There is something deeply disturbing about the people we’ve become, the culture we’ve allowed to take root beneath us, like cracks spreading through the foundation of our lives.

Signs of our cultural decline are inescapable and everywhere at once, magnified most profoundly by the very people who today have assumed the mantle of American leadership.

Consider that in early 2025 the U.S. Administration took a curious interest in Africa, the very continent the President devalued in 2018 by saying it was full of "shithole countries" when making the case for the U.S. to welcome more immigrants from places like Norway.

Coming to the defense of South Africa’s European minority, the Administration unilaterally cut off aid and assistance to South Africa, arguing that the country’s land-expropriation law discriminated against them and had provoked what it characterized as ‘genocide.’

Nothing of the sort had in fact taken place.

South Africa’s government signed the Expropriation Act in January of the same year to address the country's landownership imbalance, a legacy of apartheid that allowed the country's European minority (roughly 7 percent of the population) to own over 70 percent of the land while Indigenous Africans (roughly 80 percent of the population) owned 4 percent.

The Act permits the government to seize private property for public use, provided “just compensation” is offered, as the U.S. Constitution similarly requires of our government. It also allows land to be seized without compensation in limited circumstances, such as when it is unused, has no development plan, and is held solely for its potential to appreciate in value.

While the South Africans affected opposed the law for reasons more historical than legal, they never claimed they were being persecuted because of it. Yet none of that mattered, not to the donor who had instigated the issue and his motives for doing so, nor to the Administration pursuing its broader political objective.

Elon Musk, the South African-born former member of the Administration who later had an ugly feud with its leader, caused a stir when his efforts to expand Starlink in South Africa stalled.

He sought to retain full ownership when the country’s law required at least 30 percent qualifying local ownership for the relevant telecommunications license Starlink was required to obtain. When the authorities refused to bend, and he took it as an affront to his privilege, publicly claiming he was being discriminated against because he was “white.”

Thus entered the man he helped get elected, backed by the full force of the U.S. government and driven by the twin objectives of pressuring South Africa to relent on Starlink for the benefit of his billionaire friend, and advancing a broader political objective.

That broader goal was evident against the backdrop of the Administration’s restrictive immigration policies. By portraying Europeans as persecuted and in need of protection, the Administration reinforced its political aim of defending the interests and privileges of those classified as “white.”

Genocide was not really the point. The more revealing claim appeared in the Executive Order terminating assistance, which said that South Africa “has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.”

The Administration thus took South Africa’s opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza and cast it as an aggressive position toward the United States itself.

Congress and virtually everyone else with a voice influential enough to make a difference, save some media outlets, fell silent as the Administration purposely misrepresented the facts, turning the South Africa into such a pariah that Americans came to accept its decision to prioritize the country’s European minority for refugee resettlement, based on the false claims of their persecution.

Most disturbing about this story is not that people believed the lies. It is that they knew they were lies and ignored or repeated them anyway because the lies either served them or aligned with their worldview.

This cynical complicity, to give it a proper name, changes dishonesty from an abdication of responsibility by someone at the top into a social framework: the leader sets the story, and the followers parrot it, reluctant to risk their position or influence.

But let’s face the facts.

As egregious as what happened to South Africa was, it pales in comparison to some of the more outlandish political stunts we’ve witnessed in this country since January 2025, including  the claimed “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, the “massive fraud” as the justification for dismantling government, and the “ruse of illegal immigration” as an excuse to target major cities governed by the opposition.

And yet still, the reason the South Africa example is perhaps more poignant than many of the others is that the lie is not merely being used to justify a policy against a particular group. It is being used to construct an alternate reality about an entire sovereign country, and then American power is exercised on the basis of that reality.

We are now regularly washing, rinsing, and repeating the cycle (hello, Venezuela, Iran), watching the damage gradually flow beyond our politics and into the very fabric of our culture.

The evidence is difficult to overstate.

Neighbors deny each other the civility of basic human kindness, turning indifference into everyday practice, and citizens deny fellow citizens the rights afforded to them because they are different.

Justices of the Supreme Court willfully rule on the side of injustice, framing their bigotry in “originalist” language that claims fidelity to the Constitution while obscuring the prejudice and human consequences of their decisions.

Members of Congress side with legislation that benefits those who finance their campaigns rather than those who elected them, while turning a blind eye to the mismanagement, corruption, and usurpation of congressional powers by a president they fear because he can diminish their influence.

The Executive Branch rules by decree, treating the Constitution and rule of law as suggestions rather than constraints, to give cronies tax breaks, dismantle government, wage a senseless war, deny citizens civil protections, detain and deport, coerce foreign countries, and waste tax payer dollars on frivolous, vanity projects while denying similar appropriations for food, healthcare, and education.

In becoming the very embodiment of our national rot, the same Executive Branch demands fealty from followers, from the rich who feed at the trough they have created, to the everyday man stretching his earnings to make ends meet, to the downtrodden who somehow still believe in the election promises made.

Each, in their own way, follow the leader. 

They repeat his lies about everything he utters not because they believe him or seriously think there is good in him but because they benefit from his naked dishonesty. 

The rich keep making money from it, while everyone else beams with pride that America, even as it slips rapidly beyond their means, finally belongs to them, delighted by what they see the Supreme Court, Congress, ICE, and every other alphabet agency doing at his command.

But that’s not the defining character of our broader national decline. 

After all, we’ve lived with prejudice for centuries. We’ve tolerated money in our politics ever since it became the gateway to power. And we’ve had callous leaders before whose ideas, enacted into law, have caused real harm to American communities too small, impoverished, or powerless to have a meaningful say.

What we’ve seldom seen in this country, however, to the degree and on the scale we see in our modern era, is intelligent citizens willingly embracing dishonesty from those in authority because they know that, if they don’t, someone else will.

Truth has become less important than access, loyalty, and self-interest, turning the very society we’re engaged in building together into a flawed and deeply troubling experiment in trust, cooperation, and shared responsibility.

The question, then, is what kind of society we have become when people inside and outside government can recognize dishonesty, condemn it privately, benefit from it personally, and still defend it publicly?

Perhaps the answer is this: a society at risk of losing itself.

Choosing integrity over convenience, truth over loyalty, and country over self-interest ought to be our path forward, our way out.

Despite our differences, we should still be able to agree that honesty and doing what’s right must matter again if our national rot is to turn into renewal.

It is not too late.

There is something sinister about the people we’ve become, the culture we’ve allowed to envelop us like a shadow we have learned to live inside or a fog we can no longer see through.

Signs of our cultural decay are inescapable and everywhere at once, from neighbors denying each other the civility of basic human kindness to citizens denying fellow citizens the rights afforded to them because they are different.

This social problem is magnified by the very people who’ve today assumed the mantle of American leadership.

Justices of the Supreme Court willfully rule on the side of injustice, framing their bigotry in “originalist” language that claims fidelity to the Constitution while obscuring the prejudice and human consequences of their decisions.

Members of Congress deliberately side with legislation that benefits those who finance their campaigns rather than those who elected them, while turning a blind eye to the mismanagement, corruption, and usurpation of congressional powers by a president they fear because he can diminish their influence.

The Executive Branch rules by decree, treating the Constitution and rule of law as suggestions rather than constraints, to give cronies tax breaks, dismantle government, wage a senseless war, deny citizens civil protections, detain and deport, coerce foreign countries, and waste tax payer dollars on frivolous, vanity projects while denying similar appropriations for food, healthcare, and education.

In becoming the very embodiment of our national rot, the same Executive Branch demands fealty from followers, from the rich who feed at the trough they have created, to the everyday man stretching his earnings to make ends meet, to the downtrodden who somehow still believe in the election promises made.

Each, in their own way, follow the leader. 

They repeat his lies about everything he utters not because they believe him or seriously think there is good in him but because they benefit from his naked dishonesty. 

The rich keep making money from it, while everyone else beams with pride that America, even as it slips rapidly beyond their means, finally belongs to them, delighted by what they see the Supreme Court, Congress, ICE, and every other alphabet agency doing at his command.

But that’s not the defining character of our broader national decline. 

