What, Me Worry?
I’ve seen many posts lately that decry the influence of our felon ex-president, and say things like “I’m not going to let HIM destroy this country.” I think that kind of thinking puts far too much credit in the tiny hands of someone who is openly in cognitive decline. Something, certainly, is destroying this country – but it’s no one person, and certainly not a lizard-brained organized crime Don. He’s merely the lowest common denominator - a figurehead.
So, this is the part of the essay where I declare what IS destroying this country, and what WE are gonna do about it. After considerable soul-searching, I’m afraid I don’t like the answers to those questions, much, and I don’t think you will either. Because what I believe has happened is that our ancestors screwed up from the get-go.
They created a mythical frontier. You know all the stories: rugged individualism and freedom and manifest destiny, the place where anyone can grow up to be President, the place where hard work and industry will get you riches, a place where you are free to safely come and go, to believe in whatever god you chose to follow, to openly speak your mind. So many myths, and a vanishingly small percentage of the population who actually lived in such a privileged place.
Now the price is being paid. In the upheaval of the 1960s, we began to challenge those fictions, starting with the fiction that U.S. might is always right. We rebelled against the war in Vietnam. The rebellion generalized. We rebelled against paternalism and racism – women demanded equity and Black men took up arms. The upshot? A series of assassinations targeting those who defended civil liberties, the first criminal Presidency followed by (perhaps worse yet) a 2nd-rate actor from Hollywood who gently guided his followers back to that “shining city on the hill;” the fiction reinstated.
The fiction cannot hold if you persist in calling out the inequality and racism that continue to exist.
That’s the real tension in our world today, in North Carolina, in the United States, in most of the World. There’s a group of people – responsible, clear-eyed, reasonable people, thinkers, scientists, workers, regular souls, most people – who know we can do better and who are willing to try. They don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They are loath to fight and believe in rational discourse. They are in the majority, but they are losing ground badly and unlikely to prevail.
Against those well-meaning citizens are a small, defiant, and unrelenting group of naysayers who do not believe that social progress is a good thing. They understand “equality” as a word that means “lose your job to a trans person, or non-White, or immigrant, or non-Christian.” They know that “global climate change” is code for eat less steak and drive a tiny car. They have figured out that “freedom of speech” is a license to give lies equal time with the truth.
We’ve worked and paid through our taxes for benefits that we need to retire, chiefly Social Security and Medicare. They call these programs “entitlements” (they’re not), decry the system as “Socialism,” and demand the right to shoot themselves in their own feet.
There is literally no conventional wisdom that this group does not distort, demean or defy. The bedrock foundations of this democracy are challenged and found wanting: three co-equal branches of government must give way to a unitary and all-powerful executive, the rule of law politicized, the courts and legislature co-opted, the right to vote rescinded.
They are not “woke,” and live in terror that their children might be “awakened.” They take their marching orders from stunningly wealthy ministers and priests who equate financial success with godliness. Income inequality is fine with them, because in their fantasy future they will be the ones drawing the big paychecks.
Their only actual competence is in lying to themselves as well as everyone around. Under our current economic system wealth flows upward by design. The more the MAGA minority prevails, the more their own net worth (and ours) will decline. The more they refuse to recognize their own billionaire cheerleaders as the cause of their distress, the more they will be impelled to take it out on everybody else. Forced labor camps? Not in my lifetime, probably. Soon, though. Soon enough.
What are we to do about it? There’s not much being done, short- or long-term, other than a lot of hand-wringing and magical thinking. We need to do more than merely get past the next election. The blueprints for the MAGA revolution were laid down years ago, all the way back to ideas being hatched following the Civil War. It is the long con, and we’re likely too late to stop it. Short of a demonstratively massive outpouring of rejection for these conspirators in elections now and for years and elections to come, they will eventually prevail.
The truth is, we have been complacent, and they are not.