Dissolution is a story about divisive, cult politics, the rise of white supremacy merged with conservative Christianity, conspiracy theories, and the failure of liberalism. It is a story of extractive capitalism, disparity of wealth and health, and the danger of theocratic intolerance. America’s founding fathers knew, as Aristotle warned so many years before, that inequality brings instability. The founders tried to understand the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchical dictatorships. They sought to create a system of checks and balances that would counter the usurpation of power by any one individual or group. To be born an American was serendipitously to be rewarded with a life of untrammeled freedom and opportunity. A life where individuality, daring, and self-sufficiency were a birthright. Where all are created equal. Where there was no king or lord to bow down to. Being an American was the essence of egalitarianism. It was not just citizenship but an opportunity to serve a grand national purpose. A purpose of personal opportunity and achievement. A purpose of intellectual enlightenment. A purpose of self-reliance and individualism. But that wasn’t the whole history. There was a chunk of history that wasn’t celebrateda separate and unequal history of slavery, genocide, and racism. And it is that separate history that posed the greatest threat to America’s future. E Pluribus Unum. Out of one, many. America’s creed. Americans became increasingly disillusioned by America’s creed. The idea that people from all walks of life, all nations, all races, all religions could come together and unite under the flag of freedom had diminished. People on the left saw America as divided between oppressors and the oppressed. People on the right saw themselves as patriots and nationalists who believed America was divided between themselves and the godless internal enemies who betrayed it. The nationalists blatantly discarded America’s creed and adopted a clannism that demanded loyalty to the clan. You were either in or out. You were either with us or against us. There was no middle ground. The individual was subjugated to the clan and derived meaning and value from the clan. With the abandonment of the creed came the abandonment of shared patriotism. Once shared patriotism was abandoned, the bonds that held America together were severed. Americans sought camaraderie online, seeking recognition from “likes” and "shares." Our sense of community became defined by the social and ethical standards of common hate, drifting anonymously into a digital world united in loneliness and divided by mutual intolerance. The history of modern democracy follows an arc of creation, growth, inequality, decline, and failure. Recent history informs us democracies can fail, morality can collapse, and ordinary people can do extraordinary evil. As globalization created winners and losers, as the wealth gap became ever greater, the fraying of America was rocked by seismic shifts of shocks and aftershocks, creating fault lines of irreconcilable differences. This scabbed and scarred body politic, wounded by political vitriol from politicians dedicated to Party over Country, is in crisis. A saga of contrasted wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, health and sickness, Dissolution is a story of America’s trajectorya trajectory of a country too big and too divided to govern. It is a cautionary tale of multiple generations of two families, who, although largely unaware of each other, have lives entwined in ways that mirror the deepening inequality of life in America. Eddie Randall, son of a millworker, and Ben Thomas, son of the mill manager, are childhood friends whose paths diverge. As the Randall family struggles to survive, the Thomas family amasses enormous power and wealth. The World Business Federation (WBF) which controls the levers of power, works to exaggerate cultural fault lines through its control of media, culminating in a Constitutional Convention remaking America into a provincial republic. Born of distrust and intolerance, the Intercontinental Province slides into a dystopian surveillance state.