After all, we’ve lived with prejudice for centuries. We’ve tolerated money in our politics ever since it became the gateway to power. And we’ve had callous leaders before whose ideas, enacted into law, have caused real harm to American communities too small, impoverished, or powerless to have a meaningful say.

What we’ve seldom seen in this country, however, to the degree and on the scale we see in our modern era, is intelligent citizens willingly embracing dishonesty from those in authority because they know that, if they don’t, someone else will.

Truth has become less important than access, loyalty, and self-interest, rendering the very society we’re engaged in building together a flawed and deeply troubling experiment in trust, cooperation, and shared responsibility.

Don’t believe me? Here’s an example that lays this reality bare.

In early 2025, the U.S. Administration took a curious interest in Africa, the very place the President devalued in 2018 by saying it was full of "shithole countries" when making the case for the U.S. to welcome more immigrants from places like Norway.

Coming to the defense of South Africa’s European people, the Administration unilaterally cut off aid and assistance to South Africa, arguing that the country’s land-expropriation law discriminated against them and had provoked what it characterized as ‘genocide.’

Nothing of the sort had in fact taken place.

South Africa’s government signed the Expropriation Act in January of the same year to address the country's landownership imbalance, a legacy of apartheid that allowed the country's European minority (roughly 7 percent of the population) to own over 70 percent of the land while Indigenous Africans (roughly 80 percent of the population) owned 4 percent.

The Act permits the government to seize private property for public use, provided “just compensation” is offered, as the U.S. Constitution similarly requires. It also allows land to be seized without compensation in limited circumstances, such as when it is unused, has no development plan, and is held solely for its potential to appreciate in value.

While the South Africans affected opposed the law for reasons more historical than legal, they never claimed they were being persecuted because of it. But none of that mattered, not to the donor who had instigated the issue and his motives for doing so, nor to the Administration pursuing its broader political objective.

Elon Musk, the South African-born former member of the Administration who later had an ugly feud with its leader, caused a stir at the peak of his government tenure when his efforts to expand Starlink in South Africa stalled.

South African law requires at least 30 percent qualifying local ownership for the relevant telecommunications license, while Musk sought to retain full ownership. When authorities refused to bend, he publicly claimed he was being discriminated against because he was “white.”

And so entered the man he helped get elected, backed by the full force of the U.S. government and driven by the twin objectives of pressuring South Africa to relent on Starlink for the benefit of his billionaire friend, and advancing a broader political objective.

That broader goal was and remains evident against the backdrop of the Administration’s restrictive immigration policies. By portraying Europeans as persecuted and in need of protection, the Administration reinforced its political aim of defending the interests and privileges of those classified as “white.”

The genocide accusation was salacious, but it was not really the point. The more revealing claim appeared in the Executive Order terminating assistance, which said that South Africa “has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.”

The Administration thus took South Africa’s opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza and cast it as an aggressive position toward the United States itself.

South Africa’s refusal to abandon the Palestinians, as Israel devastated Gaza on a scale many observers described as genocidal, therefore placed it squarely in the crosshairs of an Administration willing to wield American power in service of both billionaire interests and racial politics.

Congress and virtually everyone else with a voice influential enough to make a difference, save some media outlets, fell silent as the Administration deliberately misrepresented South Africa, turning the country into such a pariah that Americans came to accept its decision to prioritize South Africa’s European minority for refugee resettlement, based on the false claims of their persecution.

Most disturbing about it all is not that people believed the lies. It is that they knew they were lies and ignored or repeated them anyway because the lies either served them or aligned with their worldview.

This egotistic orientation, a cynical complicity, to give it a proper name, changes dishonesty from an abdication of responsibility by an authority figure into a social framework: the leader sets the story, and the followers parrot it, reluctant to risk their position or influence.

But let’s face the facts. As egregious as what happened to South Africa was, it pales in comparison to some of the more outlandish political stunts we’ve witnessed in this country since January 2025, including  the claimed “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, the “massive fraud” as the justification for dismantling government, and the existence of “campus antisemitism” as a pretext for attacking universities.

And yet still, the reason the South Africa example is perhaps more poignant than many of the others is that the lie is not merely being used to justify a policy against a particular group. It is being used to construct an alternate reality about an entire sovereign country, and then American power is exercised on the basis of that reality.

