A Meaner America

There’s a saying, origins unknown: “A fish rots from the head down”.

Like most cliches, it carries on from person to person because of its truthful nature.

I find myself saying it a lot these days, as I did eight years ago when the orange pretender to the Oval Office first parked his ass behind the Resolute Desk. At that time, though, I didn’t really observe too many instances of the deterioration of interpersonal civility. There were some examples of it for sure, mostly from ardent MAGA supporters high on the hubris they developed after the 2016 election. A quick Google search could easily evince some, and there are families with MAGA members who could well articulate how much their relationships suffered. But it wasn’t enough to note a dramatic collective shift our daily discourse and behavior. For the most part, we continued being civil toward one another.

Something happened in the eight years since, however. The rot that began to set in in 2017 has finally seeped behind the siding and is beginning to eat away at the support beams. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich opens a recent op-ed piece in The Guardian: “We are living in an age of bullies. Those with power are less constrained today than they have been in my lifetime, since the end of the second world war.” He then proceeds to ask: “How do we lead moral lives in this era?”