It seems to be getting harder to get away from the bad news that suggests an
accelerating decline in the fabric of American civilization. Could be that I
cannot see the wood for the trees. A better, more zoomed-out perspective may
reveal a significant growing awareness of the bankruptcy of current political
and social trends, and portend a swing back of the pendulum, similar to the
1960's. I certainly hope so.
But, meantime, I read in the WSJ opinion pages today four or five pieces on the
growing power of labor unions, especially the (constitutionally dubious)
government employee unions, and how they have destroyed the fiscal integrity of
our states, any semblance of accountability of our public deeply-failing
schools, and similar depressing accounts. I read of stubborn multi-billion
climate agenda policies in the face of massive failures, subsidies piling on
subsidies, diverting resources and destroying jobs for no-good reason,
absolutely no connection to any climate mitigation effect.
And, wherever, I turn among friends and acquaintances, I encounter angst
reflecting polarization in the political discourse. This polarization is
characterized very little by reasoned disagreement, and very much by unreasoned
emotional commitment. Explosive anger is easily triggered by any attempt I make
to try to enter into an exchange of views based on reason and evidence. (Let me
admit that I too am probably somewhat vulnerable to emotional commitment,
though I try hard to transcend it.) The dominance of emotion over reason takes
the form of affiliation and loyalty to identified groups and personalities,
rather than to principles and policies. The former drowns out any examination
of the latter. The very term "independent" in connection to political
point of view attests to the dominance of a broad two-party system regardless
of their programs.
Some examples:
My friends and acquaintances who cleave to the legend of
Trump. They see him as representing the refreshing wrecking-ball that will wipe
away the decadence of social degeneration, fiscal irresponsibility and foreign
policy weakness and disgrace, characteristic of the Democratically sponsored Biden
agenda. The disenchantment rises to the level of agitated hatred and conviction
that only Trump in spite of any argument to the contrary can save us from this damnation.
Without any examination of the merits they cling to the conviction that all of
the charges against Trump are baseless, that the 2020 election was stolen, and
that the storming of the Capital on January 6 was not that significant (after
all, the Democrats completely whitewashed the terrible riots that occurred across
the nation in the recent past – both sides do this. Apparently the one thing
wipes out the significance of the other.) They deny or minimize any role that
Trump played in the effort to prevent the certification of the election. They
turn a blind eye or support the vilification of, and even possible palpable
threat to, Mike Pence, for doing his constitutional duty. (In fact, both sides
now boldly condemn those aspects of the constitution they don’t like, that they
see as obstacles to their preferred outcomes.). In short, they completely
dismiss the threat that Trump poses to liberal democracy by subverting the political
process. It is a threat that I was made aware of prior to the 2020 election,
and, I confess, I discounted it in favor of hoping Trump would be a much-preferred
alternative to, what I saw as, a runaway radically subversive Obama-controlled
Joe Biden. I underestimated both problems. Both likely candidates now strike me
as horrible.
My friends and acquaintances who cleave to the Democratic
party “liberal” legend. It’s a mirror image. The unreasoned passion of hatred
for Trump drowns out any discussion. It is all-pervasive. It produces egregious
double standards – a dismissal of the significance of ongoing deep malfeasance
by the federal government justice agencies in obstructing the investigations
into Hunter Biden and likely involvement of his father, and the ongoing cover
up of same, involving many high-ups in the Biden administration and beyond; schadenfreude
about the health struggles of Mitch McConnel, while papering over and
minimizing the significance of the cognitive breakdown of the chief executive
officer, who also happens to be the commander in chief and the face of America
to the nations; complete indifference to unprecedentedly radical social and
economic policies that reasoned reflection would reveal as alarmingly corrosive
to the long term wellbeing of all Americans, most especially those at the bottom
of the income distribution; the list goes on. Like their partisan opponents,
their thinking is pathetically superficial, juvenile, ignorant, economically
illiterate.
On both sides, it is a matter of (sometimes unconscious)
emotional commitments seriously distorting the capacity for rational thinking. This
is not unusual in humans. Is it worse now? And what does it portend?
