NO APOLOGIES NEEDED

When I first read reports of Donald Trump referring to El Salvador, Haiti, and African countries as “shithole countries” and asking why the United States continues to allow immigration from them, I was neither surprised nor felt that he may have misspoken.  We are at that point in our public knowledge of this president and his preferences that his being a racial bigot should no longer elicit shock or be explained away as some momentary lapse that has nothing to do with who he is as a person.

What I dreaded instead was what I was sure would follow and has followed: widespread outrage from the usual quarters and the direct victims of his racist outbursts and the predictable demand for apologies, possibly retraction.  As an original national of one of the countries named in this and another recent barb, Nigeria, and as an American citizen, I would like to say to Donald Trump: no apology needed.

No one, except his fellow travellers of the Right, emboldened in their public display of racism since the emergence the Tea Party movement, doubts Trump’s vile, vulgar racism exemplified by his remarks.  If we, indeed, grant that he is a racist and what he said is what he believes, which I am convinced is the case, what then would we be asking him to apologize for: publicly sharing his private beliefs or holding those beliefs at all?  If the former, it can only be because he is not an ordinary public figure, but the president, that our demand would be appropriate.

The problem, though, is that we somehow knew who he was when we made him our president.  From the day he announced his candidacy for president with a no less vile racist attack on Mexicans through his ban on Muslims entering the country immediately after his inauguration to embracing white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the current eruption, Trump has not been coy about what kinds of people he thinks should be allowed to immigrate to the United States.

If, as is now clear, our president is an unapologetic racist, asking him to apologize tantamounts to asking him to either lie to himself or lie to us.  When he was forced to lie to himself a day after his initial response to the violence in Charlottesville perpetrated by neo-Nazis and the alt-right marchers that led to the death of Heather Heyer, it took only two days for him to let us know that his original response that found moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and those who opposed them in the name of what is best about this country and humanity was his true stance.

This is why I think that Trump should spare us any apology on this occasion. If he were to apologize, given his record, there is no way he can mean it.  In any case, none is needed.  Trump, I submit, is not the problem. 

The country that elected him knowing who he is, and the party that not only sponsored him but continues to line up behind him, even now, are the problem.  When we, country and party, decide that our country is better than this, we will not have another day of putting up with this offence on basic decency that is President Donald J. Trump.  The world will need no apologies then.

THE 18TH BRUMAIRE OF DONALD J. TRUMP BONAPARTE

We Americans love to trumpet our exceptionalism; for some in the Republican Party, not proclaiming it from the rooftops is akin to treason.  The election of Trump makes it clear: America is not unique, either in contemporary politics, or in history.  For proof, we can look to Europe, where far-right movements are on the rise, or we can look to history. In our time, we see antecedents of Trump’s emergence in the election of another blowhard, enemy-chasing, fear-mongering, foul-mouthed, and sexist, Rodrigo Duterte, as president of the Philippines. In the saga of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, in the uncanny similarities between the French tyrant and the new American autocrat, we can observe the U.S. repeating a gory history. It is unexceptional, and exceptionally dangerous.

In the mid-1800s, France was in the throes of legitimacy crises induced by the 1789 Revolution and continued through the Napoleonic Period (1791-1815) and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1830.  Although the revolution had been prosecuted in the name of the people, it merely substituted a new ruling class: the bourgeoisie, whose factions--the industrial segment and the financial class--jostled for legitimacy as the true representatives of the new order. These factions were driven by economic interests and grasped at whatever political ideologies -- from republicanism to monarchism -- that would give them the upper hand against each other.  The crisis became acute with the overthrow of the monarch again in 1848, which saw the restoration of the Republic. But the republic was not to last. It was supplanted by a coup d’état in December 1851, as Napoleon’s not-too-smart but rather clever nephew, Louis Napoleon, began his farcical replay of his uncle’s reign.

