168 is a newsletter emailed on an unscheduled basis in which I share my thoughts on various topics for the purpose of discussion. Your comments are welcome so please feel free to post them. To view archived newsletters, please visit www.1hundredsixty8.substack.com.
The events of Wednesday, October 25 are emblematic of a continuing erosion of America’s civil society as a decline of trust and tolerance threatens the viability of the world’s longest-enduring democratic republic. In Lewiston, Maine, yet another mass shooting left at least 18 people dead and 13 injured, making it the eighth deadliest attack since 2006. On the same day, the House Republican majority, having ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and failing to unite behind conservatives Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer, settled on unanimously electing mild-mannered religious zealot Mike Johnson of Louisiana as Speaker. Johnson is the MAGA King of Denial: He denies the role of human activity in climate change; he has proposed legislation to deny women the right to abortions. He also proposed legislation to deny gay persons the right to marry. He is a staunch Trump supporter and election denier. As a constitutional lawyer, he was a key behind-the-scenes figure in Donald Trump’s legal efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Now Johnson is an inexperienced leader of a dysfunctional Congress struggling to fulfill its most basic legislative responsibility of funding the government. His leadership portends a refusal by the House to approve continuing support for Ukraine as it fights for survival against the Russian invasion. The “People’s House” is now in control of the MAGA nihilists who barely pay lip service to legislating and governing.
The fact is, here in the USA, we may not be very good at choosing our political leaders. In the same week as the Maine shooting and the House GOP buffoonery, Donald Trump was fined by the judge in his New York civil fraud trial for violating the terms of a limited gag order. This trial is apart from the four criminal cases against the former President as the result of the 91 felony indictments by the Department of Justice and prosecutors in two states. Mafia boss John Gotti (a fitting comparison) was tried on only 13 counts. The US has survived the elections of Presidents who were bad at the job, but none match Trump in igorance, incompetence, and corruption. Yet, in this land of opportunity, Trump easily leads the race to be next year’s Republican nominee for President. Obviously, our expectations of the type of person we might choose as a leader have reached new lows. Or it just might be that we are realizing De Maistre’s statement that “In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve."*
Americans are fond of crowing about our rights and freedoms, but we behave like a contentious collection of disparate identies, not as a homogeneous group united by a common set of fundamental principles. We are given to tribal-like rivalies that hinder the nation’s progress to not only a more perfect union, but to the peace and harmony we purport to want. This schism is on display in the public reaction to both the terror attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7 and to the Israeli military response. The elements of the American population disposed to anti-Semitic hate speech and violence have so quickly emerged that it is obvious they were already present. All of this flies in the face of our own self-conception of liberty and tolerance. We cannot pass a basic test of free speech and expression. Protesting in support of the Palestinian people is a protected right, yet we have become adverse to ideas and opinions with which we don’t agree. In the same vein, condemning particular policies of the Israeli government should not reflexivly be equated with anti-Semitism. But such lines are now blurred and it may come as a surprise to some that as much of the negative rhetoric about Jews in general and Israel in particular comesas much from the liberal left as from the extreme right.
What have we become?
Perhaps the more appropriate question is “Are we now simply more of what we’ve always been?” Our history is informative: the Founders protected chattel slavery in the Constitution, forcing the nation to eventually fight a civil war to expunge it; the hangover from that conflict is still with us, most notably in persistent racism. A recent study states there have been over 6,400 lynchings of blacks in this country since the end of the Civil War. There have mass killings of blacks- the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, the destruction of the mostly-Black community of Rosewood, Florida in 1923. A nation of immigrants, we have at various times practiced a violent bigotry against the Irish, Italians, the Chinese, Eastrern European Jews, and Latin Americans.
Religious freedom was among the motivations for the early European colonists who emigrated to the New World, but we have periodically suffered through bouts of religious intolerance against Catholics, Jews, and various Protestant sects. In recent decades, we added Arab Muslems to the list undesirables. Even today, those who style themselves as Christian nationalists describe the US as a ‘Christian Nation’. (Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, has described the United States as a ‘biblical republic).
The vastness of North America engendered a zeal for acquiring as much of the land as possible. “Manifest destiny” was the pretext for turning much of the continent into private property, a near-perfect exmplar of Proudhon’s statement that “property is theft”.** To realize this ambition, we committed genocidal acts against the native populations. With the flimsiest of rationales, we broke the treaties we made with the natives, forced them onto reservations, and abandoned them to lives of poverty and desparation, treatment that cannot never be described as ‘Christian”.
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. -Alexis de Tocqueville
That may have been true when de Tocqueville was writing in the mid-19th Century, and it is indisputable that America has accomplished great and wonderful things, the most notable being our singular longevity as a democratic republic. The United States was, in the words of Emma Lazarus, the nation that welcomed “your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to breath free” to enter this Land of Opportunity through its “golden door”. In the mid-20th Century, our industry power and the fact we were bordered by two oceans allowed us to turn our industrial might into defeating the forces of fascism. We became an economic and military powerhouse.
But we have lost our way, abandoning social and political progress in favor of the reactionary stance of imagining a nation that existed only in myth and by making a commitment to preserve the lesser rather than strive for the better. It is difficult to conceive of improvement unless you admit to your shortcomings.
