Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

The US federal government has been in shutdown since the beginning of this month - the first of its kind in nearly seven years - after Congress failed to reach an agreement on funding. Both parties are pointing fingers, blaming one another for the impasse, while federal employees - including soldiers and air traffic controllers - go without pay. Neither side shows any willingness to cede ground.

In an America already marred by rising political violence, as well as a visible breakdown of constitutional norms and institutions - from the legal system to the media - that have drifted entirely from reality, this shutdown is not merely a bureaucratic standoff. It is a symptom of something deeper.

This crisis, of course, has roots. Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion, warned a century ago that American democracy's biggest weakness was its dependency on "pictures in our heads" - manufactured realities shaped by propaganda and groupthink. In the digital age, those fractures have widened into chasms.

But today's moment feels far more sinister than the partisan divides of Lippmann's time. We are witnessing a rise in eliminationist rhetoric - the belief that the other side must not simply be defeated, but destroyed.

Over the summer, tragedy struck when Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home. On the same day, State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot multiple times.

On September 10, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was gunned down in broad daylight. Before the facts were even known, the far-right erupted into a frenzy of apocalyptic rhetoric. In my own home county of Boone, Kentucky, the local Republican Party chair, Chet Hand, declared that Democrats are "the party of insanity, demonic possession and radical extremism. They represent Satan's spawn on earth, and their rhetoric over the years has stoked a proliferation of incidents like this."

On October 4, a few days after the government shutdown began, retired US Army lieutenant general Flynn wrote on X (formerly Twitter): "This is WARFARE! It's not just bombs and bullets, it's information, technology, and other unseeable forces. It's 5th Generation Warfare!"

Periods of civil strife always entail a breakdown of shared reality. During the English Civil War, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke grappled with how reason could be reconstituted after chaos. In Leviathan, Hobbes explored this in depth, while Locke, through his writings on political theory, language and epistemology, sought to rebuild a common framework of understanding.

As historian Joseph Kellner recently wrote in Jacobin, the collapse of shared reality after the fall of the Soviet Union was the clearest marker of a systemic breakdown - a symptom of a civilization that has lost its sense of past and future, reaching for anything to tether itself to an uncertain and shaky foundation. The US now stands in that same place. I also know this to be the case because I am tracing the fall of reason, law and order in my own community. 

The shutdown is not the cause of the chaos - it is the mirror reflecting it. A nation that can no longer agree on truth, reason or shared purpose cannot govern itself. And when every faction believes it is fighting a holy war, even the machinery of the state becomes degenerated.

This is not just a political crisis. It is, increasingly, a psychological and spiritual one - a civilization at war with its own reflection.

The author is an investigative journalist, columnist, author, political analyst and the founding chairman of the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project, a local US anti-corruption network and civic oversight body.