Despite the century-and-a-half that separates them, there are three points of convergence between mid-nineteenth century France and early twenty-first century America -- between the rise of Louis Napoleon and the ascent of Donald Trump.  First, the state of the electorate.

By the time Louis Napoleon executed his coup d’état in 1851, the electorate was already sufficiently alienated from the ruling class, and had been internally divided for long enough that its capacity to resist any pretender was significantly attenuated. Similarly, the contemporary American electorate has been degraded enough in the course of the last thirty years, beginning with the all-show, little-substance regime of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and ending with the relentless badgering, battering and efforts at undermining Barack Obama’s presidency over the last eight years. 

The situation has not been helped by the assault on truth and objectivity. On the right, the culprits are talk radio, Fox News, and think tanks that are geared always to muddying the waters on objectivity. On the left, it is a particularly virulent form of nihilism sponsored by less careful post-modernist popularizers.  In an environment in which truth now comes with inescapable bylines, and criticism is no longer regarded as coming from fact-based, objective standpoints, it was an easy transition to a campaign where then-candidate Trump could boast that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”; where a candidate, Trump, lied routinely, peddled conspiracy theories and embraced his inconsistencies without shame; but it is his opponent, Hillary Clinton, with a lifetime of public service, who was deemed untrustworthy.

Louis Napoleon’s base of support was in the peasantry in a yet-to-be industrialized France dominated by Catholicism, and in the lumpenproletariat, the omnibus category Karl Marx created for the castoffs of society: thugs, vagrants, prostitutes, etc., who were always available as hired hands for causing mayhem, especially in political struggles among the various classes in society.

In the present case, Trump’s base in white rural America mimics the description of the French peasantry offered by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1869).  “The Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, i.e., of the mass of the French people.  The chosen hero of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dispersed it.”  Trump may not be able to disperse the Congress, but there is little doubt that, during the campaign and transition, he was dismissive of Congress and of the elite of his party.  Certainly, his standing with the base of the Republican party and with America’s rural whites who came out in historic numbers to hand him the presidency, owes everything to his dismissive attitude towards the “establishment” and “political correctness”.

Although she walked back her comments, Hillary Clinton did hint at the lumpenproletariat equivalent in her “basket of deplorables” characterization of Trump’s supporters.

The second striking parallel between Bonaparte and Trump: the character of the candidate.  In the aftermath of France’s turbulent social dislocation, Marx wrote, “historical tradition produced the French peasants’ belief that a miracle would occur, that a man called Napoleon would restore all their glory.” Historical tradition in the United States has engendered a similar belief in white America.  Our country has not lacked social dislocation, either. The malaise of which Jimmy Carter spoke, the crisis of confidence that doomed his presidency, produced the miracle worker, Ronald Reagan. 

The economic collapse of 2008 and the anxiety of the white lower classes that they were being left behind, pushed from the pedestal they had hitherto occupied in the American structure, kindled in Americans the expectation of a miracle.  In 21st century America, as in 18th century France, an individual, Trump, turned up who pretended to be that man.  Republicans and Trump’s other followers’ obsession with the second coming of Reagan coincides with Trump’s obsession with being America’s savior from what he called in his Inauguration address, “the carnage”.

From Reagan’s “it’s morning again in America” to Trump’s “Make America Great Again”, the pangs of nostalgia, a yearning for what in the French situation was the many configurations of Restoration—monarchy or republic, it didn’t matter—the country has found its candidate who “would restore all their glory”.

Trump, too, has had no difficulty claiming leadership of that class in which he finds what Marx called “a mass reflection of the interests he himself pursues” as he “perceives in the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes the only class which can provide him with an unconditional basis.”  Recall his declaration: “I love the poorly educated,” he enthused after winning the Nevada Republican Caucus.

We are, beginning to see the outlines of a possible usurpation—NATO exit, unilateral imposition of tariffs, negotiating trade agreements, removing sanctions on Russia.  Again, the similarities between Trump and Bonaparte are quite instructive.  Both desire to usurp power.  Both behave “like misunderstood genius[es] proclaimed by all the world to be simpleton[s].”  And Trump’s ever-present threat of unleashing his Twitter hordes on the opposition must not be discounted now that he is president.

