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Levels of trust in America—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late? @nytdavidbrooks on America’s moral convulsion: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share // This
2/ is a very serious essay by David Brooks--much longer than what he can write in the NY Times. He does a very good job of looking at the macro indicators of social mistrust and the larger social-economic forces that drive social mistrust. But, like many conservative and liberal
3/ public intellectuals, the main driver of social distrust and destruction of institutions is completely omitted: the Christian Right. As I ended my interview with @PaulHRosenberg in Salon, https://www.salon.com/2020/09/26/behind-trumps-push-for-civil-war-a-deep-history-of-white-supremacist-paranoia/ public intellectuals completely ignore Hofstadter's
4/ Anti-Intellectualism in American Life which has 3 full chapters on the epistemological disruptions from fundamentalist Christianity. Public intellectuals completely ignore the solid research from @FredClarkson and @julieingersoll on the destructive orientation of the Christian
5/ Right. My own research has focused on how the Christian Right has used its political warfare strategy--devised by Paul Weyrich and William Lind at the Free Congress Foundation called Fourth Generation Warfare--to declare open, vicious, radical, revolutionary warfare against
6/ liberalism, secularism, science, liberals, the Democratic Party and its base, and the Enlightenment. It has been the political strategy, note STRATEGY, to divide Americans and to incite MENACE (fear), UNCERTAINTY, and MISTRUST. Where do the latter 3 come from? From John Boyd's
7/ "Essence of Moral Conflict" which is the epistemological basis for his OODA LOOP. Boyd's biographers wrote that Boyd thought his OODA Loop was so dangerous that he almost did not publish it. But, the OODA Loop is what underlies Fourth Generation Warfare. David Brooks notes the
8/ unravelling and destruction and looks to larger, impersonal forces. But, any all-source analysis would include this truth: this unravelling and destruction is the result of a deliberate political strategy rooted in Christian Reconstruction and pursued by the Christian Right
9/ using the GOP as its battering ram. The truth is that the barbarians are inside the gate. They are already looting and pillaging the state and its institutions. And until you look fundamentalist Christianity in the eye, you don't really understand what's going on.
