“The Trump administration’s decision to publicize something like Alligator Alcatraz is not just a useful weapon that they can now threaten their enemies — and Elon Musk — with. It’s also a distinctly new form of propaganda. Something they seem to have picked up from the video tours of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. The concentration camp reimagined as a hype house. A place to make content, both real and AI-generated, that glorifies the power of the state. What Democratic super-poster Will Stancil described this week as “pornography for Trump's sadistic base.” But also content that desensitizes you. That normalizes state violence and, most importantly, turns it into a meme. Trump’s administration knows that the most effective propaganda of the 21st century is viral, ephemeral, and, crucially, stupid. Something CNN hosts can joke about on air, distracted by how idiotic the name is. How goofy the T-shirts are. Completely removed from the human misery happening behind closed doors.”

“[Robert] Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in 2000, chronicled the precipitous decline of social trust and civic engagement over the course of four generations since the end of World War II. Spoiler alert: The book’s conclusion was that at that moment, America was at a dangerously low level of social trust; the effects of the internet and social media had yet to be seen at that point, but Putnam was agnostic, or at best, cautiously optimistic, about where things would lead. Even so, let’s just say that after you put down Bowling Alone you will most likely have an urge to go change into sweatpants.

Perhaps feeling some guilt from basically predicting the end of democracy (especially as his implicit prophecy began to be realized), Putnam published a prequel to Bowling Alone in 2020. His thesis took the initial data presented in Bowling Alone — the high point of social trust and civic engagement culminating in the mid 1960s — and instead of looking at where we went from there, he looked at how we got there. What he found was fascinating, and it forms the basis of his book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The Upswing takes as its starting point the Gilded Age — an era marked by acute income inequality, xenophobia and nativism, rapid technological change, a surge of immigration, monopolists, oligarchs, and isolationism. Sound familiar? (Incidentally, the Gilded Age is Trump’s favorite era.)

From the Gilded Age, Putnam graphs changes in income inequality, bipartisanship in government, participation in community, civic engagement, and a number of other factors, and found a consistent pattern, to wit: An “upswing” which saw the creation of the New Deal, public education, more open immigration policies, progress in civil rights, social solidarity, and an overall marked shift from individualism to community culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965. He characterizes this trend as an evolution from the “me” to the “we”.”

“In 2011 I didn’t want to see our nation degenerate into two polarized groups that were equally self-righteous, sanctimonious and insufferably judgmental, but it happened anyway. Likewise, I don’t want to see a surging escalation of state’s rights that ultimately cause our nation to become an expanded and updated version of the European Union, but I believe that is where we are headed.

By 2033 you will hear this idea of “each state doing their own thing” being proposed by Alpha Voices that will arise and popularize it.

Ten years later, the “ME” cycle of 2043 will be launched in the heady delusion that all of America’s problems can be solved by letting each state become, in essence, its own little country. America will maintain a common currency and a standing army to defend the member states, but the real power of the nation will have shifted to the governors and state legislatures. When you cross a state line the laws will change in profound and meaningful ways.

By 2063 we will have begun to realize that if you sow to the wind, you reap a whirlwind, and we will begin to mourn what we left behind.

I will be 105 years old in 2063 so it is unlikely that I will be paying much attention. But that’s okay. I’ve already seen this movie, I know how it ends.”