Then, the third chilling similarity: the situation of the ruling classes in Bonaparte’s moment and in Trump’s. Bonaparte rode to power as different ruling class factions jostled for power and on the opposition’s diffidence at alienating the masses that supported him.  In Trump’s case, Republicans and Democrats alike cowed before “the angry white, largely male, voter”.  The Republican Party helped create this incubus, the Democratic Party feeds it while beggaring its minority constituencies—think of its scandalous running away from Obama’s record in the 2014 midterm elections—and the American media pander to it.

Of course, for all the chilling similarities between Bonaparte and Trump, there are obvious differences. No doubt, we do not expect Trump to crown himself "Emperor". And we know that American institutions may have the resilience to survive the shenanigans of a narcissist Commander-in-Chief. We should, however, not be too sanguine about how battered and compromised those same institutions have become in the last thirty years. And therein lies the wisdom of sleeping with only one eye closed while our current pretender sits in the Oval Office.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign ended with a humiliating military defeat at the hands of a new power, the emergent and recently unified Germany. At home, the Paris Commune led an insurrection and a new era of instability was inaugurated that lasted decades. How Trump’s reign will end, and how many people will suffer in the meantime, and in the aftermath, remains to be seen.

WHY WE SHOULD WORRY ABOUT RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE

The Russians interfered with our elections. This has been repeatedly confirmed by the top echelons of our state security apparatus up to and including Jeh Johnson, the former Secretary of Homeland Security. The meddling occurred at several levels and it has been traced to the highest levels of the Russian government. The only thing still to be established by several investigators is whether there had been cooperation, witting or otherwise, by our citizens.

Even in these days of a unipolar world, one would have to be naïve in the extreme to think that the rump of the other pole of what used to be a bipolar power world, Russia, would give up all its pretense to being a world power, regardless of what ex-president Barack Obama thought of it.

No doubt, we, too, interfere enough in other countries’ elections. We do so on the surface, for the most part, through NGOs like the Open Society and the Cato Institute or quasi-governmental institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy as well as our many well-heeled foundations supporting democracy around the globe.

Russian interference may be a case of “what goes around!” It matters less to me that the Kremlin was involved. Our own foundations and other assortment of think-tanks are not fully innocent of ties to our own government, either. It is completely unacceptable when it comes to Russian spy outfits seeming to preselect winners and losers in our presidential election.

Which is worse: that the Russians interfered with our elections or that they had any measure of success at doing so? If, indeed, the Russians set out to secure a certain outcome in our elections and, from the look of things, got it, then, it must be that either the Russians somehow knew what would resonate with our electorate, offered it, and watched our voters lap it up; or ours is an electorate that would play suckers for whatever the Russians fed through our multiplex public spaces—media, internet, town halls, rallies, etc.—and vote the way the Russians wanted or expected us to

I am inclined to dismiss the first option. All we have been told, so far, is that the order to interfere in our elections was given at the highest levels of the Russian security apparatus. We now know that they had a clear preference for an outcome: the election of Donald Trump.

That they obtained their desired outcome is more important and more sobering. It is the one that anti-Russian hysteria is likely to obscure and, by so doing, prevent us from looking at what is wrong with our society such that we ended up where we are at this moment. Of course, I assume that our current administration is not one that meets with the approbation of most Americans and few would deny that the Trump presidency does not have popular support, a fact indicated by Trump’s loss of the popular vote in the last elections. The president is neither popular nor was he popularly elected. Yet, that he is president today, despite his popular vote loss, means that there is a solid block of his supporters, especially in so-called swing states, some of whom bought, alongside other things, whatever it was that the Russian infiltrators were selling during the electioneering campaign.