We are now regularly washing, rinsing, and repeating the cycle (hello, Venezuela, Iran), watching the damage gradually flow beyond our politics and into the very fabric of our culture.

The question, then, is what kind of society we have become when people inside and outside government can recognize dishonesty, condemn it privately, benefit from it personally, and still defend it publicly?

Matthew Arnold warned us about it in 1869, when he decried England’s social upheaval during the Industrial Revolution, as increasing materialism, social alienation, and self-interest coalesced to make England a society in which personal advancement eclipsed the common good and, therefore, England’s prosperity.

What he proposed then as a solution, a society transformed by a culture that changes what people value, how they think, and how they relate to one another, is precisely what we are busy debasing in our cynical complicity with those leading us—what Arnold named culture and anarchy.

Last weekend, the United States issued a security alert on the potential escalation of the conflict with Iran, recommending that Americans in the region leave or prepare to leave. 

Seeing the alert gave me pause because I knew, based on decades of work in the U.S. Foreign Service, that warnings like this are not issued without good reason. 

U.S. missions …

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Scrolling through social media over the weekend, I came across a post that caught my attention, both for its language and its subject. “The problem was never us,” the post declared. 

As I read on, it became a critical commentary on the problems facing Africa and where blame resides: bad leadership, corruption, and tribalism—failures often attributed to A…

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Is it really any surprise that some in the conservative movement have beef with The Odyssey, the new film directed by Christopher Nolan that tells the story of the king of Ithaca, Odysseus, and his struggles to return home after the Trojan War? 

The beef might not surprise anyone, considering the sensitivities of some on the political right and, what Ada…

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Remember Strom Thurmond, the Senator from South Carolina who was a staunch segregationist? His name resurfaced this past week on account of all the attention South Carolina is getting because of the sudden death of another one of its Senators, Lindsey Graham. 

More on him in a moment. 

Thurmond’s name struck a nerve for a lot of reasons, none bigger than …

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The debates we have as a society are as consequential as the stories we share.

In a sense, our stories give meaning to our experiences, while our debates test and refine our understanding of those experiences, producing a culture that expresses who we are, influences who we become, and reflects our conception of the benefits that support the wellbeing of…

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There is no more important conversation for us as a society than how we treat one another and the history that influences our behavior and relationships.

But many of us avoid the conversation, and that avoidance often manifests in the people we associate with and the material we choose to read.

I come across a lot of great articles about race on this ver…

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Two stood out to me in particular: a young Latina girl, bubbling with exci…

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As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, the line connecting the nation’s founding to our modern struggles weighs on the mind, like the echo of a deep and unresolved chord. 

What divides Americans today, our conflicts over identity, race, immigration, economic justice, and political power, is a continuity of unresolved questions from ou…

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There is something off, broken in the soul of men who take comfort in depriving other people of their humanity. It is a condition so cold it feels almost beyond this world. But it is not, and the evidence is clear in how men find peace in the erasure of others; how they relish forcing a fellow human to their knees, extinguishing their light in the name …

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March 21, 1861. Savannah, Georgia.

The atmosphere is electric inside the Athenaeum, the air heavy with anticipation and the humid weight of a coastal spring. Every seat is occupied while many more stand, taking up space the crowd outside jealously covets. The largest audience ever assembled in the public hall is edgy, desperate for affirmation. This is n…

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The betrayal was served alongside the salad at a dinner party meant to toast his new gemstones venture. He sat among friends, unaware that the host, a man he trusted implicitly, had laced his meal with rat poison, intent on taking for himself the very venture they had come together to celebrate.

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The answers compel a return to the past, to a period when Europeans, the English in particular, busied themselves with conquering the world, and in doing so exposed the depths to which they were prepared to descend in bending the people of society to the contours of their power.

The Europeans who arrived in the Americas were not just explorers. They were also ethnocentric and xenophobic to their core. They carried an unshakable assumption of their own cultural superiority, a pride that quickly morphed into a need to eliminate anyone they viewed as alien. This was especially true when the prospect of tradable resources and land entered the equation, and when those they called aliens proved they were unwilling to simply bend the knee.

