America’s Arc of Moral Madness (and Hope)

The path of human progress is random, chaotic, and often maddening. Taming humanity—organizing ourselves for the common good—has been a fool’s errand since antiquity; cajoling and coping with humanity are perhaps the best we can do. Yet there is also a spirit in each of us that never surrenders. That in the face of what seems insane and insurmountable in the moment, we find a sliver of light through which we squeeze ourselves and dare to meet the challenge; through which we emerge again to restore ourselves and renew hope. Most Americans rise each day with the expectation that the day is theirs; that they will be left to their own desires and devices, as long as they treat others as they wish to be treated.

This fundamental right of self-determination governed by the norm of reciprocity has been with us since our nation’s inception that we are, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, “endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Life, liberty, and happiness. Throughout our history, we Americans have respected and protected—often with our lives—these freedoms fostered within the norm of reciprocity. At its essence, this is the magic of America—of an experiment that has (thus far) prevailed regardless of the enemy (external or internal) who might wish to shatter the persistent dreams and aspirations of Americans who are inherently in charge of their destiny. Today, we are facing one of those daunting moments when those we have chosen to represent our interests have, at best, a dubious commitment to our interests over their own.

The last seventy-five-or-so years have produced incredible gains in human welfare as The United States ascended to its throne as the world’s lone superpower. Compared to our parents and grandparents, our lives are a cakewalk. The affluence we enjoy is unprecedented in human history. The question today is are better-off humans better humans? Moreover, is what it means to be human due for a major overhaul? The late French philosopher, Michel Foucault argued humans are a curated composition of intellectual and moral architecture that if revised or discarded “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Foucault was suggesting we humans are a constellation of cognitive illusions which durability relies on our collective subscription—of our willingness to play along. That what it means to be human is dynamic and impermanent, which is as the Buddha further argued, the nature of everything.

On the last day of March, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. during which he sought to assure us that justice was always on the horizon, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For those who remember 1968, or have studied that period in American history, our society was as fraught with division (if not more so) than it is today. The Viet Nam War, racial conflict, generational animus, severe air and water pollution, and a stagnant inflationary economy made us feel as if we had entered a dark tunnel that was sure to collapse before we ever got to any light at the other end. And, like today, there was plenty of violence in our streets, more often waged with bombs than with guns.

Our victorious euphoria that ended the long period of crisis that began with the stock market crash in 1929 and ran through Word War II, and which subsequently gave rise to large American families living in tidy idyllic suburban neighborhoods in the 1950s, would reach its climax in 1969 when we landed a man on the moon. During this period, “America is good” was our moral mantra. Four days after King’s assurance of justice at the National Cathedral, he was gunned down on the balcony of The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, the future suddenly looked bleak. The paint was peeling off the post-World War II America. Unbeknownst to any of us at the time, King’s “arc of the moral universe” had achieved its apex. It would prove to be a bridge to moral peril more than an arc—maybe even a bridge to moral collapse.

We then entered what became the malaise decade of the 1970s with double-digit inflation, a dishonest law-breaking president in Richard Nixon, and an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation posed by the Soviet Union. With the Viet Nam War winding down in the shame of defeat, and the mess of Nixon’s Watergate scandal destroying what had been a stellar run for our federal government through the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the best President Carter could do was offer us redemption; if we would only turn down the thermostat, put on a cardigan sweater, and sacrifice more, Carter’s evangelical sensibilities believed we would be born again into greatness. He came to epitomize the decade with what presidential historians still refer to as the “malaise presidency.”

