America’s destruction of its own government and economy continues to shock the world outside of bribe-paying oligarchs. Not just Canada and Mexico but our allies across Europe and Asia look on with horror as Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol thugs beat up and kidnap people on American streets and murder Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean. While a federal shutdown dragged on for almost two months, the MAGA-aligned Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to Trump denying children SNAP benefits and Trump’s clown cabinet made the TV news rounds saying that inflation was a hoax and that prices were actually coming down.

Official government websites now function like backed-up sewers, filled with Trump Administration propaganda and lies about political enemies, the state of economy, and the safety of cities and communities. The Homeland Security site, in particular, engages in performative immaturity that would get you fired from any company in America. Its vulgar “messaging” mirrors whatever foreign-bot-generated AI content Trump shares on Truth Social. All of this contributes to the global impression that the word of the United States cannot be trusted.

Yes, there are Americans who can’t understand how we would let this happen. Many are incredulous and outraged. But when you look at the entire population, this incredulous outrage seems like a drop in the bucket. What most of the public picked up from Congress’s two dumps of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails is that Trump might have given a blowjob to someone named Bubba and that pundits assumed this was Bill Clinton.

Trump has flooded our consciousness with the lowness of his crimes; he has mainstreamed a whole vocabulary of sleaze, vitriol, and unfiltered hate. “No one would otherwise tolerate the nuclear codes in the hands of someone who talks like this,” the Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols recently wrote on Twitter, “but Trump and his movement have normalized the idea that the president can be completely unstable as long as he’s also entertaining.”

In the old America, Trump’s connections to Epstein, his nonsensical ramblings, and his nodding off in televised press conferences would diminish the confidence of voters. Today, however, such behavior generates a lot of good entertainment even when that entertainment makes fun of him. In the Guardian, Leo Escobedo estimated that “Trump’s most enduring legacy isn’t a policy but a persona as the shameless troll who made humiliation a political strategy.” This has left us with “a culture addicted to performance, where shame is no longer a deterrent.”

Americans do seem addicted to this visceral entertainment that demands ignorance and apathy. But they were not dragged down by Trump himself. Our nation of consumers was already down there waiting. The Silicon Valley authoritarianism we’ve been swept into did not come from the government doing something; it came from the government doing nothing. It came from a void—first from Republican deregulation and then from an unregulated internet of things, which was distilled down to endless entertainment and distractions with bigger shocks and awes. Our very lifestyles have sanitized the tech bro oligarchy, and everyone does it.

This growing malady of ignorant apathy reminds me of I’m Not a Robot (2023), the Academy Award–winning short film by the Dutch filmmaker Victoria Warmerdam. It concerns a woman at her workplace laptop who gets a system update and then a CAPTCHA click test to show she’s not a robot. The problem is, she keeps failing one test after another. When she calls IT, she is stunned when asked if it’s possible that she is in fact a robot. In a horrific sequence, she fails more CAPTCHA tests and is given a test with random questions that determines that there’s an 87% chance that she is a robot and welcomes her to “the bot community.”

What’s unsettling about this brief sci-fi drama is that these CAPTCHA tests are central to our increasingly digital lives: Show us you’re not a robot because robots are bad while humans who spend half of their waking lives in front of digital screens are good. We love movies like the Harry Potter series and The Matrix where the protagonist discovers his true identity as being special and distinct from the masses. Here, though, the protagonist learns that she is manmade and expendable. The true identity that has been concealed from her is of a commodity.

Robots are something our collective imagination has either feared or pitied. As AI improves and we become more ignorant by choice, the prospect of robot domination looms larger. But it’s shocking how willfully Americans have submitted to becoming expendable commodities for tech billionaires. Being enslaved to capitalism’s algorithms makes us robots ourselves: we can be programmed and our actions are predictable. Need evidence? As AP reported on November 28: “The economic picture hasn’t looked very rosy: Hiring has been sluggish. Consumers have been dealing with soaring meat prices. Layoffs are rippling through companies. But despite those concerns, shoppers hit the stores in full strength on Black Friday.”

“The Robots” is a 1978 song by the German electronic band Kraftwerk, the progenitors of the synthesized 1980s. There’s not much lyric to it, just a German-accented voice singing repeatedly through a vocoder “We are the robots.” I’ve thought of this song frequently over the years as the vocoder has become a common means of improving bad voices (think Cher) and pop music has become progressively less complex, with fewer notes. Kraftwerk in 1978 were imagining themselves as music-producing robots, but they might as well have been trolling music-makers of the future, many of whom need technology to create anything at all. (If you want a moment of uncanny, have a look at the video. The four band members done up like shirt-and-tie robots all seem to have the Mar-a-Lago face.)

