The Quislings of American Collapse

How Downwardly Mobile Americans are Being Radicalized into Betraying America

Check out the jaw-dropping picture above — which by now you might have seen. Now think about Senators travelling constantly to Moscow for reasons unknown. Then consider a President who’s more loyal to Russian self-interest than he is to any vaguely American ideal.

America today faces a (yet another) crisis that’s as weird and bizarre as it is gruesome. School shootings? Opioid epidemics? Retirees living in their cars and working at Walmart? Insulin which costs ten times what it does in Pakistan or Iran?

Try the quislings of American collapse. Whole groups of Americans — like the fine gentlemen above — seem to be perfectly happy betraying America. By putting Russian oligarchy, repression, and ethnic supremacy, above American democracy, freedom, and civil society. What does it all mean?

What’s happening, to put it bluntly, is that (some) downwardly mobile white American middle class men — at least some of them — are being radicalized. Not by ISIS, by communism. But by a seductive, grandiose kind of authoritarianism. To become something like true believers in the Russian model of society. A patriarchal supremacy. A repressive, ethnically charged patriarchy, in which the state is a mechanism for the pure and strong to dominate the impure and weak, with violence, exclusion, fear, and intimidation. All of which the pure and strong believe vehemently is right, just, noble, and true. But it’s in fact just a tool of oligarchy, to go on enriching itself. Give men in decline someone to hate, it seems, and they’ll let you exploit them to the bone. Who cares if an oligarch owns your energy grid — when you have gays to bash, women to demean, and immigrants to bully?

Doesn’t that sound like where this group of American men are heading today? They’re being radicalized into being true believers in authoritarian supremacy, Russian style. Not quite apartheid, not quite segregation, not quite full on fascism — something more like “strong men arise, and fulfill your destiny, because you are the rightful leaders of a society, and everything in it, whether households, corporations, governments, cities, towns. You have a social license to prey on everyone who is…