It occurred to me that what has happened resembles, in some ways, the 30-year-old movie Jurassic Park. The movie’s central character is Alan Grant, who studies dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the central character represents the white male, 60 percent of whom voted for Trump. In the movie the rich guy John Hammond built Jurassic Park to resurrect dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the rich guy is a composite of several supreme court decisions handed down since the Reagan Revolution that enabled a new class of capitalist robber barons (the dinosaurs) to arise. The rich guy represents the rule of law. In the movie the character of mathematician Ian Malcolm is trying to warn everyone that the dinosaurs will get out of control. In the story of the end of America, it is democracy that is the mathematician telling us that the dinosaur robber barons are going to be a disaster.
In the movie the various supporting characters have various adventures, but they are all essentially representations interacting with the three main characters who themselves represent the citizenry (Alan Grant), democracy (Ian Malcolm), and capitalism (John Hammond).
Jurassic Park is America, the great experiment in democracy that ends with the election of Donald Trump. In the movie the computer programmers, one evil, one good, one representing Donald Trump, one representing Kamala Harris, both have bad endings. In the movie the greedy lawyer, representing the mainstream media, is devoured. And the park game warden, representing the U.S. government itself, is also killed. The only difference is in the true story of the end of America, Trump triumphs instead of failing to steal riches as in the movie.
At the end of the movie the rich guy, who in the story of the end of America represents capitalism and the American neoliberal economy, is taken to the escape helicopter last, after the mathematician, who represents a badly injured democracy, and the heroine and two children, who represent the citizens. They fly away and that…is the end of the experiment. And the end of America.
Now we wait for the sequel…a New America.
Ice on the Moon 