Certainly, we now know or have reason to believe that a lot of what the Russians fed to our electorate, apart from the leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s private emails, too, was fake news. This is what should worry us as a country, a democracy, and the only recognized super-power in the world: that we have a solid segment of our electorate that is susceptible to manipulation by a foreign country that is willing to feed their communication lines with lies, half-truths and outright fabrications.

Whatever epithets we care to choose to describe this portion of our electorate—“low information voter”, “angry male voter”, “apathetic voter”—what matters is that we now have a not insignificant percentage of our electorate that is vulnerable to manipulation by local and foreign mischief makers, that will be around for some time to come and, therefore, represents a very present imponderable factor in future elections. This constitutes a severe existential threat to a democracy that has been losing its democratic attributes for quite some time now.

How do we rid our system of this segment or how do we inoculate our electoral system against this pathogen? That, for me, is the challenge that the news of Russian meddling in our elections has brought home to us. My fear is that we are not paying it enough heed.

Why Do We Ask To Be Lied To?

It should be clear by now to all that President Donald Trump’s original reaction to the violence in Charlottesville was his his true feeling about the perpetrators of violence and what they stand for.  And his performance at the hastily arranged press conference at the White House on Monday, August 14^th, where he recited with barely disguised discomfort, if not disdain, the script that had been shoved before him by his staff, acting as our surrogates, calling out “white supremacy”, “KKK”, “neo-Nazis”, and “racism is evil”, happened only because the rest of us insisted that he must and in exactly those terms call out those crucial members of his base.  And now with his Arizona rally where he insisted that his initial reaction was right, it is time to ask why we demanded that he did what he did at that press conference.  For, at that conference, he was literally responding to our insistence that he lie to us.

Why do we ask to be lied to?  Why do we insist on hollow rituals when all they do is further reinforce our cynicism about our institutions and our public life and diminish the dignity we attach to the highest office in our land: the presidency? 

If anyone seriously thought that Donald Trump believed any of what he had said at that Monday press conference, subsequent pronouncements from him have clearly demonstrated otherwise.  I did not.  I would like to think that I was not alone.  It had taken him two days of badgering by almost everyone after his initial response to the violence in Charlottesville, the unwarranted death of Heather Heyer, and the maiming of eighteen others, to consider blaming those who were directly responsible for that tragedy.  If his statement had come from a rethinking of his initial position, he ought to have admitted making a mistake and apologizing for getting it wrong the first time.  Nothing of the sort happened.  This is why I am convinced that his was a crass response to pressure from, ironically, “many sides”.

If I am right, it is fair to say that in making his statement, the president lied.  That the president lied is not what is important on this occasion.  It is that he responded to our goading him to lie to us.

Nothing in this president’s short political career and his life prior to it tells us that he is anything but a well-rounded bigot: against blacks and Hispanics; against women; against Muslims; and against Jews.  He ran on an openly bigoted platform and nothing he has said or done since taking office suggests that he has had any change of heart.  On the contrary, his silence on the mosque bombing in Minnesota and his failure to reference Heather Heyer in his first response to Charlottesville merely emphasize his commitments.  Finally, when you have one of the official leaders of the alt-right movement, Steve Bannon, as a principal counselor to the president, we should not pretend that the presidency has not been shrunk to fit the moral size of this president.

As a people, we are alarmed that the presidency is becoming one with its present, temporary occupant.  It is why that even when we are not sure that the president himself believes it, we insist that the presidency itself step up and demonstrate moral leadership.  In other words, we acknowledge the moral cretinism of Donald Trump but we do not want the presidency to become synonymous with the moral cretin who holds the office momentarily.

Still, as much as I sympathize with the desire to keep the office separate from its momentary holder, it may already be too late to save the American presidency.

For eight years while Barack Obama held the office, the Republican Party, its foot soldiers in the Tea Party movement, and the same right-wing bigots under attack now in the aftermath of Charlottesville all thought absolutely nothing of rubbishing the presidency because of their intense hatred of its then officeholder.  They then entrusted the office to a clearly unfit holder, Donald Trump.  Why do we think that a small mind would not remake the office to fit him?

