We Must Resist the Collapse of Conscience in the Age of Trump

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The Public Intellectual

Under the Trump regime, the United States has entered a dark age in which conscience is not merely ignored but systematically dismantled. Compassion is mocked as weakness, truth treated as disposable, and cruelty elevated into a governing principle. This is more than corruption. It signals the suffocation of civic culture under gangster capitalism — a predatory system in which power serves wealth, law serves vengeance, and democracy is hollowed out from within.

Donald Trump did not create this moral vacuum. He seized it, refined it, and weaponized it. For decades, neoliberal rule has hollowed out the social state, normalized staggering inequality, elevated billionaires to the status of civic arbiters, and schooled generations to believe that self-interest is the highest virtue. Public goods were dismantled or sold off, civic responsibility withered, and citizens were reduced to consumers, detached from any shared sense of fate. In such a landscape, empathy is no longer a public good but a private burden, something to be shed in the relentless pursuit of profit, power, and spectacle. As Zygmunt Bauman notes in Modernity and the Holocaust, gangster capitalism as a form of fascist politics thrives on “moral sleeping pills” and “the dead silence of unconcern.”

The war on empathy is central to our lethal white supremacist culture, which thrives on violence and normalizes the politics of disposability. This assault is starkly visible in the rhetoric of Elon Musk, who has claimed that empathy itself threatens Western civilization. Such a view does not stand alone. It echoes a broader right-wing crusade, amplified by segments of white evangelical Christianity in the United States, that casts empathy as a dangerous moral weakness. In this distorted logic, compassion becomes a political weapon attributed to liberals and Democrats, who are accused of eroding “Western values” by extending care and recognition to those deemed expendable, particularly immigrants from poorer, racialized, and predominantly Muslim nations.

What takes shape here is not simply the erosion of empathy, but its deliberate inversion, a cultural alchemy in which cruelty is elevated to virtue and exclusion is recast as a civilizational imperative. This assault on empathy, mobilized to inflame hatred against those cast as the “other,” cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice or psychological aberration. It draws from a deeper historical reservoir of violence, one that, as Pankaj Mishra observes, has “enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue.”

What has emerged is not only a political crisis but a cultural collapse. Moral cowards and political nihilists occupy the commanding heights of national politics, while culture itself has been stripped of civic responsibility, compassion, imagination, and courage. In its place stands a brutalizing ethos, animated by a crude authoritarianism that eviscerates historical memory, turns state terrorism into a model of governance, and rewards cruelty. Institutions tasked with preserving history are being transformed from sites of critical remembrance into instruments of distortion, where history is emptied of its lessons and repurposed to serve power rather than truth.

Public outrage, when it surfaces at all, is largely measured in cents at the gas pump rather than in lives extinguished.

What passes for dissent in the face of the war on Iran has been hollowed out by a culture organized around profit and convenience. Public outrage, when it surfaces at all, is largely measured in cents at the gas pump rather than in lives extinguished. While such economic pressures are real, especially for those already burdened by inequality, they eclipse far graver questions. For instance, Amnesty International writes, “an unlawful U.S. strike on a school in Minab, in Iran’s Hormozgan province, killed 156 people, including 120 children,” an act that the organization insists must be held accountable under international law. Yet such atrocities barely register within a media landscape that reduces war to economic inconvenience. The mass killing of children, the targeting of civilians, the normalization of state violence, all recede into the background, erased by a politics that translates human suffering into market fluctuations. This is not merely distraction, it is a form of moral cowardice, a willful shrinking of conscience in which unbearable violence is rendered invisible so long as the machinery of profit remains undisturbed.

Within this degraded moral order, MAGA culture thrives on a toxic fusion of hyper-nationalism, manufactured ignorance, and unapologetic cruelty. Violence, once a marker of social breakdown, is now aestheticized, turned into spectacle, and circulated as a form of entertainment, numbing the public to its real, devastating consequences. Blood flows freely in a culture obsessed with guns — in houses of worship, schools, supermarkets, streets, and too many other spaces of daily life. Power consolidates itself not only through force but through complicity, as major media institutions trade truth for access, amplify lies, and normalize the unthinkable through silence and distortion. This is evident as the new techno-authoritarians buy up powerful cultural platforms such as CBS and CNN. Jeff Bezos has told his opinion writers not to criticize capitalism; the mainstream press largely refuses to criticize Israel’s war crimes and focus on irrelevant or trivial stories rather than on a world in crisis and disarray.

In this context, the words of Annie Ernaux from her Nobel lecture are worth repeating, particular her powerful call to use language to light the unspeakable. A task more necessary today than ever before. She writes:

In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.

The failure “to bring to light” extends into higher education. Universities, which should function as critical democratic spheres, have largely retreated into caution or complicity. Faced with ongoing violence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, where thousands have been killed in recent days, many institutions have chosen silence. Worse still, they have disciplined and criminalized students who dare to protest these atrocities. At places such as University of California, Berkeley, reports of cooperation with state authorities against student and faculty activists reveal a betrayal that is not merely institutional but moral. University presidents now condemn commencement speakers that criticize genocidal wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Such actions echo the bleakest periods in modern history, recalling the capitulations of higher education under regimes such as Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and Mussolini’s Italy, where intellectual life was subordinated to the dictates of power and dissent was treated as a crime.

Trump emerged from this wasteland as both symptom and accelerant. He governs through spectacle and fear. Migrants are caged, dissenters threatened, educators attacked, and the vulnerable rendered disposable. Language itself is poisoned. When words lose their ethical force, society loses its ability to distinguish justice from barbarism.

