That is social poverty — when a nation’s social bonds break apart, its social ties are severed. In America, it’s as if a great scythe ripped through social bonds, and distrust is now at astonishing levels. What does social poverty go on to do? It produces political poverty, which means that a society is ruled by idiots and demagogues, that, as it plunges backwards and downwards, extremists, authoritarian, fascist, theocratic movements arise. That is because people need to trust one another to create a modern society, a functioning democracy, and in America, trust, breaking apart, became its opposite: hate, violence, brutality, rage. To put all that in perspective, to give you a living example of it, a majority of white Americans still backed Trump, even after the horrors of the last four years, from concentration camps to mass death.