All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis.
The moral order is turned upside down.
The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions.
The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us.
We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs.
The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements.
And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross.
Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote.
“That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
Our elites have used fraud.
Force is all they have left.
Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved.
More importantly, they are trying to save themselves.
All attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers will prove useless.