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Fascism, conspiracy theories, the GOP, theocracy, white nationalism, loneliness, burnout, and other fun stuff

Discussion article - Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives. COVID didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken.

When this is all over, will we be able to patch up the economy and get things back to normal? Trump certainly claims so. But he's wrong. The pandemic is exposing just how dysfunctional our economic system was to begin with.

Melville's tale describes the deep structures of a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn't die with it. Racism, in the United States at least, was grafted onto slavery, while at the same time disguised by a potent kind of individualism, a cult of individual supremacy, based on the fantasy that some men were born natural slaves and that others could be absolutely free.