Entropy Dave: Funnily enough, just today I described the urban design of Los Angeles as being like Godzilla had a wank and splooged out a giant lake of goo. That's my origin myth for LA. I say that as a fan of the culture of LA, just not the urban geography.
I was being serious though. A yankee friend of mine asked me dead in earnest, "As a patriot, I feel like I should do something, but what?" The New York Times is my primary newspaper so I keep up pretty well with American politics. It's been bad, getting worse for at least 25 years, ever since that asshat Grover Norquist decided to cripple the Republican political class by demonising legislative compromise. But the decline is reaching a new low, because the Republican political class has now effectively been neutered by an egocentric fool with no regard for anything but his own emotions.
The power of America has been that it has a thin culture. What I mean by that is not that it is not rich with things like music, football, food, rituals, etc. It is. Rather, the culture of membership and citizenship is thin. It is not based on 800 years of this or that region's history, like Europe or China. History doesn't matter--how could it? most American families have been in the country for less than 100 years--it is the ideas that matter, and it is from these ideas that the political institutions are made. So to become an American you just need to buy in to a few civic ideals. This is great because it means America can absorb anyone at any time, irrespective of creed, history, etc.
But the downside is that when someone violates these ideas, when someone undermines these institutions built on this thin culture, there are relatively few resources on which to draw. It is all held together by a shared belief in a few basic ideas. The French can reply, with the weight of history behind them, by saying this is not true to France. I don't think you can really do that in the US, unless you hark back to a few (mostly inaccurate) stories from the founding days of the country (think of George Washington and Paul Revere). These stories don't give us much traction.
We've seen the Republic subverted by subtle means, as Cheney did when he suborned the Office of Legal Counsel. But now we're seeing it subverted by unsubtle means that move the norms, that remove the inhibitions, that dismantle the thin culture that holds these institutions together. It is like everyday is a day to use the "nuclear option" in the Senate, everyday is a day where what matters is only whether you win (compare Merrick Garland and Neil Gorsuch), and where all that matters is whether you can get away with it (cp. Scott Pruitt).
This nothing to do with feeling alienated from the American voting public or having expatriated myself. It is about seeing a great country, my homeland, being destroyed almost literally day by day from within its own institutions. I only hope the next generation are better people than we were.