Emblematic of this bigoted nature were the English, whose contempt for the poor within their own borders and for the people of Ireland would foreshadow the sobering experience of the Indigenous Peoples in the Americas and the Africans they forcibly uprooted and displaced.

England’s imperialist designs, as catalogued by Edmund S. Morgan (1975), were steeped in a desire to secure material wealth for the English Crown. A parallel motivation was acquiring territory to rid England of some members of her exploding population, namely the increasingly listless poor, at a time when half of the nation’s people lived “a hand-to-mouth existence” and employment was difficult to come by.

In the 1500s and well into the 1600s, the English gentry came to the unsettling conclusion (for them anyway) that the country’s materially weaker position, as compared with their European neighbors such as the Dutch, was a result of the inability or unwillingness of England’s people to work. England could not prosper, according to the country’s well-to-do, because of the “immoral” indolence and loafing of the poor.

The elites contemptuously branded their poor as “vicious, idle, dissolute...addicted to Laziness, Drunkenness, Debauches, and almost every Kind of Vice, to mutinous and indecent Discourse. They were Miserable, Diseased, Ignorant, Idle, Seditious and (otherwise) vicious” (Morgan, p. 320).

The answer to this dastardly problem was creating policies that enabled the government to extract work from the poor. Company men working the various trades were made to hire laborers for a fixed period, while the government established houses of corrections and schools, where the poor could be goaded to produce while learning the ethics of hard work.

Ultimately, these measures crumbled under the weight of reality. The job creation schemes failed to satisfy the demand for employing the poor, and this failure rendered many of them a burden to the English society, a development the elites grew determined to address with an enduring solution.

The solution the elites believed was the most viable was the poor’s immigration, en masse if possible. This was evident by the fact that “From the beginning, Englishmen had thought of their New World possessions as a place in which to make use of people who were useless at home.” There was very little benevolence behind this agenda. “The wretches who were rescued from idleness and unemployment [had to] be sufficiently able-bodied to make the rescue worth the rescuer’s trouble” (Morgan, p. 235).

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Part 1 of this series explored the vagaries of this storytelling for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, the origins and evolution of their racial branding and the uneasy self-reckoning this branding provoked, resulting in resistance that, in a struggle for civil rights, gradually succumbed to a collective embrace of the very demon names they were given.

Their fight for social justice in the late 1960s and 1970s was punctuated by an “Indian” identity made synonymous with savagery and sub-human qualities by the storytelling of their colonialist foes, and it echoed an earlier struggle movement, when Africans made similar appropriations to rebel against their oppression.

Part 2 of this series takes a closer look at the African experience in the US, how the demonic branding of the people reinforced shifting hierarchies of power and belonging that profoundly influenced the national identity Africans proved willing to embrace in their own struggle for social justice.

Africans in the United States

Africans enslaved in the Americas from the early 1500s were not submissive victims, in much the same way that the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resisted being colonized. Africans refused to surrender their freedom without struggle—preserving their cultures in defiance and instigating uprisings when the weight of their bondage became too severe.

Their response to being enslaved oscillated between insubordination and outright rebellion—to a degree that it struck fear in the hearts of European colonists, compelling them to strengthen their laws and maintain order with barbaric brutality, while knowing that the Africans they set out to oppress would not capitulate easily.

Armed rebellions were common defense measures for Africans, but they also leaned on the art of storytelling the colonists leveraged to justify their enslavement. The powerful stories of racial labels appealed universally to Africans as a weapon against their bondage, as if reclaiming the very words meant to define and confine them could instead become the language of their freedom.

Ben L. Martin (1991) observed in his timeless article From Negro to Black to African American that Africans “called themselves Africans until after 1816, when the American Colonization Society was founded to help them back to Africa” at a time of immense turmoil and as tensions over slavery careened the country into a full-blown war (p. 102).

Africans guarded the truth about who they were, holding tight to their ancestral memory and spirit from the time of their arrival, even as others in America took them for slaves. And yet, their ability to guard this truth came under immense challenge in view of their long presence on US soil, an enduring foothold which surfaced questions about their collective sense of belonging.

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Wh…

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