A nation at odds.

Robert Reich
8-2-2016

I’m not sure we’ve ever been as divided as we are now, at least since the Civil War. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, Newt Gingrich warned of a coming apocalypse if Hillary Clinton is elected. His view was widely shared by Republican delegates. “There are a lot of people who think the whole purpose of all this turmoil is to create martial law,” Hal Wick, a Republican delegate from South Dakota, told the New Yorker’s Jill Lapore (below), Wick doesn’t believe that the United States will last much longer if Hillary Clinton wins. “If you do the research and the reading,” he said, “you find out that, if you get to a point where more than half the people are on the dole, the country doesn’t exist. It descends into anarchy.” It won’t take as long as four years. “I give it two or three,” Wick said. “Tops.” Susan Phillips, another Trump delegate, says she loves Trump because he says all the things she wants to say and can’t; because he speaks her thoughts about the half of America that’s living off the other half, and about the coming lawlessness. Lapore asked Phillips what happens if Trump loses. She said, “Then we’ve got to build our compounds, get our guns ready, and prepare for the worst.”

The following week, in Philadelphia, when Democrats on the floor talked about Trump, they tended to talk about a political apocalypse possibly even darker than the one conjured by Trump supporters when they imagined a Clinton Presidency: Fascism, the launch codes, the end of days.

What’s going on here? Economic stresses don’t tell the whole story, obviously, but they’re a big part of it. They close people’s minds. The decline of the American middle class has ended the American dream for millions, and ushered in apocalyptic thinking.

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