Then, a sunny smiling actor-turned-politician from California, Ronald Reagan, arrived on the scene to offer Americans absolution. We weren’t the problem; government was the problem. Our civil religion flipped from Carter’s jeremiads to a re-inspired version of the late 19th century prosperity gospel. Reagan was here to liberate us—to lift the cloud of malaise. In 1980, Reagan beat Carter in a landslide with 489 electoral college votes to Carter’s 49; a 10X drubbing. Then, suddenly, we embraced an ethos of entrepreneurial zealotry in pursuit of prosperity. Among other shifts, the best and brightest no longer sought a role in our federal government as they had after World War II. They became lawyers, investment bankers, and technologists who embraced investor Carl Icahn’s new ‘morality’ conveyed by the character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street that “Greed is good!” The nouveau riche were back in style for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. Heavily starched shirts, suspenders, and mousse-laden hair for men, and leg warmers for women who swarmed the new Jane Fonda-fueled craze of aerobics became uniform staples of the 1980s. (I still have my suspenders by Hermes and my hair eventually recovered.)

In the period’s cultural observer, George Gilder’s, 1984 book The Spirit of Enterprise, he romanticized this new spirit of America in the 1980s as reflected in its newly-minted entrepreneurs.

Some are scientists, some are artists, some are craftsmen; most are in business. Although they act as individual men and women, they are nearly always driven by familial roles and obligations. They are not always temperate. Rarely elegant or tall, only occasionally glib or manifestly leaders of men. By fleeing their homes and families to go to far-off lands, may inflict and suffer a trauma of loss—and fight to justify and overcome it. As immigrants, many seek an orphan’s fate, and toil to launch a dynasty. Ugly, they wreak beauty; rude and ruthless they redeem the good and true. Mostly outcasts, exiles, mother’s boys, rejects, warriors, they early learn the lessons of life, the knowledge of pain, the ecstasy of struggle.

This spirit of enterprise, as Gilder called it, was accompanied by a new spirit of victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Christmas holiday in 1991. The subsequent peace dividend was characterized by a sudden increase in both political and economic power for America. The United States was now the world’s lone superpower. The thesis of American exceptionalism that began with John Winthrop’s (1630) “A Model of Christian Charity” in which he suggested “we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of the world are upon us” to settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later invoked by many politicians including Kennedy and Reagan, made its transition from setting the humble example for the world to the neocon dream of reshaping the world in the image of America. We had won the Cold War and quickly dispensed with humility in favor of hubris. Winning is its own intoxicant.

An era of politics as blood sport was ushered in by the congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich from Georgia in 1994 whose “Contract with America” began our precipitous descent into the dysfunction we see in Washington D.C., today. Gekko’s “greed is good” became Gingrich’s “gridlock is good.” Destroying the institutions of our democracy was picked up by the Tea Party in the early 2000s and is the core of the MAGA movement thirty years after Gingrich’s so-called contract. The late 1990s caught another huge tailwind after the end of the Cold War with the coming of the Digital Age. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs completely transformed the economy from bricks and mortar to 1s and 0s. We survived the fearful doomsday transition we imagined in “Y2K” as we rang in the new millennium and our moral orientation shifted again. “Digital is good” as the next moral mantra was born.

Americans were entranced with digital technologies in all aspects of their lives: work, play, and love. Meanwhile, in a cultural fit of delusions of grandeur, we lost sight of the virtues and values that created the greatest empire in the history of the world. Initially and dramatically, following the attacks of 9/11, with the lies of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda in Iraq to justify the Bush/Cheney aspirations of an American exceptionalism on steroids. We had been poked with a painful stick and it was time America showed the world what it meant to be a superpower, or at least how we could spend trillions of dollars, kill tens of thousands of people, and destabilize an entire region of the world.

However, our greatest delusion may have been believing that linking human beings on a filter-free platform through Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook would somehow propel humanity forward. Social media promised to be an elixir for everything from the proliferation of democracy (remember the Arab Spring of 2010?) to solving all our issues related to human connection by friending and liking at the click of a button rather than a handshake or a hug. But like a toxic solvent, the ether of the Internet dissolved America’s social fabric. Within ten years, sharing cute pictures of grandma’s cats morphed into a laboratory of disinformation including an incubator of suicide for our youth. Contrary to what initially seemed to improve our lives, social media made us vulnerable, narrow-minded, depressed, and dangerous.

