We're seeing more and more of these sticking points crop up, where the ruling class pushes the contradictory tensions between rhetoric and action so far that the formal logic breaks down, and the mass consent with it. You can spin a lot of this every which way if you don't go too hard, and you can lie to a lot of people through a given crisis, and a lot of people will buy it, desiring to get on with their lives. But what if you do go too hard and its harder to spin away? And what happens when crises like that are more sustained and destructive, and happening more frequently? And then you have more people who can't get on with their lives because their lives are simultaneously falling apart?
The Ukraine war is really doing this on a higher economic and professional statecraft level, implicating processes like arms manufacturing, military alliances, military doctrine and prowess, global trade and finance, and so on, the effects coursing most powerfully through Europe, but which are being widely observed as well.
And simultaneously you have the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, doing immense damage to questions of international law and basic issues of morality and modern ethics which have formed a bulwark of our national mythology since at least the World Wars.
You also have the Epstein fiasco wreaking havoc domestically, with huge swathes of the political spectrum completely inflamed over the issue, casting into sharp contrast the separate tiers of justice and public morality based on wealth and class, gulfs which are only growing and deepening.
Larger and larger swathes of the body politic are no longer accepting the manufactured consensus attempted around these crises, letting the open wounds stand and fester. Or to put it another way, the steel is losing its temper.
But this is how everything works too. Ukraine was another piece in the grand scheme of the everlasting Pax Americana and the homogenization of the world system under neoliberal capitalism. And Israel was the "aircraft carrier of the Middle East," getting its ethno-state colony purified as part of that deal. And Epstein was one of the multitudes of middle men that emerged in the nexus of global finance and geopolitics, who was able to facilitate the movement and laundering of massive global wealth flows, while maintaining delicate balances of personal and political power, until his monstrous nature caught up with him anyway.
These were the increasingly desperate and ad-hoc processes put into place to keep the world system running as it was continuously breaking down, forming the masses of duct tape and glue slapped onto groaning forms and wobbling motion that now need to be changed fundamentally, as their pathologies have advanced too far, which the ruling classes refuse to do, if they were even capable of doing so anyway. And now these very processes are doing much of the dismantling as they proceed to their logical end.
