In the hollowed-out cities, the voice of the demagogue finds a certain appeal. All ills are embodied in the scapegoat.

Scapegoats are chosen, not for anything they’ve done, but precisely because they make easy targets, ready prey.

The list of scapegoats is long, but the most vulnerable find their statuses criminalized. The two most obvious are the unhoused and immigrants.

The unhoused are punished for their social or economic position, while the root causes of homelessness, such as the lack of affordable housing and mental health services, go unaddressed.

Immigrants are subject to apprehension and deportation purely for their position. They may not have committed any criminal act, but they will still be removed.

To the cries for justice, the demagogue says, “The homeless made bad decisions.” Of the immigrant, “They may have lived here for years, contributed to their communities, paid taxes, but they lack the proper status, so they must go.”

The ignorant cheer the demagogue and take the lies of their [orange] god to new extremes, “All immigrants are criminals!” “It’s about unlawful entry!”

The problem of course is the mob is bloodthirsty. New scapegoats will soon be needed. New crimes imagined.

You can almost hear them say, “Homosexuality is a sin that must be punished.” “Muslims are blasphemers who shall be banished.” “Atheists have made us immoral and they will be blamed.”

Virtue for the demagogue is strength. Being weak, few in number or otherwise vulnerable is the only crime the demagogue sees.

Describe this phenomenon, the Ubermensch, as succinctly as possible:

Status crime.

My city is filled with the unhoused. As you walk the streets, the smell urine and feces greet you. The downtown speaks of a once vibrant past now forgotten; buildings are boarded up- something has gone terribly wrong.

The centers of our communities have been hollowed out. The so-called middle class dwindles. The unhoused, like zombies, wander the streets.

When did whatever it would take to help become too costly, too expensive? When did we come to accept that the mentally ill and drug addicted were destined to die on our streets?

I don’t exactly know but it was probably around the time the “greed is good” crowd took control of our politics. When cutting taxes, the mechanism to ensure social programs are funded, became the path to “freedom.”

According to this concept of “freedom,” which is really just a return to Lochnerism, the person most free is the freelancer, the so-called gig worker. Yet, ironically, it’s hard to imagine persons less free, in our pay-to-play system, than is the precarious gig worker.

In truth, such “freedoms” have made us unfree. And, as wealth has consolidated as it’s risen to the top, more and more people are experiencing the absence of wealth- they own nothing and rent everything, sitting as serfs on the manor of this ever-evolving techno-feudalism.

Private equity now runs the housing market. There’s no mechanism to correct it seemingly, as both major political parties have forsaken the people, preferring marketing instead of community organizing/building to win elections/retain power.

Back on my streets, no eye contact is made. We have been made stranger to each other, to ourselves. The products of our labor are owned by someone else, we follow orders and perform tasks dictated by our employers, we compete with other workers and our peers, and, ultimately, we find ourselves disconnected from our potential, without the prospect of realizing our aspirations.

In this Neo-Gilded Age, we’ve been alienated from what matters.

But there’s a new way to live. It requires courage and self-awareness. It calls for us to reconnect with ourselves and others.

When will we finally awaken and build anew? My city needs to know, as do I.

Ideologies work to shape our unconscious desires and social practices, making it difficult to imagine alternatives to the dominant system. A critique of ideology challenges the accepted narratives, exposing their role in maintaining social control, and invites people to think more critically about the power structures they may unknowingly support. This critique is not only about deconstructing existing beliefs but also about liberating individuals from systems that limit their ability to critically engage with the world and imagine more equitable or just alternatives.

There is a moral aspect to our failing or refusing to critique ideology. By not engaging in the critique, individuals may support or sustain systems that exploit vulnerable groups, whether through political, economic, or social structures; for example, ignoring or failing to challenge an ideology that promotes racism, sexism, or economic disparity allows those systems to thrive unchecked. In this case, moral failure lies in the passive acceptance of the status quo, where the harm caused by these ideologies continues unabated because no one is willing to question or confront them.

To cover for laziness or indifference, conspiratorial thinking offers emotionally charged explanations of the world which seduce the proponent into feeling as though his mind and body have been activated in defiance of some unnamed evil, some secret plot. Rather than engaging in critical analysis, conspiratorial thinking simplifies things down to some narrative of “us v. them,” inviting ones to sidestep vigorous inquiry, oversimplify complex situations, and ignore contradictory evidence. Because the conspiracies offer an enemy, the focus invariably becomes defending the conspiracy, hopelessly entrenching proponents in positions regarding something that does not and, in many cases, cannot exist.

In the era of Trump, our job is two-fold. First, we must, by encouraging questioning, promoting reflection, teaching the value of evidence, highlighting logical fallacies, and modeling critical thinking, help the conspiracists to acknowledge they have lived in fantasy. Second, and perhaps more difficult, we must do the main thing, namely the difficult task of critiquing ideology. These efforts may appear to share some similarities, and perhaps they do, yet the work of critiquing ideology goes to challenging belief systems, not just beliefs. In truth, conspiratorial thinking, as hinted at above, attends certain ideologies.

Humanity, or its critical mass, cannot always be expected to be moral or, perhaps better put, brave. And I write to say we can and must work to save ourselves. We must find a way to not doom with the doomers, but to build anew. We can build anew.