Shame seems to be the big thing at the moment (“And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”) as the US regresses to Second World status, with our would-be dictator and primitive public realm.
Our emerging civic models are disease-vector cults (fringe Mennonites, the Ultraorthodox) and it’s INSANE that we keep giving zealots vaccination exemptions and education exemptions and civic existence exemptions but this is where we are. Eventually our sense of shame will disappear, and it’ll be all Ostrogoth and Visigoth and Mad Max Fury Road.
At least we’ll have plenty of guns for the incipient permanent warfare.