"The malaise that infects Americans is global. Hundreds of millions of people have been severed by modernity from traditions, beliefs, and rituals, as well as communal structures, which kept them rooted. They have been callously cast aside by global capitalism as superfluous. This has engendered an atavistic rage against the technocratic world that condemns them. This rage is expressed in many forms — nativism, neofascism, jihadism, the Christian right, alt-right militias, and the anarchic violence of antifa. The resentment springs from the same deep wells of despair. This despair exacerbates racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. It poisons civil discourse. It celebrates hypermasculinity, violence, and chauvinism. It promises the return to the mythical past.

"Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only by force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy. . . .

"The radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their marginalized lives, battered by economic misery, have been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They claim the right to use force to silence those defined as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are consumed by the adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation. These groups are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the 'narcissism of minor differences.'

"It was inevitable that we would reach this point. A paralyzed government, unable to and unwilling to address the rudimentary needs of its citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in the Weimar Republic and czarist Russia, empowers extremists. Extremism, as the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote, is 'a refuge from the terrors of the inner life.' "