Militarism functions as political theater while arms makers and energy interests wait in the wings for profit. Death abroad becomes profit at home.

The collapse of conscience is also visible in the fusion of war and profiteering. Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran, and the threat of further wars in the Middle East, reveal how militarism functions as political theater while arms makers and energy interests wait in the wings for profit. Death abroad becomes profit at home. Under gangster capitalism, bloodshed is not tragedy, it is revenue.

Under Trump, corruption has moved into the open, unapologetically embraced by the president and his craven family members. No previous president has blurred the line between public office and private gain so shamelessly. Recent estimates suggest Trump has personally profited at least $1.4085 billionsince returning to office, likely an understatement given hidden dealings. The presidency has become less a public trust than a vulgar and unethical private investment vehicle.

This is not simply a national crisis. What is unfolding under Trump’s influence signals a broader international crisis in which corruption is elevated to a governing principle, openly sanctioned and even celebrated. Trump does not simply tolerate such practices; he legitimates them, giving license to a political culture in which ethical violations are reframed as strategy and moral crimes are rewarded as signs of strength. In this emerging order, the language of democracy is emptied of its remaining substance while its institutions are completely retooled to serve power, wealth, and impunity.

This shift does not remain confined within national borders. The logic of privatization, the rise of anti-democratic populism, the assault on public institutions, and the normalization of cruelty travel with alarming ease across the globe. They circulate through global markets, digital media, and political networks, embedding themselves in the everyday life of societies far removed from their point of origin. Authoritarian impulses learn from one another, borrow tactics, and amplify their reach, producing a global culture in which repression is normalized and dissent is increasingly criminalized.

What is at stake, then, is not simply the fate of a single nation but the corrosion of democratic life on an international scale. The spectacle of power without accountability, wealth without responsibility, and violence without consequence becomes a model to emulate rather than a warning to heed. In such a climate, vigilance is not a choice but a necessity, requiring a renewed global commitment to civic courage, ethical responsibility, and the defense of democratic institutions capable of resisting the accelerating drift toward authoritarian rule.

It is also visible in the assault on memory. Authoritarian politics thrives when history is erased and critical thought is replaced by slogans. Books are banned, teachers threatened, universities disciplined,and discourse reduced to rage and distraction. Trumpism understands what Democrats too often forget: Education is a battleground because memory is a form of resistance. A society that cannot remember injustice is condemned to repeat it.

Yet conscience can be revived. It begins by refusing the language of disposability and reclaiming the idea that no one is expendable.

Most dangerous of all is the spread of thoughtlessness and manufactured ignorance through a culture filled with disimagination machines, producing an inability to judge right from wrong. People cheer policies that harm them, applaud cruelty toward others, and accept corruption as normal. Conscience collapses not only through repression from above, but through surrender from below.

Yet conscience can be revived. It begins by refusing the language of disposability and reclaiming the idea that no one is expendable. It means connecting private pain to public causes, seeing that loneliness, debt, fear, and despair are not personal failures but political outcomes. It means rebuilding institutions that nurture critical thought, solidarity, and compassion rather than greed and obedience. It means reclaiming literacy as a way to read the world critically.

The antidote is not nostalgia for a broken past. It is a radical democracy rooted in shared responsibility, economic justice, and the courage to care for others. Conscience is never a private luxury. It is the lifeblood of public freedom.

These struggles remind us that democracy is never handed down by elites but is forged collectively through acts of courage, solidarity, and refusal.

The real crisis in the United States is not only Trump. It is the social order that made him possible and the moral silence that allows him to flourish. If democracy is to survive, conscience must become contagious. We need a mass movement of workers, youth, educators, artists, and all those denied dignity to turn outrage into collective power. Yet such resistance is already emerging in cities, classrooms, workplaces, neighborhoods, and on the streets. In Minneapolis, for instance, communities, labor unions, students, immigrant rights groups, and local residents mobilized against brutal immigration raids and mass deportation policies, creating networks of mutual aid, public protest, legal defense, and civic solidarity that challenged the machinery of fear and disposability. Across the country, teachers are defending critical education against censorship, students are organizing against the militarization of public life, workers are unionizing against exploitative labor conditions, and artists and journalists are exposing the violence hidden beneath the spectacle of authoritarian politics. These struggles matter because they refuse the language of inevitability. They remind us that democracy is never handed down by elites but is forged collectively through acts of courage, solidarity, and refusal. Against a culture of cruelty, state violence, and the mobilizing passions of fascism, such movements keep alive the radical possibility that another future can still be imagined and fought for.

The choice before us is stark: a society governed by cruelty, greed, and organized forgetting, or one animated by justice, memory, and solidarity. Trump has shown us what the collapse of conscience looks like, how a culture organized around fear, unchecked greed, moral compromise, and the pressures of conformity can hollow out democratic life and turn human beings into objects of suspicion, disposability, and silence. What is at stake is not simply the fate of a political system, but the moral compass of society itself. In an age when capitalism rewards selfishness, punishes compassion, and trades civic responsibility for the ruthless pursuit of power, the greatest danger is not only the rise of authoritarian figures, but the willingness of ordinary people to accommodate them. The question, then, is whether we have the courage to resist the seductions of conformity, reclaim the ethical imagination, and rebuild a culture in which justice, collective responsibility, and the dignity of human life matter more than profit, spectacle, and fear.