The Age of Deceit that began with Bush/Cheney has subsequently achieved its pinnacle of expression with the second election of Donald Trump. We experienced a moment of potential moral reset during the period of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” but alas, a black man in our White House was more than too many Americans could tolerate. “Deceit is good” is today’s perverted moral mantra. If nothing else, Trump has demonstrated that lies have no consequences, at least no negative consequences for him. It is hard to find King’s “moral universe” anywhere in American life, today.

Many believe that the institutions we have built over two-and-one-half centuries will survive the wrecking ball of Trump and the MAGAs. As one scholar recently suggested to me in a retort to my concern that we now have a virtue-free president, while our founders believed wholeheartedly in the importance of virtues, our institutions are strong enough to survive regardless of who might occupy the Oval. In other words, virtues-in-leadership no longer matters. This seems like a specious—plausible but wrong—argument to me. I suspect it may even prove to be the ultimate expression of American exceptionalist hubris. At the very least, it is an extremely risky proposition. Alas, such is the life and inevitable death of empires; on this point history speaks with great clarity. Our city upon a hill may be reduced to rubble sooner, rather than later.

Recently, I attended the new Broadway show, McNeal, at Lincoln Center in New York City. It stars Robert Downey, Jr. as an aging Nobel prize winning writer faced with the many dilemmas of artificial intelligence (AI). Downey’s natural irascible nature was a perfect fit for his character, Jacob McNeal, who is a near-perfect writ-large reflection of the American character in 2024. Often intoxicated, but never wrong, never apologetic, and never in doubt. “AI is good” as our next moral mantra appears to be a certainty. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is our new Gekko, Gingrich, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Trump.

To be clear, I am not advocating for the end of the development of new technologies. Technology has been essential to advancing human welfare. I am simply asking that we heed our mistakes—like those we have experienced with social media—and consider carefully how we apply technology in our lives. To pick our moral compass up off the floor and put it back on the table. Today, the arc King idealized in 1968 is a nearly unfathomable, random, chaotic, and maddening black hole into which algorithmic equations and quantum computing are sucking humanity into the abyss at astonishing speed. Notwithstanding the promise of improving human welfare, we risk allowing AI to extinguish the human spirit; to suppress volition and homogenize our lives. To prove Foucault’s thesis.

As creativity advocate, Kirby Ferguson has illustrated, we are experiencing a crisis of sameness produced by technology. AI doesn’t create thought; it flattens it into an average of everything. It wrenches the spirit out of the human. It turns both poor writers and great ones into mediocre writers. But, as Ferguson points out, conformity and repression often lead to rebellion and rebirth. Anyone up for the next Renaissance? Are you, or your child, the next Leonardo da Vinci?

Unfortunately, the endgame of AI may be to replace American exceptionalism-on-steroids with nihilism-on-steroids.  From humility to hubris to nihilism may be the signposts which tomorrow’s historians use to define America’s final descent. Taming humanity—let alone assuring justice—is becoming a quaint notion, indeed. Humanity itself may be an irrelevant locus of focus. But, no, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What comes next in the cycles of American history is anyone’s guess. Rebirth, or a descent into an entropic collapse are both possibilities, as are other variations between the two. Our task remains, however, the same: look for that sliver of light to squeeze through to fortify and restore our humanity—to bring hope back into our lives. We made our history what it was: a messy and inelegant march into the future. But, march we did and we remain (mostly) upright today. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued during another period of great uncertainty in America, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

For many, Trump is a blessing: a savior who will restore them to what they view as their historic and rightful place in social, political, and economic order. To produce a sort of retrotopia. Others view him as a curse whose deceitful, cruel, and sleazy manner is not just an existential threat to American democracy, but also to their own lives. Either way, our best hope—however perversely accomplished—is to get Americans back on track to moral goodness where truth, self-determination, and reciprocity snap America back to its potential as that city upon a hill. At our essence is something no technology or demagogue can defeat: a flame of resilience and ingenuity that resides deep within our souls. Not even a Blackwell chip from Nvidia can generate this spirit.

