"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" asked Jack Kerouac in his 1957 novel, On the Road - a work that defined and influenced a generation, including me. Kerouac's tale questioned the soul and direction of 1950s America with it's emphasis upon wealth, consumerism, and the chasing of the American Dream without a clear destination. One might paraphrase Kerouac's question for the America of the second decade of the 21st century and ask "Why goest thou, America, in thy shiny car into the dark", for America, the richest and most powerful nation on Earth is indeed in danger of entering a new dark age - all of its own making. The perverted policies and actions of Trump's Presidencies, America's GOP and the current witch hunt against against Dr Fauci prove the truth of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's comment over a century ago that "If you want to reach a large audience, appeal to idiots." The vilification of Dr Fauci is proof enough, were it required, that America has a very large audience of idiots wishing and waiting to be reached out to by those with evil intentions - Rand Paul, Robert Kennedy Jnr. Pete Hegseth and the rest of the amoral and mendacious demagogues that hold sway in Washington 2026. Dark times indeed for a nation once revered or feared in equal measure, but now mocked and ridiculed in the international court of public opinion.
The situation is bad enough over here in the UK but I fear America has long since passed the point of no return. In the end, however, this is not about Trump, Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci or any other single individual or policy. It's about the mindset of the American people and something there has gone profoundly wrong. It seems impossible to me, as an 81 year old to look at the USA - a nation once revered and who produced leaders, statesmen and ideas that shaped and improved the world - and wonder what has happened to the wisdom (what an old fashioned word that now seems) and good intentions that once drove Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, Obama and others. What happened to Lincoln's moral steadfastness or LBJ's "Great Society"? Where now are the men and women who govern with the humility and integrity of Jimmy Carter or share the world vision of FDR or the soaring promise of Obama? Would Kennedy's plea to "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" now fall upon deaf ears in Trump's America? I fear so. The words and ideas that once inspired generations not only in America but across the world now seem redundant and are replaced by brutalist and shameless lies and expletives on social media and from the mouths of America's current "leaders". Those great statesmen of the past became leaders not because of their inherent qualities; they became leaders because their wisdom and commitment to the common good was recognised and shared by the American electorate of yesteryear who gave them the power to act in their name. A nation gets the leaders it deserves; leaders reflect those who elected them and America's current leaders are a damning reflection upon much of America. Where I ask, has that wisdom and inherent goodness of the American electorate gone? Tragically, FDR's comment in his Second Inaugural Address in 1937 that "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little" would, in my view, get short shrift in today's White House and be howled down by the coarse, the wilfully ignorant and the shameless across swathes of Republican America. America and the world should weep - and Americans should take a long hard look at themselves; their nation is becoming a disintegrating society, a failed state.
So many in America (and here to in the UK), in their wilful ignorance have forgotten or chosen to ignore basic lessons of life and adulthood. Firstly, they have not listened to or understood, two of American author Mark Twain's life rules: "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" and secondly. "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured". In contemporary America (and in the UK) as the philippic against Dr Fauci confirms, many people are, through their actions, words, expletives and thoughts, proud of what they once would have been and now should be, ashamed of; posts on social media from "ordinary Americans" and what I witness in the wider media spewing from the mouths of Trump and his sycophantic followers speak volumes about their mindset and lack of shame.
And shame matters. In our hi-tech, anything goes, 24 hour news, social media driven culture the very word shame might seem old fashioned, something that our grandparents said to us when we were naughty children but when an individual or a society loses its sense of shame then it is in a downward spiral, for it is losing its sense of basic decency, worthy human values and just action. It is what happened in 1930s Germany; I wonder how long it will be before we witness the American version of Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht? Loss of shame - individually or across the community - weakens the moral "glue" which binds society together and returns a society to the law of the jungle. The ancient Greek soldier and statesman Thucydides told both his world and and ours in his great work “The Peloponnesian War” that in a world where anything goes, where the winner takes all, where right is defined by might then "The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must". Written almost three thousand years ago Thucydides' great work sets out the principles of military strategy, diplomacy, high politics and the use of power and is required study for all officers in training at the world’s leading military colleges such as America’s West Point, Britain’s Sandhurst, or France’s Saint Cyr. It is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it and he would recognise what is now happening in America 2026, and know its inevitable consequences - a world where the powerful do what they will, where any words or deeds become acceptable no matter how shameful, cruel or immoral, and where decency, truth and integrity have lost all meaning. And all at the expense of the weak for they have to "suffer what they must".
It is the dismissing of life lessons and values like these that bring the end of empires and civilisations. When "the people" choose ignorance over wisdom, hate and rage over love, and lies over truth and when they abdicate their responsibility to seek something better for their children and grandchildren by speaking and acting in a way contrary to the common good then they are condemning their society to a dark age. As Mark Twain warned, it poisons the body politic and rots the nation from the inside. This is what is happening in the akrasic mindset of contemporary America - just as it happened in England with the great act of national self harm that was the Brexit vote. America must - as my own England - re-learn one of the profound lessons of history, one that we were warned of from the pen of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his great work on good government "Leviathan". Hobbes warned that when good government, to which all are committed and bound, fails, then the law of the jungle becomes embedded - as is already happening in the divisive world of American politics and society. The result, Hobbes told us (and he was not making an idle theoretical forecst, Hobbes had experienced this is his own lifetime and it terrified him) is that life becomes "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Hobbes' warning has echoed down the centuries and has been proved time and time again across the world. Beware America your nation is on a pathway to social chaos and civil destruction where all will suffer and from which there will be little or no reprieve. There will be no easy solutions; a new President or a different government might give short term respite but the root of the problem lies in the hearts and minds of men. Under Trump and his demagogues America's fissiparous body politic is vitiated, embittered, corrupted; it will not end well.
In 1858, as America tumbled towards Civil War, the great Republican President Abraham Lincoln cautioned his young nation "A house divided against itself cannot stand"; ignore Lincoln's words and American children and grandchildren will not judge the current generation kindly.