When we demanded that the presidency disown part of the president’s constituency, we essentially asked our president to abandon some of his cherished supporters and distance himself from his own preferences.  Yes, he obliged us, but then he had to do so by lying to us.

Instead of asking to be lied to, we would have been better served to let the president own his bigotry while we seek ways of separating his kind from ever occupying the presidency again.  We have ample time to do that.  Let us get to work.

It has been a few years now since I composed the note below to the Rachel Maddow Show.  As the byline shows, I was still at Seattle University then.  I am reprising it in this setting now because we are in the season again when toxic people and their toxic ideas are gaining respectability, especially in the media, because their hosts will do anything for ratings when they are not making false distinctions between the toxicity that people like, at the present time, Donald Trump--welcome to your next president, America!--Ted Cruz, and, of course, Mr. Marco 'Glib' Rubio, represent and genuine difference of opinion on matters of mutual concern in a decent society.  Enough said.

Dear Rachel Maddow,

I have just finished watching your exchange with Pat Buchanan.  I must say that I was mightily disappointed with your handling of him and his racial supremacist views.  I was expecting that you’d do a better job and you did not. 

Here is why I think you did not.  You, quite out of character, allowed yourself to join the ranks of those who continue to dignify the bullshit that Pat Buchanan wraps in fine raiment that makes him a feature of the talk shows on TV.  When you asked him why there have been 108 white men out of the 110 men who have ever served in the US Supreme Court, he gave you the KKK party line and you did not pick up on it.  I cannot assume that you are afraid of him. 

He said, among other things, that in all the signal events of American history it was “100 % American white men” who were present and/or active.  You let that pass.  How much American history does Pat Buchanan know?  Or pundits are allowed a pass when they peddle illiteracy in the name of rhetoric?  Has Buchanan ever heard of Crispus Attucks?  And, obviously in Buchanan’s KKK-inflected history of the United States, there were no blacks who fought on the part of the right side in the Civil War, hence his startling claim that Gettysburg was all white in battle.  You let him slide on that, too. 

And when he uttered the slander that Judge Sotomayor is an affirmative action hire, you seemed to be apologizing by suggesting that there is some good for our nation to have a wider pool of candidates to pick from.  Yes, you are right.  But that was not the right answer to a rampaging racial supremacist.  Did the judge receive an affirmative action degree from Princeton or Yale?  Did her law review editorship carry an asterisk showing that it was an affirmative action appointment? 

And when he trotted out the canard that they all do who want to defend white privilege regarding the superior performance of the fire fighters or his own SAT scores, you let him slide, again.  In the first place, except in the make-believe world of racial supremacists, no institution hires or advances employees on the basis solely of test scores.  When we allow ourselves to be sidetracked into arguing test scores, we let them take the high ground.  Secondly, I always like to ask my students whether they will agree if someone suggested to them that in all the years that the US Supreme Court has been in existence since 1787, only two black people have had the smarts to sit on it, they usually display more wisdom than the old racist fool that you dignified in your segment.  Even a random sampling of the population over time would have yielded a greater than 2 frequency for black candidates.

By not calling people like Pat Buchanan what they really are—racial supremacists whose only ‘improvement’ on the David Dukes of this world is better diction—you contribute, even if inadvertently, to their continuing respectability in our public sphere.

I do enjoy your programme and tonight’s missteps will not change that.  I just hope that you will take another look at the bona fides of the Buchanans of this world and ensure they receive no pass the next time around.

Femi Taiwo

Philosophy Department

Seattle University

In fairness to the host, she did do a rejoinder the following day taking care of some of the concerns in the above, though by no means all or most of them.  And, certainly, I am not one to suggest that complaints like mine have anything to do with her follow-up.  But in a season where bullshit is again having respectability conferred on it in our public discourse, mostly media-driven, some caution might be in order for the rest of us not to fall easy prey to snake-oil salespersons.  A word is enough for the wise.

