A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
Gonna need some firm evidence that the social contract is “long dead” in the US or this post is just nonsense.
https://time.com/5845116/coronavirus-bailout-rich-richer/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/sunday/inequality-america-paul-krugman.html https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-citizens-united https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/LC64096/text?s=1&r=3 https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-10th-anniversary-trayvon-martin-c2d79ae4639934ca1eb77d6b54c16f8b
The social contract is broken when a state asks its citizens to obey the law but doesn’t give them equal benefit from fulfilling the duties of law.
I could keep cobbling links together as examples, but if your metric is a President going on TV and tearing up a piece of paper labeled the social contract while looking into the camera saying “the social contract is dead, officially. No take backsies, can’t triple stamp a double no social contract double stamp.” then I can’t help you.