gracchusdixit

The 18th century diplomat and political philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, famously quipped:  “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”  He was thinking of the French and the Revolution of 1789, which he abominated, because he deemed the notion that “the people” were fit to govern themselves to be idiotic. De Maistre’s mordant bon mot was quickly plagiarized by no less than Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, even though they were far more sympathetic to the popular aspirations he disdained—proof positive that a juicy turn of phrase is too good to pass up, even for those who may disagree with it.    

After four years of a watching a sociopath squat in the White House, after suffering the criminal dysfunction of his incompetent administration, after enduring a lethally bungled response to a global pandemic, after witnessing Donald Trump’s dangerously dumb followers bellow and bash their way into the halls of Congress, it is difficult to disagree with Monsieur de Maistre.  That Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes and two Democrats now represent Georgia in the Senate are signs of hope.  But they don’t alter the depressing realities that 74 million people voted for an outright criminal and many of them cling to the absurd fairy tale that he actually won by a landslide.

Which raises a fundamental question:  What accounts for the willingness—one might even say, the eagerness—of such a large swath of the American people to choose a tin-pot dictator over democracy, to abandon common sense and common decency for corruption and a con, to embrace bad government over good?  There are several answers to this question, and unfortunately, none of them is pleasant.

The least unpleasant answer may be that ours is still a comparatively young nation, which makes us, so to speak, historical adolescents, who cannot be expected to make mature decisions.  It is not that older nations, with longer histories, are more virtuous.  It is merely that experience tends to give them a perspective that we lack.  The Italians are notoriously cynical, the French unruly, the Swiss democratic, and the Scandinavians egalitarian, because they have, one and all, lived through centuries of chaos and misrule.  Without that context, Americans have no such clarity.  We are akin to children, to whom every new experience provides more titillation than threat.  Thus, instead of changing our ways, we throw tantrums when we do not get our way.

Another, less pleasant, answer is that Americans are appallingly ignorant.  Few, including the current president, can name the three branches of government; many are incapable of naming any branch of government.  Even fewer can parse a sentence, let alone tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun, or a verb and an adverb.  On the most basic measures of literacy and mathematics, Americans lag far behind the rest of the so-called “advanced” nations of the world. 

This is not because Americans are intrinsically stupid—though some clearly are.  It is because we have allowed political and religious ideology to supplant learning and knowledge.  There was a brief moment when the nation as a whole got smarter, because our country made a major investment in universal public education.  That forward march came to a screeching halt with the election of Ronald Reagan, whose demonizing of government empowered the Republican Party to starve the public sphere in the name of “private enterprise” and “personal freedom”.  This assault on the public good, and on public education in particular, has made Americans more ignorant and intellectually impoverished than they have been in generations.   

An even less pleasant answer is that our most abiding national myth, that the United States of America is a “land opportunity” for those “yearning to be free,” is awash in a  bucketload of eyewash.  For every immigrant who came to these shores seeking freedom, asylum, or opportunity, there was another who came for less meritorious reasons.   From the beginning, this country has been a social and political dumping ground, in which other nations have deposited their miscreants and malcontents.  

The Puritans were religious bigots, unwelcome in their own land, as happy hanging witches as they were hoisting the flag of freedom.  The “Sons of Liberty,” who cooked up the Boston Tea Party, were a mob of lawless tax-evaders.  Another mob of tax-evaders instigated our so-called “War of Independence,” causing 100,000 loyal and law-abiding Americans to flee the country and 20,000 African-American slaves to ditch their masters and fight for the British.  Last week’s invasion of the Capitol building by a gang of white-trash thugs was merely the latest episode in a long tradition.

The last, and least pleasant, answer to the question of what motivates such people is that selfishness, racism, and violence are deeply embedded in American history and essential components of the American character.  

American selfishness loves to masquerade as a “love of liberty,” a charade that has been on shameless display during the pandemic.  All the while thousands were gasping for breath and wheezing to death in ICUs across the land, Samuel Alito, one of the most partisan and sanctimonious members of the Supreme Court, declared: “The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.”  He was joined by another master of sanctimony, our former Attorney General, William Barr, who said:  “Other than slavery…this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”  

These claims are absurd.  Asking Americans to wear masks or refrain from crowded gatherings is not remotely akin to slavery.  When compared with the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the rounding up of guiltless thousands under the Alien and Sedition Acts, the incarceration of 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, or the persecution of countless so-called “communists” by Joe McCarthy, these modest sacrifices don’t come close to being “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history”.  Right-wing resistance to common-sense health measures is nothing but a temper tantrum on the part of those whose vision of “liberty” is the license to do whatever they want, without regard for the impact on anyone else.

Still worse, the “liberty” these people are so hysterically determined to protect is not the “liberty” of all Americans.  It is the “liberty” of white people.  One of the rioters who stormed into the Capitol last week put it bluntly:  “Why are they trying to arrest people like us?  They’re supposed to be arresting ANTIFA.”  Do we even need to ask who she meant by the phrase, “people like us,” or the sort of people she branded with the phony acronym, ANTIFA? 

Underpinning all this ignorance, selfishness, and racism is a strain of violence that is uniquely American.  It is no accident that Americans own more guns, by far, than any other people in the world or that guns kill more people here than anywhere else save the drug entrepôts of Central and South America.  It is no accident that the most iconic heroes of American popular culture are lawless lone wolves who display their toxic masculinity by pulling triggers and blowing things up.   Nor is it an accident that Americans have a fetishistic reverence for the military and the police, whose main stock in trade is the use of force.  Violence built this country, and violence sustains it.  

That is why Donald Trump became our president.  That is why all but 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against impeaching him, even after he openly incited a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol.  That is why more than two thirds of Republican voters would, if they could, not only vote for him again but reward him with a lifetime in office.  That is the enemy we face.  The enemy is us.