Mini-Feature: The Social Contract

What is the biggest threat to the social contract in our country?

What social contract?

The biggest threat we face is ignorance about what the social contract that binds us together as citizens is. When we look around for clear accounts we find at least two competing and diametrically opposed understandings: one would have all citizens possessed of equal rights and duties, treated equally under the law. The other denies the older notion of citizenship itself and instead establishes a hierarchy of groups based on racial and sexual identity based on governmental law and policy. The new social contract adopted by the rolling revolution is not the same as the one it seeks to replace. The great question America faces is whether or not the nation will fully embrace it.

-Matthew Peterson, founding editor of The American Mind

The social contract, such as it is, is dissolving in American cities, if we assume that the contract allows us to expect that the state will protect us from harm and punish wrongdoers when they break their end of the bargain. 

Leftist radicals have assumed control of prosecutorial offices across the country. They make a mockery of their positions by refusing to proffer charges against serious criminals. They have essentially hung a “Gone Fishin’” sign on their collective offices. 

As a result, we are facing a decay in order as malefactors run wild in our streets. These radical prosecutors have not just frayed the social fabric—they have cut a jagged line right through it. 

-Seth Barron, managing editor of The American Mind

At The American Mind we often joke, rather grimly, about that meme in which FBI agents poke a conservative with sticks and say "do a racism" or "do a domestic terrorism." The joke is funny because it depicts how ham-fisted our regime is. It's grim because it depicts something very real, as shown by the recent Buzzfeed exposé on how the feds "infiltrated" a group of men as they discussed absconding with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Our intelligence agencies, government officials, and cultural authorities have a lot riding on their conviction that the bad guy is the American people. They want to catch Americans—preferably white, rural Americans—acting like the gremlins they are made out to be. In order to produce that result, they are prepared to harass, provoke, gaslight, and demoralize us.

What the regime is really saying to everyone—not just to online kooks plotting to kidnap a governor, but to ordinary folks across the country—is not "do a racism" or "do a domestic terrorism" but "do a hate each other." Every day we wake up and are poked with sticks again and again, barraged with phony studies and narratives about how whites hate blacks, or men hate women, or straights hate gays. They tell us this so constantly, in so many ways large and small, because they hope to will it into reality. A recent Gallup poll showed that Americans' perception of race relations in this country are at a new low. That is the mark of success on the part of our ruling elites.

They are the threat to our social contract, to the ties of affection and common cause that would otherwise bind us. They have invented a story about the ways we despise one another and they are begging us, screaming at us, to make that story come true. If instead we could tell them to go to hell—could even, day by day and community by community, learn to love each other—then we would really be on the right track.

-Spencer Klavan, associate editor of The American Mind