Is this the beginning of the end of the American empire?

American Carnage

When people turn against their best self, what do they become?

He mobilised the rage in people, not because he sought to show them a way forward on a more just and rewarding path, but to take the power they would give him and use it as a means to destroy all who dare to see him for what he is.

George Orwell through his experience in Spain during its civil war learned well the ways of these monster men. Let us please, not call them strong men, for they are deep inside very frightened men and what they most fear and rage against is their own mortality. What they really stand for and what they really intend is almost always the opposite in meaning to the words they use. The 'Big, Beautiful Bill' represents a 'death march' in GOP populist economist Oren Cass's own words, it is 'a total dud for the people who actually voted for President Donald Trump.' Tax cuts for those who don't need them to be paid for with cuts of billions to Medicaid, food assistance and environmental programs. There goes quality of life for anyone not super rich. 

Now the military are urged to use Democrat cities as training grounds against the enemy within, that is anyone who believes in democracy, equality, love between our brothers and our sisters. 

Because who are these people who have welded themselves to MAGA? They are frightened people who see life as a fight against others. 

The American Revolution needed soldiers who would fight. They were promised freedom, democratic rights, the institutionalisation of the principle of equality. MAGA does not stand for freedom. It stands for winner takes all. 

Those who value truth, and honour, need to refrain from making divisions worse. Differences in values and differences in how cause and effect are understood, are not so important as respect for each other. 

The flattery though has to stop; it isn't a strategy, it is fawning. In Australia, our Indigenous people have a custom of turning their backs when someone has behaved in a way that makes them unworthy of respect.