The Moral Corruption of America
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
— William Butler Yeats
It’s taken me a while to process my most recent trip to America, my first trip back since the pandemic. I have spent many years living and working in the emerging world, seeing first hand poverty and deprivation, and the failures of states to adequately look after their own people. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in America.
It wasn’t just the sight of hundreds of drug addicts lying on the streets of San Francisco. Nor every city I subsequently visited, on both the west and east coast. Or the complete absence of any commitment to solving the challenges of climate change (where are all the recycling bins?). Nor the tasteless food, filled with salt and sugar, designed to get you hooked on yet another money-making scheme for a large corporation. Nor was it the cardboard cut-out homes of affluent California, devoid of history and soul, or the way in which I was forced to take a car everywhere because walking on the pavement means you take your life in your hands.
No, it was the response to a question posed, my incredulity that things in America had gotten this bad. ‘Well, the problem is, you see, is that California has raised its state taxes so high, that all the rich people are leaving to go and live in Texas.’ So, you are telling me that solving America’s problems come down to making sure that the rich pay even less taxes? Are you serious? Perhaps it was going to take a trip to America to make me feel grateful to be paying the high taxes of Europe because, at least, my children won’t have to grow up thinking it’s OK to step over a man dying on the street because of a fentanyl overdose. Oh, and that’s another thing, fentanyl. Yes. China’s fault apparently. It shouldn’t be making it so cheap. Bad China.
Addiction is the outward sign of a society so morally corrupt it has to blame someone else for its own failures. And that pretty much sums up America’s relationship with China too. But that’s a subject for another article……Perhaps in Europe we carry a greater humility, living daily with the layers of the past, more humbled by our relatively small role in the greater scheme of things.
And then, one month later, the final nail in the coffin. The wholehearted support for Israel’s slaughter of thousands of innocent children in the war against Hamas. Can this country really stoop any lower?
In a democracy, we get the government we deserve. There’s a limit to how much we can blame the system, at the expense of our own individual moral responsibility. Democracies, in particular, are predicted on the social contract that exists between the government and the governed. Liberal thinkers throw their hands up in horror at the rise of Trump, decrying the supposed technical fault lines of the system, without questioning their own deeply held values and beliefs. The justification of the need to lower taxes on the already insanely wealthy came from someone who supposedly represents the hallmark of American success as a progressive thinker. But even those deeply-held values of the endless pursuit of wealth are hard to question. It’s difficult to get away from the idea that everyone really does need a fridge the size of Texas in their home when your whole culture, let alone the economy, is predicated on the idea that more and bigger is better.
But here’s the thing. I think it might actually be a good thing for America to collapse. It’s hard to bring about a revolution in thought until things have gotten really bad. And a total revolution in our thinking is the only thing that is going to save America. And the world. We need to dig deeper into what constitutes true power and to question the foundation of our democracies. To acknowledge that technical solutions to changing the machinery of state have little impact if we don’t question the absence of moral courage of those in power. And our own responsibilities as citizens and voters in supporting leadership that is rotten to it’s core. Quite frankly, I’d have a hard time even voting for Biden right now, if I were an American voter, given the current government’s endorsement of Israel’s heinous actions. Perhaps it will take another Trump presidency to truly bring the country to its knees so that finally — finally! — the liberal thinkers too will exercise the needed humility to really question the foundations on which their society is built.
We have such an opportunity with the rise of the Global South to reframe a better and more collaborative multi-polar world and I, for one, welcome the total collapse of America if it brings with it a greater humility, true introspection and acknowledgement that the global status quo needs to change. We cannot build on false foundations and if anything good is to come from the horrific tragedies in Gaza, it is the emergence of new voices questioning our assumptions, our global governance structures, and leadership emerging from more thoughtful and substantial voices. The leadership exhibited by South Africa in bringing Israel to the International Court of Justice was a small step in this direction and I wholeheartedly support new voices and powers emerging to re-order our world.
Let’s use the moral collapse of America as an opportunity to write a better future for us all.
In memory of the children whose lives were lost in Palestine and Israel, who deserve better grown ups as their leaders.
Caroline Watson is the founder of The Centre for the Arts and Global Leadership, and a disruptive thinker, speaker and writer on issues of global governance and leadership.