Most of us rightly feel like robots when we have to do repetitive tasks—which is why people were appalled at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick back in April when he bragged to CNBC that an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones . . . is going to come to America.” He later suggested that as an American Apple employee, you’d “work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” Many argued that this dismal scenario of Chinese factories was beneath the American worker. And yet as Elon Musk is poised to become America’s first trillionaire, the U.S. federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour.

This robotic apathy set the tone for 2025 as government agencies and norms collapsed and the elites who are supposed to be our moral leaders proved themselves cowards by rapidly acquiescing to Trump’s extortion. Having made Americans expect 24/7 streaming of outrageous diversions, the mainstream media has been useless in combatting authoritarians using the same tactics. Even though elite media and institutions recognize the apathy and ignorance running across America, as a social class, they need this ignorant apathy for their business models to work. They’d waste no time in staging an intervention if one of heir own were the problem, but they indulge and humor the masses because they don’t see them as equals capable of rising to an occasion. In a great recent column in the New York Times, Anand Giridharadas argues that “the Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing—taking care of one another instead of the general welfare—before it got really bad.”

Among the masses, political cowardice derives not from fear of losing money and one’s rung in society but from a habitual weakness that has evolved from the surrender of agency for the dopamine of consumption. How does one surrender agency? You start by not being able to think critically. Reading is the key to critical thinking—being able to distinguish emotion-triggering provocation from genuine meaning. But persistent corporate and Republican efforts to make Americans seek entertainment rather than education have paid off bigly. As of 2022, over half of American adults (54%) read below a sixth-grade level. This means that they could comprehend a book like Charlotte’s Web (“Terrific,” “Some Pig”) but nothing much beyond.

In the immediate postwar years, educating U.S. citizens to grow the GDP was universally supported. But starting in the 1970s, the right wing of American politics began a systematic assault on reason, evidence, and empiricism. It exploited the human tendency to not want to do anything that’s difficult. Today’s young people create their identity from meme fragments, unconsciously mimicking behavior they don’t fully understand. Without the media literacy that comes from critical thinking, they fall victim to cultural incoherence. They grow up to become biased, emotion-triggered followers rather than citizens who can make objective and reasoned choices.

Cultivated ignorance coupled with racial and cultural grievance was the GOP’s strategy to keep the working class bitter and resistant. And both the corporate world and the media have been more than happy to assist the GOP in making people feel comfortable and justified with their limited knowledge and lack of curiosity. They encourage a cultural chauvinism when globalism requires the opposite. Perhaps because the country is large and geographically diverse, people see the United States as the only context for any decision, as if there were nothing outside this reality.

Even Americans who take pride in being educated fall victim to a civic indifference created by endless distraction. We’ve had at least two “no worries” generations who’d stick their hand in fire before either judging and telling people what to do. When there’s conflict, they move quietly away without judgment. In October, 2 million people in Italy joined a workday strike over Gaza as a global humanitarian concern. Given Italy’s population, this would be the numerical equivalent of 11.5 million Americans. We got 8 million Americans out for the October No Kings protest, but that was on a Saturday for a do-or-die national issue. Indifference among the American center and left is indeed a problem: 75 million people voted against Trump in 2024, but only 8 million will come out to protest. There’s more to a functioning society than holding up your phone when people are being brutalized. You have to look out for your fellow citizens day to day.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City is one of the few glimmers of hope that Americans may be able to stop being capitalism’s robots. In its many post-election “cope” articles, the New York Times went as far as to suggest that “volunteering for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign became a salve for members of a generation diagnosed by psychologists with anxiety and by the surgeon general with loneliness, whose religious affiliation is often ‘unaffiliated’ and who also apparently killed drinking and having sex.” In other words: We have a Democratic Socialist mayor only because Gen Z have mental health issues and don’t get drunk or laid.

I suppose it would never occur to the Times that Mamdani’s victory might be a case of voter “value added” rather than a fix for something that’s missing. That his candidacy provided something new and different that was exciting to many voters: affection for one another. As the psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips explains, “At its best, affection that is trustworthy is something that is actually genuinely heartening and fortifying. If people can rely on the affection of others and their own affection, they feel much closer and less threatened. They feel much more as if they’re in a shared world.” §