With the 2020 presidential election in complete chaos, it can now be said that virtually every institution in the country has broken down and has no credibility left to its name.  This is the logical conclusion to relativism and the destruction of absolutes that began a long time ago and have led directly to what many now describe as postmodernism, post-Christian, post-constitutional, and post-Truth for the times in which we now live. 

It's not hard to find examples, especially when it comes to politics and journalism.  The journalistic profession as it once was rooted in objectivity is dead.  The mainstream media today exist in a state of pretense when it comes to political reporting and claiming to be playing it down the middle without taking sides.  The tragedy for the profession is that it is so unaware of its double-standards and biases that it now is on the receiving end of scorn and ridicule for its blatant hypocrisy.  With the current election in total disarray, the chickens of relativism have come home to roost.  

It seems as though every major institution that holds society together is breaking down.  When there are no shared values or even what now constitutes a value, this is the end result, where no one believes anything anymore, and only cynicism is left. 

The following excerpt from The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy puts its finger on the where and how the problem began:

Medieval thought is characterized by its notion of a universal hierarchy leading up to God; and together with that goes the acceptance of a transcendent standard for the evaluation and understanding of the things of the world. In order to find an unchangeable, an absolute truth, man has to go beyond the limit of his own consciousness and his own existence. 

The author goes on to say that without the absolute standard for objective truth, man's reason will end up failing and therefore ends up being "ineffective and impotent."  When reason breaks down, so does everything else.  The end result is the road we've been on, taking us exactly where we are today: distrust in our institutions with chaos always close behind.

The book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success demonstrates the powerful case how reason itself, and in turn modern society, is rooted in Christianity.  From the preface:

What had propelled the West is not the tension between secular and non-secular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason.  While the world's other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and deductive thinking as the path toward enlightenment, freedom and progress.  That is what made all the difference. 

To use an old saying, what's going on today is what you get when you throw the baby out with the bathwater.  In other words, the breakdown of everything is what you get and is inevitable when reason itself breaks down because of the long and winding road of discarding and eventually outright rejection of Christianity and Christian thinking and traditions that used to be embedded in the American way of life.