Civil society in the U.S. is a dead man walking

At the beginning of episode seven of the second season of the TV series “Breaking Bad,” a mariachi band sings a Mexican corrido, or narrative ballad, about the show’s antihero protagonist Walter White. In the song, called “Negra y Azul: The Ballad of Heisenberg,” the Mexican drug cartel has become aware of Walter’s methamphetamine manufacturing business and has initiated a plan to assassinate him. Among the lyrics are, “Ese compa ya está Muerto. Nomás no le han avisado,” roughly translated in the subtitles as “But that homie’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Without spoiling the eventual fate of Walter White, suffice it to say that he was the main character, and the show aired for three more seasons. But regardless of how or whether his life ended, he was indeed a dead man walking for the remainder of the series. His life was a non-stop series of chaotic, irrational, violent events, in which everything and everyone around him suffered from his own desperate attempts to stay alive. Bereft of hope, and on a trajectory worse than death, it was not a life that any rational person would want to replicate.

Like Walter White, “civil” society in the United States is a dead man walking. Public life in the U.S. is a series of chaotic, irrational, violent events, increasingly inhospitable to any attempt at rational discourse. And no clear solution is in sight. Indeed, on its current trajectory, civic life in the U.S. is a dead society walking.

There’s no contingent set of conditions, the occurrence of which will cause it to be a dead man walking. The conditions have already obtained. There is no civil society in the U.S.

Rather, we have become a war of every faction against every faction, in which reasoned, dispassionate discourse has given way to violent rhetoric—and actual violence—from both ends of the liberal spectrum. The ramifications of this are enormous, as extremist brands of authoritarian ideology are now in competition to replace civic engagement with totalitarian “solutions.”

The collapse of civil society is not an accident of the genius of American politics. Rather, the seeds of collapse are in the very sowing of our political and legal structures. America’s founders did not intend to erode and eventually destroy civil society through the political institutions they created. But those institutions necessarily led to its collapse despite any good intentions.

In the U.S., we have reduced politics to the invention and protection of possessive individualist rights claims. Perhaps the better way to put it is that we have inherited such a political theory from 16th-century English philosopher John Locke and his ideological cousin Thomas Hobbes.

In a February 15, 1789, letter to John Trumbull, Jefferson asserted that Locke (along with Bacon and Newton) was one of “the greatest men that ever lived without any exception.” Jefferson expressly believed that the political institutions he was helping to create were a direct application of Locke’s rights theory. “Locke’s little book on Government, is perfect as far as it goes,” he wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. on May 30, 1790. “Descending from theory to practice there is no better book than the Federalist.” Locke “laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the … Moral sciences,” he wrote to Trumbull.

What is that foundation? To use Hobbes’s colorful imagery, it is that the human person has a natural right to possess himself and anything else to which he makes a claim. Having rejected natural teleology for a “state of nature,” Hobbes advanced a theory that the natural state of the human person is violent acquisition. Note, this is not some deviation from human nature. Rather, a war of every man against every man is the natural state. The human person is not social by nature, but rather radically individual. Thus, his life is not ordered toward some good, but rather motivated by unfettered rights to acquire and protect individual goods.

Possessive individual rights do not complement a notion of politics oriented toward the good of the person. Quite to the contrary, they are conceived as antithetical to such a notion of politics. Rights replace good as the purview of politics. Having rejected any notion of a shared political end of the human person, ours is a political society that posits and foments mutual antagonism of every man against every man, to paraphrase Hobbes.

Of course, as everyone knows, the proposed solution to such a bleak view of man and politics is the so-called “social contract.” Each of us has the right to take anything we can, but we implicitly recognize that there’s no real security if those rights are not curtailed. Thus, we have made a tacit agreement not to take one another’s things in a transaction—or rather a series of billions of transactions—of mutual consideration. But this contract is a fiction. The real world is one of possessive, individual rights.

In the liberal theory of American politics, there is no transcendent principle by which order can be established or the fictional contract enforced. Both options have already been summarily rejected in the creation of our political and legal institutions. A political society built on a fictional voluntary surrender of rights collapses when one or both counterparties reject the fiction.

So what happens when a sizeable group of people decide that they don’t wish to enter into the contract, or to keep its terms? While it is a generalization, the answer is one of two results: denunciation of any kind of civic responsibility to anyone, or authoritarian enforcement of the fictional contract.

We see both of these things in the U.S. as we turn to 2026.

On the right, a burgeoning number of people advocate throwing off any notion of mutual responsibility or agreement with anyone else, asserting a kind of social and economic libertarian free-for-all. Rejection of the mythical social contract perpetuates a story of hyper-individualist assertions of individual rights. This results in a social survival of the fittest, discarding those who cannot compete. When the adjective “enlightened” is rejected as a modifier of “self-interest,” raw self-interest takes its place. No liberal principle is available to do anything about it. This is the position of many, though perhaps not all, of the so-called MAGA faithful. And of course, violence—whether private or official—is the only means of enforcing those rights.

On the left, the recent election of Islamist, authoritarian, communist Zohran Kwame Mamdani as mayor of New York City illustrates the polar opposite reaction to the rejection of the liberal social contract. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani declared, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” It goes without saying that this is a horrifying statement, invoking images of gulags, mass starvation, and a tyrannical police state. Mamdani is either profoundly stupid or profoundly wicked—or both. But one million New Yorkers voted for him, including a shocking 78% of people aged 18 to 29 and 66% of 30 to 44-year-olds.

Catholic Social Doctrine contains the theology and attending language as the only viable alternative to the pathology of liberalism. Balancing solidarity with subsidiarity, CSD provides the pathway to the protection of human dignity and preservation of the common good.

But, of course, this cannot be a solution on the margins of a political theory that explicitly rejects every element of the doctrine. It would require a regime change at the level of a political philosophy that has been summarily rejected for 400 years.

Lockean-Jeffersonian liberalism no more has an answer to Mamdani than it has to MAGA libertarians. The social contract of mutual self-restraint for the sake of civic peace is not part of the theory; it is a voluntary antidote to the inevitable result of the theory. But when enough people withdraw their consent to the contract, civil society dies.

Like Walter White, civil society in the U.S. is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.

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