The Problems With Living in the Material World
As much as any other factor, American life is rooted in its consumer economy. It is the basis of the material comfort most Americans enjoy, but it also promotes waste. The USDA estimates, for example, that the United States wastes between 30-40 percent of its food supply annually. We are fond of single-use products like plastic bags and myriad disposable items. We rank 7th in the world in motor vehicles per capita (the first 6 countries have very small populations ), but public transportation has been mostly neglected for decades. Modern America is the land of dazzling technological advances, the latest being the coming onslaught of devices controlled by Artifical Intelligence. It is a land of large-screen TVs and SUVs, meals you order with your phone to have delivered to your door,
But convenience and comfort can mask the problems we should be addressing. As a society and a culture, we tend to be superficial, sloppy, insensitive, and even arrogant. We have come to take much for granted- our democracy, for instance. We tend to avoid responsibility for our individual roles in the polity and the society as a whole. It is not novel to these times that there is a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism infecting the population, but did it ever seem possible that we would witness book bannings and elected officials speaking openly about burning books? The percentage of us who cast ballots in our elections should be regarded as a disgrace, but we still find it convenient to criticize politicians for perceived ills. (I’m still wondering how a President is responsible for the price of gasoline in a free market economy.) How can it be that the world’s wealthiest nation ranks 50th (out of 195 countries) in infant mortality? Why do we cities like Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi that cannot provide their citizens with clean drinking water? The World Population Review reports that “compared to other developed countries, the US has the most homicides, with 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people.“
It is the time that we Americans take a good look around at the problems that need fixing. We can start by identifying these problems discussing possible solutions.
Suggested Reading
Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab, Steve Inskeep (2015, Penguin Press)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann (2017, Doubleday)
*Joseph DeMaistre, Sardinian lawyer and philosopher, Letter 76 in Lettres et Opuscules, August 27, 1811.
**Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865), a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist considered by many to be the "father of anarchism"
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If you ever wondered why the American population has so many supporters of performers in politics, just review the work of Canadian media researcher Marshall McLuhan. He coined the aphorism "the medium is the message". Whether its television, radio, computers, smart phones, or other electronics, they have induced in the republic a somnambulism about content, character, religion, sociology, art and other areas where inputs are accepted without investigation or verification. As long as a particular medium supports your notions of the world, you accept that input and medium without critical thought.
So no subject is immune from acceptance by those with little curiosity, little resistance, scant independent verification and absorbs our brains and memories given any plausible (sometimes fictional) conclusions by someone else. So judging by the last persidential election, 2020, there are approximately 70 million obvious believers out of 150 million voting citizens that belong to McCluhan. That leads to a conclusion that only with reduction in those media sources that are not straight or truthful will the nation's malaise in politics, specifically GOP adherents, diminish and normal American democracy ascend to its prior routine negligence.
Fulfilling the needs of the public, ala the Federal Constitution Preamble's provide for the common defense and especially promote the general welfare will fall to those of us who continue critical thinking about local, state and national affairs. Everything else is ignored by those in office who also sleepwalk through life or simply want to show an image of governance. The problem is that extreme right governance mistakes this medium is message concept for a dictatorial yearning, a yen for authoritarianism, a search for someone to give all our rights and responsibilities to, someone who can think and act for supporters and let them ignore everything but their own notions of pursuits of happiness.
And there are many factors that support such lackadaisical politics. In the Southwest and Plains states, posse comitatus still rules, the concept that there is no law above the county Sheriff and such local law. The GOP forever has the concept of 'falling in line' with politicians, not independent thinking for the masses. Many people are ill educated to the ongoing needs of people to watch their leaders for missteps in democracy: incomplete, faulty or misguided education and teaching. Some are just totally absorbed in living their lives, say at at low or impoverished level, isolated from social interaction or media, or too affluent to bother. Some media types, not to mention politicians, are just populist panderers to make a commercial buck or live an easy life sponging off the public weal. And there are the power grabbers who for selfish reasons want to rule the roost, soak the public ala grifting, or dominate in their chosen domains, ala domestic relations. Then there are the religious leaders who pull their Gospel messages because telling the entire truth would cost them their churches. And there are many more facets of American life that promote abdicating voter attention to business and relying on supposed trustworthy others.
Absent 1. education on civic responsibility in schools and real world; 2. teaching critical thinking that applies to all parts of the American experience, especially politics; 3. improving the basic lot and living of millions in Appalachia, separatist living arrangements, meaning economics that work for all; 4. limiting media to fair and balanced or verified truth concepts by law; 5. enforcing laws against corruption in political office; 6. elevating accountability in every area of life, leaving social promotions, participation awards, unwarranted praise, that is more truth and justice we are destined to continue struggling to meet stated governance documents Declaration of Independence and Constitution which assist us toward truth, justice and the preferred American way (apologies to Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster).
Nic, I appreciate your like, your comment and your invitation. I realize my 'comments' are of a length and depth that resemble stand-alone essays. In the past, more than one publisher/writer has asked to take my stuff and give me 'award' kudos for them or edit a series of comments on a topic for publication giving me the credit: Washington Post; New York Times; Wall Street Journal; Writers Blog; James Call and even foreigners. I've even been invited to write the equivalent of a book on a given topic on teaching techniques: Ford Foundation and Iran National Education Department. I find it easier to respond to good essays like yours or correct the record on other blogs with my essays. My 'problem' is writing as a former editor, reporter and policy writer I attempt to be brief and technical. I don't have your creative nature to make prose more attractive. I do invite you to send me a list of concerns to which I might also be attracted and maybe generate something you might publish with my byline. We can talk about this later.