Our founder Thomas Paine wrote at the time of our nation’s birth, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He also acknowledged, however, that

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

In other words, we need look no further than into a mirror to point the finger of blame for the government we endure.

In my lifetime, the four most inspirational leaders were Kennedy, King, Reagan, and Obama. Theirs are the faces that should be on our Mt. Rushmore of today. They each had very different political perspectives and extraordinarily different personal backgrounds. However, they had one thing absolutely in common: they all made Americans feel good about being Americans. They believed in the American experiment that began in 1776. They lifted us up and made us reach for what Abraham Lincoln called our “better angels.” Like Lincoln, the first two were assassinated; the third nearly assassinated; and the fourth, spared. (The optimism of unity is threatening to those who seek power through animus.) Their courage resided deeply in the core of their being and their belief in the unlimited capacity of the human spirit. They personified hope. In their honor, it is our duty to stand in opposition to divisive forces and to avert America’s moral collapse.

We are better off today, but are we better humans? The Latin-based word nihilism in its literal translation means nothing-ism: the rejection of moral principles where cynicism reigns and life is meaningless. Based on America’s current trajectory, we need to face the possibility that nihilism may become the defining character of the next America. Although our institutions may hold, they remain the object of human leadership. As columnist David Brooks observed, MAGA is perhaps most accurately considered as an inversion of morality made up of “performative arsonists.”

Destroying things is easy, building things is hard. I think we all believe (and expect) that soon-to-be empowered MAGA loyalists can destroy, but can they build? As we learned with our attempt at regime change in Iraq, being able to do the first and not the second can result in long term instability and expanded regional conflicts with no end in sight. Is that really what we want for America?

For the moment, as Americans we still enjoy most of our rights of self-determination. Being human still matters. All of these developments over the last seven-plus decades have been, as they always have been: up to us. Individually and collectively, we need to act to direct the future of our lives, our communities, country, and world. Notwithstanding the headwinds of Trump’s authoritarian nationalism devoid of any subscription to virtues, in America the people still decide. We have the power.

It is an evident truth that without darkness there can be no light. The spiritual parallel is that without suffering there can be no enlightenment; without despair transcendence is unachievable. That the only way out is through. Therein lies the path forward. It is time to stand again; to honor our voices; to move on from this moment with humility and determination. To make our presence known and, moreover, felt. To open, to release, and to rise.

 

By |2024-12-22T13:41:03+00:00December 7th, 2024|American Identity, General, The New Realities|0 Comments
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MAFGA

Do you remember when it felt good to be an American? When the always sunny-side-up Ronald Reagan proclaimed that every day was “Morning in America”? The best day ever in America was always that day, and tomorrow would be even better.

Traditionally, the essence of the American spirit lies in one basic proposition: that the United States of America is the best place in the world to become all you can be—to realize your dreams. If you were born here, you were damn lucky. And, if you weren’t you would do what you could to get here.  The shining city on the hill beckoned all as the escalator to unmatched human fulfillment where each successive generation would reach new heights of achievement. That spirit was indomitable in American life for more than fifty years—from the late 1940s until the early 2000s. Then, we turned against ourselves.

Today, Americans are exhausted. Many feel as though they have been living on the edge of disaster—mentally, physically, and financially—since before the Great Recession, now more than a decade past. Then, the pandemic threw us all in a pressure cooker threatening our very existence. It has taken an extraordinary toll that has proven very stubborn to resolve. The sad fact is that Americans are killing each other at rates not seen since the Civil War, and committing suicide at rates never seen—ever. (Let those facts sit with you for a moment.) Since the early 2000s, we have fallen so dramatically into divided camps of hate-filled animus the prospect of redemption seems impossible to summon.

After fifty years of extraordinary achievements and prosperity, made possible by the sacrifice and toil of six-plus generations of Americans who preceded us, we slipped into the trap of judgment and condemnation, heaping shame on each other at every opportunity. Shame that kindles humiliation, which results in depression, anger, and violence.