AMERICA'S MEANWARD TURN

Last November's elections returned Republican majorities in Congress and in many state legislatures.  As well, many state governorships fell into Republican hands.  Political analysts, editorial writers, and many ordinary thinking persons, have interpreted these results as a decisive turn to the Right by Americans.  I propose to challenge this view and offer a different interpretation of the elections and their aftermath.  I would like to suggest that a more appropriate characterization of what took place last November is to see in it a "meanward turn," a turn to meanness in public life, to meanness as a yardstick for measuring the desirability of public policies, and as an index of electability of public officials.

It would be wrong to date this meanward turn to the last elections. It was long in the making.  The elections were merely a formal acknowledgment of a material change in the culture of public discourse, including public policy formulation and implementation.  To understand this contention, a little background is in order.

It is arguable that the turn of events signaled by the elections' outcome is related to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements of the last three decades.  In addition to the changes that these movements brought about in the areas of public policy formulation and implementation, there were concomitant changes in the character of public discourse about issues over which no consensus could be said to exist.  Examples abound.  For instance, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, laws were promulgated against some of the more egregious forms of racial and sexual discrimination in various spheres of life.  Of more importance were the changes that did not need any formal institutionalization.  The language of public discourse came to be marked by some sensitivity to racial, sexual, and other differences.  Feminists had begun to make appreciable progress in getting the rest of us to mind our language and be watchful of sexist references in formal and colloquial situations.   I am not saying that meanness ever disappeared from public discourse.  By no means.   But the transaction costs of meanness were often high and sometimes prohibitive: you could be sued; you could suffer all kinds of disapprobation, and so on.  You could be mean, but you had to go to creative lengths to do so.

By the same token, bigotry was not respectable and was even frowned at.  There was a declining level of tolerance for words that hurt and actions that demean others.  How times have changed!  What makes the last elections such a significant turning point is that they brought to office, to the apex of public life—Congress—individuals who, in the name of a spurious frankness, call others names, stigmatize fellow citizens, brand ways of life they happen not to share, demonize difference, and just plain make it unnecessary to be watchful of any passion for meanness.

Again examples abound.  Presidential candidates now fall over one another to see who is closest to the top of the meanness index.  Think of it: it is no longer cool to run for office on a platform of what you will do for people, if elected.  It is cooler now to run on a platform of what you will do to people, if elected.  Building schools, creating jobs, and generally establishing conditions for all, especially society's worst off, to lead lives befitting their humanity, are things you do for people when you are a public functionary of a certain kind.  Jailing people and throwing away the key, taking benefits away from the needy, making it more difficult for the children of the poor to hope for better days than those of their parents, are things you do to people when you are a public functionary of the kind ascendant in this country today.  And who are those to whom these things are to be done? They are those who have historically been shut out of the benefits of full citizenship in this country, poor people, legal and especially illegal immigrants, the dispossessed generally: in other words, those who are least able to organize in their own defence, or find alternative sources to those that public functionaries are eager to eliminate.  Gubernatorial candidates now run for office on a promise to build, not schools, but prisons and other institutions for confining both undesirables and unwanted.  It is not fashionable nowadays to campaign on a platform of increasing the rate of graduation from high school of those most at risk of dropping out.  It is a competition to see who is the toughest and the meanest s.o.b. who can be trusted to lob heads off, as in the death penalty, or lock them up quickest and most often.

