Violence, soaked in blood and stripped of shame, has become the defining language of governance in the age of Trump and the global resurgence of authoritarianism. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, and with it, the very notion of moral and social responsibility. In its place, we find a brutal political grammar scripted by modern-day barbarians, disciples of greed, corruption, racial purity, ultra-nationalism, and permanent war. Compassion is mocked as weakness. The social state is vilified and hollowed out, derided in the language of a deranged anti-communism. And policies that produce mass suffering, engineered by the powerful and shielded by the myths of meritocracy and social Darwinism, are deemed not only acceptable, but inevitable. More
