This American Crisis Shows How the Force of Brokenness Operates

This piece ran in the newspapers in April, 2025.

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One can observe how different forces — representing distinct forms of Brokenness — naturally gravitate toward each other and readily make common cause.

“Force of Brokenness” is another name for “Evil,” which I’ve defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.”

Anything that operated in such a way would reasonably be called “Evil,” because it closely corresponds with how the religious perspective has understood Evil: as something that degrades the human world in one way or another.

The Republican Party

Whatever one chooses to call such a consistently destructive coherent force, today’s Republican Party meets that definition to a degree unmatched in American history.

With remarkable consistency, on every major issue — inequalities of wealth and power, relations among the races, dealing with the disruption of the earth’s climate, upholding the Rule of Law, finding the proper balance between gun rights and public safety — the Republicans have been making things worse.

The history that brought this once-respectable conservative party under the sway of such a destructive force illustrates the natural affinity that different forms of brokenness have for each other.

Two forces of brokenness that had previously been aligned with different parties — White Supremacy, which had its political home in the Democratic Party since before the Civil War, and Corporate Greed, which had been part of the Republican coalition for a similar period — came together under the tent of a single party: the GOP.

(This shift resulted from the Democratic Party’s leading role in passing Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, which alienated those Southern whites for whom the power structure of segregation and “Jim Crow” was important.)

The Solid (Democratic) South became the Solid (Republican) South — exemplified by Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond’s switch to the Republican Party.

No longer canceling each other out — as they to some degree had, when White Supremacy and Corporate Greed were on opposite sides of the two-party system — these two forms of the “Force of Brokenness” readily formed an alliance to take over the Republican Party.

The decent part of the old Republican Party was pushed aside by the rising Fascist element — in which racism and greed joined forces.

(As brokenness took over the GOP, other long-standing forms of American brokenness were drawn into the alliance by a kindredness of spirit: American imperialism — from the invasion of Iraq to recent threats to annex Canada and take over Greenland, regardless of what Denmark or the Greenlanders want — and a form of religion geared more toward conflict than to “Goodwill Toward Men.”)

But the Force of Brokenness could inflict such catastrophic damage only because other parts of the American body politic were already afflicted with their own forms of brokenness.

The Contribution of the Democratic Party and Secular America to Systemic Breakdown

In America’s intrinsically two-party system, if the “disease” enters through one party, it falls to the other to protect the body politic — to act as an immune system.

The Democratic world — the Party, and the Liberal America it represents — failed to identify the pathogen. In other words, it failed to comprehend the nature of the force rising in the GOP.

The Brokenness in Liberal America that contributed to this failure derived in part from holes in the secular worldview — a worldview that offered no way to conceptualize a force that might reasonably be called “Evil.”

And it also derived from a misguided belief that “fighting” is always the wrong thing to do.
The Democratic Party — both clueless and weak in the face of the rising threat — proved incapable of preventing the Force of Brokenness from gaining substantial power over the nation.

A line from Yeats captures the two-sided brokenness that enabled a Fascist force to rise:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Cultivating Brokenness in the Conservative Base

As this “coherent force” took over the Party, it worked to move America’s conservative base toward beliefs and passions more conducive to Fascism.

With great financial resources and skilled propagandists, the Fascist Force used media to move the Republican base — mostly sane and decent in Reagan’s time — toward beliefs and passions more conducive to Fascism.

They fanned the flames of resentments and prejudices already present.
Those whose psychological structures gave them a need for an enemy — and a need for conflict — were provided with enemies to hate and fight.
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In every society, there are forces both for Good and for Evil.

The question is always: which will govern?

In America today, a confluence of factors has brought to power the most destructive — the most grotesque — force in the nation’s history.