Slouching Towards Bethlehem

When things fall apart and the center cannot hold

Sep 18, 2025

One hundred five years ago, in 1920, Scottish poet William Butler Yeats published his apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming.”

It was written in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, a time when anxiety, uncertainty, and hopelessness prevailed amid fears that the foundations of society were crumbling and the specter of anarchy was rising.

Yeats bemoaned the end of innocence, warning that the best of citizens had lost all conviction while the worst were full of passionate intensity… and what was coming, “slouching towards Bethlehem,” was not salvation or redemption, but something dark, foreboding, and bestial.

And Here We Are Today

Staring at our devices, doomscrolling through our lives, stimulated by momentary outrages and umbrages, grasping onto memes of questionable accuracy to confirm our biases, pausing to smile at the photos of puppies or kittens, then rushing back to the agitating babble to which we have become neurologically addicted.

In this social media dystopia, we are connected globally in every instant, but there is no foundation or center to hold us in a collective humanity.

Whatever is repeated the longest and the loudest sinks into the deepest recesses of our consciousness, erasing norms, justifying the outrageous and unacceptable, twisting any semblance of reality into a dark, delusional hallucination. Truth is sacrificed to the deliberate ambiguity of disinformation, while extremism is amplified to the decibel level of deafening.

All social media platforms know this: conflict, conspiracies, absurdities, and outrages generate more clicks, and more clicks mean more revenue… society and your emotional well-being be damned. The ideologues, crazed cultists, hate-mongers, botfarms, and trolls know it too.

As a result, things fall apart

Alarming percentages of the population can come to disdain the essential goodness of diversity, equity, and inclusion, thereby paving the way for uniformity, inequity, and exclusion, as if these are righteous principles.

Vaccinations become anathema, quack remedies are embraced, and science is vilified to the point that a crazed gunman fires 150 bullets into the Centers for Disease Control.

The most extreme among us are radicalized into committing violent assaults and assassinations of public officials and thought leaders. Insurrection is justified as traitors come to see themselves as patriotic and cultists claim they are Christian.

In Yeats words:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

A Constitutional Crisis

Since its ratification on June 21, 1788, the U.S. Constitution has been the center that holds America together, providing a common bond for a nation of immigrants from diverse cultures, united by the aspirational principles of liberty and justice for all. This precious document is now being deliberately dismantled and destroyed by those lusting for a right-wing fundamentalist authoritarian regime.

It is as if Yeats saw this coming, the darkness dropping, something bestial slouching towards us, with a blank and pitiless gaze, vexing us into a nightmare.

The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? ~William Butler Yeats, 1920

We Still Have Time to Stop the Beast

Christopher Armitage, author of the Existential Republic, reminds us that pushing back is essential:

“When Senator Joseph McCarthy destroyed lives with baseless communist accusations, most senators maintained decorum, expressing "concerns" about his methods. McCarthy's power grew for four years. Then Edward R. Murrow abandoned journalistic neutrality and called McCarthy exactly what he was: a demagogue exploiting fear. Within months, McCarthy was censured and powerless. The key wasn't violence or law-breaking. It was the willingness to match aggressive lies with aggressive truth.”

“When Republicans in Tennessee expelled two Democratic lawmakers for protesting gun violence, the expelled representatives didn't issue statements about "disappointment." They called the expulsion "fascist," organized massive rallies, and turned their Republican colleagues into national pariahs. They were immediately re-elected with increased majorities. No violence. No property damage. Just the refusal to treat authoritarianism as legitimate, valid, or tolerable.”

Nobody is going to do this for us. It’s up to you, and me, and every American who believes in preserving our democracy to stand strong and speak out, together, again and again, until the beast is vanquished.

As John F. Kennedy famously said before an assassin’s bullet struck him down: