I didn't pick up on her comment. I might have. I agree the guy is loathesome and dangerous in his habit of saying things that are patently untrue, counting on his cultlike following to march, lemming-like, off the cliff and take the rest of us with them. But I don't wish him dead because I've come to understand that the hatred such a wish would require takes too much out of me. I'm pretty good at getting my spirits back up when they go down - good music, good food, good conversation all do that - but why use the energy, I tell myself, when I could put it elsewhere.
For one thing, I think blaming the orange road kill, to use one of his ninety-nine names in current use, is not the problem. The real problem is a combination of two things. One is an uninformed populace willing to follow-the-leader because we live in what some call a "post-epistemic age" - an age when we no longer believe in the idea of objective truth, but think truth is simply whatever you want it to be. If I want to follow an American Führer, I can. I know my rights.
The other problem is our failure - is it laziness? simple apathy? ignorance? - to do the work necessary to keep democracy alive. We have allowed it to slip through our fingers, to wither away, because (and this connects it to the first problem) we have lost the will to educate our children in the art of critical thinking. Where once we valued being smart and working hard, we now put our effort into equity and diversity.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not against including the whole population in the American experiment in democracy and, God knows, as a gay man I committed to diversity and inclusion decades ago. But I also value nuanced thinking, and avoiding pendulum swings like overcompensating for leaving kids out of competitive games by giving them all participation trophies. I have weak muscles and flabby skin because I built an aversion to physical education early on, when my elementary school physical education program consisted of baseball or football instead of calisthenics or soccer, and I was almost always the last to be selected when my colleagues chose their team members. I know the feeling of being left out; I know where the impetus to award participation trophies rather than reward athletic performance came from. But the push for inclusion came with a loss of excellence. And the notion that "learning should be fun," much as I agree with it, also brought with it the feeling that there was something off about a dedication to hard work and struggling against the odds.
I have no way of measuring this claim, if indeed it is true, but I'm not alone in my concern that we are throwing American democracy out because we aren't willing to do the work to keep it alive and well. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two professors of government at Harvard have put their heads together and written a book titled Tyranny of the Minority. I haven't read it; it's due to come out next week, but you can read about it in a splendid history and summary of the slide of American democracy in an article in the latest edition of The Atlantic. [You may need to have a subscription to gain access.]
It starts out by making the point that the United States, which once led the world as a model for the pursuit of democracy, has fallen behind. What jumped off the page at me was the claim that even Argentina, my idea of a country that knows how to shoot itself in the foot, now outranks the U.S. in Freedom House's Global Freedom Index. Not economically, I assume, but in other measures. Freedom House, I should mention in passing, is roundly criticized by conservative voices for being too "progressive" (don't you love that notion - "too progressive"!), but at the same time it receives most of its funding from the U.S. State Department and other government grants.
Levitsky and Ziblatt's main point, if the Atlantic article is anything to go by, seems to be that the U.S. has painted itself into a corner and no longer has the mechanisms needed to gain rule of the majority. We read on a daily basis how the tail wags the dog in America, how the Senate blocks such things as voting rights and those wearing the mantle of retrograde Southern racists like George Wallace and Orval Faubus, who today would clearly be in the Republican Party, and Strom Thurmond, have infiltrated the Republican Party's power brokers. Evangelicals, themselves infiltrated by "God loves you more if you're rich" prosperity-gospel leaders, now exercise power way beyond their numbers, although one might prefer to describe what's going on as political manipulation by right wing politicos of clueless religionists.
I'm on so many democratic party politicians' mailing lists that I spend hours every week clearing out my inbox of "please send five dollars...three dollars... anything you can?" solicitations from worthy candidates. I understand that the only way around deep pocket Republican donors is for small donors on the left to pitch in, but I can't escape the worry that anything I send barely covers the cost of mailing me and asking for more donations. It seems so much like a losing proposition.
I don't know what else to do, other than stay awake (something that has gotten harder and harder to do as the brain-fog descends), pay attention, and share the information that comes my way when my bullshit detector goes off.
I don't believe in intercessory prayer. I don't think that getting Saint Francis to use his clout with the Big Boss to save the squirrels from my favorite animals - dogs - is the way to go. But if you do, please, will you, get somebody upstairs to shake my fellow-Americans into awareness that we are losing our democracy as we speak. And guide the hands of Jack Smith and Fani Willis and all the other heroes fighting the good fight to throw aforementioned road kill's ass in jail.
And to think clearly, to question, to speak out, to vote, and not to surrender to cynicism.
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