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.