I would like to make a suggestion that is quite in tune with the tenor of these times: gubernatorial candidates who won office on a campaign to restore the death penalty or intensify its deployment should have the privilege of performing the ceremonial tape-cutting to declare open the death season for convicted murderers in the states where they won.  They should have their pick of administering the required injection, turning on the switch, or playing the hangman in the first execution to come under the new dispensation.  I cannot see a more fitting demonstration of their seriousness of purpose and capacity for taking tough actions.  By and large, bigotry has become respectable or, at least, less disreputable in the name of 'telling it like it is'.  And anyone who demurs is easily labeled 'humorless', or a foot soldier in the 'political correctness army'.  When all else fails, First Amendment guarantees provide the last refuge for our contemporary scoundrel!  I am not sure that the writers of the First Amendment thought they were guaranteeing a right to obnoxiousness and incivility for citizens.

What must be pointed out in the current situation is that meanness is a racket, a harbinger of false promises.  Mean policies may be effective in the short term.  They may even buy some respite for ordinary Americans who place their trust in quick-fixes.  Nor can one doubt that they will help many otherwise unimaginative politicians get into, and stay in office for some time.  Yet they cannot represent long-term solutions to the crises of thought and life pervading this country.  One does not have to be a genius to predict that, given present trends, the merchants of mean cannot build the prisons fast enough.  For unless, by some fluke, most of the kids forced on to the streets in America's inner cities and suburbs were to die soon or fairly soon, it should be obvious that a generalized life of crime and reactive meanness is what is in store for them as a consequence of America's meanward turn.  They will grow up devoid of hope, bereft of skills to give them a fighting chance at life, too strong to drop dead unless felled by bullets, but seething with rage at a society in which you are what you own, and they have no access to owning.  They surely are headed for prison or death.  The trouble is: they will not go in or down quietly.  Those kids who grow up with a lethal mix of envy and resentment towards those who are well off have ready access to guns.  They are going to become a more potent threat in their adulthood when the possibilities of improving their situations would have been reduced to nil.  Envy and resentment are not noble sentiments.  And I fail to see how those who gloat over the prostrate conditions of their less fortunate compatriots-remember, the poor are Americans, too-can expect to live in safety to enjoy what they pretend are the fruits of their labor.  The wind of cutbacks and beggar-thy-neighbor policies cannot fail to engender the whirlwind of a war of all against all.  We can see the signs of the commencement of this war already: neighbourhoods creating their own private police, individuals clamoring for the right to bear concealed arms, individuals abandoning whole areas of cities to criminal elements, citizens forever on the move to escape the widening boundaries of crime and other dangers to life and property.  It seems that the leaders of this country are bent on proving Hobbes right.

POSTCRIPT:

The above piece was written sometime in 1995.  The election to which it refers was the historic one of 1994 when the Republicans won control of congress for the first time in almost half a century.  Then, as was the case in 2010, people, especially pundits and scholars, interpreted the shift as a turn to the right. 

What has surprised me is how prescient the piece has turned out to be when it comes to the coarsening of values and the substitution of name-calling for serious discourse in our public life.  Needless to say, the one or two newspapers that I ran the piece by back in 1995 found no merit in it.  I am not sure that I can persuade any of its relevance, even now.

What is noteworthy is that when I wrote the original piece, no congressman had called the president a liar at a public forum no less than the occasion of the State of the Union address; nor had a Supreme Court associate justice blurted out at the same forum that the president was telling an untruth when he expressed his view of contentious court decision.  We had not had a party commit to a destructive policy of noncooperation with the other party for nothing but partisan political advantage, even when such a policy hurts the country.  We had not had the Tea Party and its gun-toting exponents at political rallies.  Talk radio had not become, but was well on the way to becoming, the torrent of toxicity that it now is complete with its corrosive impact on the quality of public discourse.  Of course, we had their precursors in the militia movement of the early nineties whose madness and violence only got checked after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995.

My hope is that we do not have an Oklahoma City reprise before the Tea Party and others like it are checked in our politics and public life.  For it is obvious that the tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut, has had no significant impact on the preference for violent rhetoric in our public discourse.  For the rest, the politics of hate and meanness may have eaten too deep into our public culture to be checked anytime soon.  I can only hope that, for the sake of all that is good about this country and that we hold dear, I am wrong.