The systemic collapse of the US society has begun, by The Saker

I have lived in the United States for a total of 24 years and I have witnessed many crises over this long period, but what is taking place today is truly unique and much more serious than any previous crisis I can recall.  And to explain my point, I would like to begin by saying what I believe the riots we are seeing taking place in hundreds of US cities are not about.  They are not about:

1. Racism or “White privilege”
2. Police violence
3. Social alienation and despair
4. Poverty
5. Trump
6. The liberals pouring fuel on social fires
7. The infighting of the US elites/deep state

They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.

It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of “cause” and “pretext”.  And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at least to some degree, and without looking at the distinction between cause and effect), none of them are the true cause of what we are witnessing.  At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you want, but the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of the US society.

The next thing which we must also keep in mind is that evidence of correlation is not evidence of causality.  Take, for example, this article from CNN entitled “US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts” which completely conflates the two concepts and which includes the following sentence (stress added) “Those disparities exist because of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.”  The word “because” clearly point to a causality, yet absolutely nothing in the article or data support this.  The US media is chock-full of such conflations of correlation and causality, yet it is rarely denounced.