A society must sustain a collective conscience, a clear (but evolving) set of beliefs, morals and attitudes. Without it, society in the ordinary sense, society in the functioning sense, ceases to exist.
The American Republic's success was a product of a collective conscience invested in the freedom of the individual to speak truth to power, in democratic traditions, in the belief that no one was above the law. The First Amendment was our First Commandment: our right to speak against power in government, and the right and obligation of the media to fact check and confront it, and the right to "petition" government with our grievances are all there in the First Amendment.
Of course, we have always been deeply imperfect. Of course, we have often failed to live up to our values. But the vast majority believed in those values, and when push came to shove the vast majority would not tolerate a fascistic demagogue who would damage this central democratic idea of ourselves. At least that it what we must remember at a time such as this when even the aspirations of the Republic are no longer part of our common consciousness.
Without a functioning collective conscience, without a commitment to our deepest held values -- without a majority invested in viewing attacks on the First Amendment and the continued protection of a man held above the law as grave crimes -- we lose what Durkheim called social integration. We lose the solidarity that binds us as a functioning, moral society, what he called the organic solidarity that evolves as we appreciate our need for one another, our essential interdependence.
For reasons too long-winded to describe here, we have lost the moral values that are central to the American Republic's collective conscience. A large plurality of Americans are now authoritarians of one sort or another. Whether they are Corporatist-fascist, or Christo-fascist, or another breed of statist, is not important for this purpose. What is important is that over 40% of Americans now disavow the core values that gave their nation what moral credibility it once had: (1) a belief in the fundamental ethical idea of the universal dignity of man, (2) a ferocious protection of the freedom of speech, dissent, and media; and (3) the view that no man is above the law (that the unitary executive was a wholly objectionable totalitarian idea).
Durkheim would call our current malaise "anomie," but he theorized that societies work this out, eventually, as they have no choice. But that process can be monstrously costly. Like Keynes' "in the long run we're all dead," generations can be lost to bloodshed and totalitarianism before anomie is excised fully. Whole nations and empires can be lost along the way
The dissolution of the American collective conscience is now palpable as our cities are burning in mass protests against ongoing racist police killings inflamed by a white supremacist in the Oval Office on the verge of violating the tradition of Posse Comitatus.
In the case of the USA in 2020, a special twist is that the fragility of the biosphere and the desperate need for action now means that even a generation lost to a looting, Putin-inspired Oligarchy is likely to be a fatal delay, from which we cannot recover.
If the 2020 elections stand for anything, they stand for recovering our national reverence for the core values that made our collective conscience worthwhile and sustaining. Those who would degrade us by race, class, gender, orientation or religion; those who would suppress our dissent and the power of our media; those who would put themselves above the law must be, in the words of George Washington "banished from this earth."
If not, it is we who will be banished, instead.
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