![]() ![]() Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979 meanwhile, between 19, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. Limbaugh’s brand of bullying, populist white ethnocentrism – a rancid blend of aggrieved attacks on liberal elites, racist dog-whistling, bragging about American exceptionalism and appeals to authoritarian leadership – had become an integral part of mainstream political ideology in the U.S.īut one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2020, president Donald Trump awarded Mr. Then-president Donald Trump arrives with far-right conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh at a rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 2019. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. ![]() The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto. “Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.” This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled in the Senate. Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S.
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