad while citizens are sacrificed to conduct them. The violent suppression of protests, the construction of cop cities, the impending TikTok ban, and the overall gutting of communities in a surveillance state tears at the social fabric of America. Movies like Alex Garland’s “Civil War” released in April of this year feel thematically appropriate and not at all farfetched.
The Fate of the Electorate and Beyond
It’s days before the 2024 U.S. presidential elections. Corporate lobbies have captured the two major political parties, an antiquated electoral system pits the popular vote against minority power, and a mere 43,000 voters in swing states may determine the next Commander-in-Chief of the military-industrial complex.
As a result, the world will inherit MAGA fascism with Republican Donald Trump, or Blue MAGA repression with Democrat Kamala Harris.
There is no will from Harris’ party for deep systemic change, so she may, at best, extend the finite window of safety for women’s rights and trans rights. And that’s only if Trump supporters accept the election results if she wins, and if they don’t succeed in another January 6th-style insurrection.
The Pro-Insurrection Conspiracy Theorists
The American electorate has become increasingly cultish, ruled by fear, and unable to forge a common morality. Anti-vaxxers, covid deniers, flat-earthers, and other conspiracy theorists are manipulated endlessly toward consumption as their only contribution to society. Meanwhile, their agency dwindles. Being denied proper education and meaningful work, they seek community based on shadows of half-truths.
The Comfortable Careerists
For other Americans, their education and social status creates the impression that the turmoil outside their comfortable sphere is manageable by leadership. Incrementalism appears to be the most stable approach. Beholden to mortgages, career stakes, and retirement goals, they are unmotivated to change much. With their ideological commitments to moderation and centrism, they are pulled further right over time while accepting the Overton window into which they are corralled. Their economic hurdles are inconveniences rather than symptoms of the looting of America.
Socially isolated from the state of other classes, they recoil from the bold reforms that are needed. They remain unaware that the major ideologies of an age - imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy - are coming to a head in a way that policy adjustments on a minor timescale can’t deter. They prefer to make the trains run on time for a bad machine than to ally themselves with unpolished changemakers who want a good machine.
The Cannibalistic Left
Then there is the progressive contingent. Not even a true left compared to other nations, people in this group generally seek basic rights and refuse to be pulled further toward conservatism. Among them are armchair activists and chronically online theorists, as well as more praxis oriented community organizers and direct action planners. They clamor about guillotines and relish the sunken yachts and submarines of billionaires. They have episodes of collaborative mass mobilization such as with the Occupy, Standing Rock, and Anti-Genocide movements, but rarely mobilize to convert those numbers into votes in swing states.
They are easily internally fractured by their own purity politics, infiltration that promotes inefficiency, or mere survival in an economy that crushes the working class.
The Prognosis
The timeline for change is long. For perspective, there is an image of a traffic jam in the center of Amsterdam in the 1970s compared to its iteration as a bicycle-haven in the 2000s. It took 30 years in one capital city for this policy to come to fruition. If we extrapolate from that how long it will take for the US to tackle all of the policy failures on a national scale, it is at least a generation’s work. That is the optimistic timeline. Realistically, the work of alignment on core values as a society and overhaul of the electoral system will take even more time and collective effort.
Glimmers of Hope
However, there are some hopeful notes. Imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are no longer subjects sequestered to academia. They plainly appear in social media discourse, and sometimes in American cinema and television. Young people are engaged in confrontation, reckoning, and realignment with society’s past, and many have committed to a more life-affirming future. They are engaged in local mutual aid efforts and are more interested in living life than living under the boot of corporate exploitation. When they manage to vote, they tend to vote progressive.
Lastly, "America" is an idea that travels with its people who move abroad to other nations.The economic safety and thriving communities that once bolstered Americans’ love for imagination, inventiveness, critical inquiry, human rights, and entrepreneurship are found in other countries where freedom and prosperity do exist. Americans seeking a lost dream bring their assets to nations that can actually foster and benefit from them, while reconnecting Americans to much needed perspectives and models of community. That movement of ideas and ideals is, after all, the trend of history when once-powerful nations fall into decline.
————————————————————
If this piece provided valuable perspective today, or simply gave you a headache, please toss a coin this way for the breadlines. Thank you.
About the Author
Zerina Usmen is an American filmmaker. Her sci-fi feminist dramedy, “The Caliphate”, won best original screenplay at the 9th Annual Imagine This Women’s Film Festival.