The election is coming, and I am frightened, yet hoping our nation will pass through this macabre dance with lies and propagandists on social media and right-wing news networks that have gone a long way to prove that telling a lie often enough makes it the truth.
Never, during my lifetime, have I seen such rampant, angry, cultural division in this nation. Never have I seen such demagoguery and hatred. Ginned up not only by extremist media, but a rogue former president, and a crew of cowardly congressional consenters. These are not mere policy differences.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the great arsenal of democracy, martialing its mammoth industrial might, fighting the odious tyranny of Nazidom, the cold war oppression of Stalinism, sacrificing the flower of its youth in two sanguinary world wars and an even bloodier civil war, could now fall victim to scoundrels whose only objectives are power based on the exploitation of the darker aspects of human nature and who now deny the validity of the most closely monitored election in the nation’s history. The big lie.
We have come through a great pandemic; the miracle of medical research has saved millions of lives. We are entering a period of exponential technological change, though frightening, that promises to save the planet from the worst outcomes of human despoliation. Humanity will inevitably triumph. Technology will improve human existence; it always has, even though it has often caused displacement, economic tribulation, and fear. Even if it is true that life must be a class struggle, as Marx wrote--class warfare, the arc of history has bent toward justice, as Dr. King said.
If human nature causes the remnants of tribalism and reptilian self-preservation to abnegate a more diverse and tolerant society, then the normative, civilized forward motion of society, the rule of law, means nothing. If this is true, then hope dims. Society is destined to a dark Trumpian dystopia. “I have got mine, so fuck the rest of you.” Let the rule of the jungle prevail. Every man for himself. This is not what the founding fathers intended. Even though the curse of slavery was baked into our constitution, this is not what they intended. They intended the Union to become more perfect. They knew it was not perfect—it was a compromise. But they hoped that it could move toward more perfection.
Even so, different factions militate to preserve their identity, fearing a loss of self, a “replacement” by those they think less worthy. What is that identity? How does it differentiate us from one another? Cultish religiosity and white supremacy that seeks to impose its rules on others, selfishly assuming that one culture is better than another? Human DNA is all the same. Differences in education and in societal norms are what separate us from beasts. Human sociology confirms this premise. Some believe that theology is the curse of mankind, others believe it is the salvation. The state has no place in this debate.
Ignorance is the seed of prejudice, education the seed of tolerance. But perhaps not always, some say, many educated Germans, the nation of Schiller, Wagner and Beethoven gave us Himmler and Heydrich. But that was an education based on lies—geared upon the debasement of human fellows—a grotesque version of Eugenics. Education perverted by lies is not education This behavior is true today of those who feed the public misinformation.
The norms of society rather than the capricious rule of men are what holds us above the savage beast. It is not just the written law, it is the understanding and compassion of society that makes it validate our existence as anything other than debased. Diminishing societal norms of decency and tolerance threaten our freedom.
Attaching oneself to convenient untruths often provides a path to power at the expense of the less entitled. Something about that resonates today, although institutional anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, went hand in hand with the racist Jim Crow south. The United States abrogated open immigration in 1924. Before that almost anyone could come, and in coming, helped build the colossus of America—the railroads, the steel mills, the automobile and an ideal that America was exceptional. That reality is still true, if we let it be, moving the arc of history to the better. If the “evil that men do lives after them and the good is oft interred with their bones,” as Mark Antony cynically said in his eulogy to Caesar, then we are obliged as a society to make that not happen. We must strive to make the good live after us.
Somehow, I want to believe that we will come through, as “Americans will always do the right thing, after all other possibilities are exhausted,” attributed to either Abba Eban or Winston Churchill, take your pick.
But I still am frightened, in fact, scared stiff.