The invocation of shame started with the religious right, but today finds its greatest animated vigor on the woke left. “Family values,” espoused by the religious right was always a contrivance to bind true believers together (for the benefit of the church and/or televangelists), and to condemn those who did not join and conform to the money-machine bondage of institutionalized mysticism. Their pro-life movement is perhaps the most enduring shame-based construct of all time. All well-packaged doctrines, but nonetheless hypocritical and knavish.

More recently, the many shame-based movements of the woke left (MeToo, BLM, Defund the Police, Occupy Wall Street) target men, Whites, cops, and the wealthy with a firehose of shame. Do those targets deserve ridicule? Yes, some do. Will it change behavior—solve the problem? Absolutely not. Finally, right when we need everyone on board to solve the many effects of climate change, and to persuade the unvaccinated to get in line for a jab, the principal pathway of persuasion is, you guessed it, shame. We humiliate people and then wonder why they flip us off rather than do what we need them to do, for us and for themselves.

The message is always the same, notwithstanding subtle modifications to fit different targets: you are immoral; you are unworthy; you are deplorable; you are stupid. Like middle school bullies, we put each other down to build ourselves up. In fear of being displaced from our position in American socio-economic hierarchies and/or enduring the effects of a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, or simply satisfying our elitist impulses, we defaulted to putting one foot on our fellow Americans’ necks and a knee on their backs to assure our own status and success. It is little wonder why we live in a toxic cauldron of ire that is destroying our humanity and our country.

This dire assessment aside, there is an enormous opportunity for those in all elements of society—business, political, and social—who are astute enough to provide the foundation of redemption to save us from ourselves and, yes, thrive. Make Americans Feel Good Again (MAFGA) is a simple and powerfully persuasive proposition. Lifting people up has always proven more powerful than putting them down. “Your success makes mine possible” is a tried-and-true leadership axiom. The elegance of this proposition lies in its return on investment inasmuch as the investment—the cost of adopting this approach—is $0.

The use of the term ‘good’ in MAFGA is intentional. Not happy, or great, or special; good. As my high school expository writing teacher often reminded me: “good is a moral term.” Moreover, ‘good’ is the essence of feeling worthy, which is essential to every human being’s sense of self that enables them to succeed in their pursuit of their particular purpose—of their dreams. Evisceration of the goodness in our fellow Americans—what shaming does—is a surefire pathway to societal collapse.

Today, MAFGA can be applied to any aspect of life that requires persuasion. Business, public health, politics, education, law enforcement—wherever you need people to make a preferred decision or adopt better behaviors, making them feel good about themselves for having done so is by orders of magnitude more effective than dropping the anvil of shame upon their heads. Shaming and the humiliation it evokes must stop, now.

Finally, since many of you follow this post for my political observations, to my Democrat readers, it appears the Republicans have figured this out first. While Democrats are busy criticizing each other in Congress, and shaming people who are unsupportive of their policies (from fiscal stimulus packages to climate change to vaccinations), Governor-elect Youngkin in Virginia was making parents of schoolchildren feel good about themselves again and won the statehouse. Even Republican senator Josh Hawley, a Trumpy firebrand, who made some rather visceral remarks about the state of manhood in America last week, is onto something: he was attempting (wittingly or not) to make men feel good again.

In the presidential election of 1980, Mr. Sunshine, Ronald Reagan, defeated the jeremiad-driven Jimmy Carter by granting Americans absolution from their sins. He intoned: you (Americans) are not the problem, government is. You Americans are good. The question for Democrats today: is Biden, Carter? Republicans may not even need history, redistricting, or voter suppression to assure their next wins if they embrace MAFGA-based strategies. The midterm elections of 2022 and presidential election in 2024 may well turn on the simple measurement of who made Americans feel good again. In the emerging post-crisis era, how could making Americans feel good again ever fail? (Wake up Dems, you may not be as ‘woke’ as you think.)

MAFGA, people. MAFGA.

By |2021-12-01T16:24:06+00:00November 17th, 2021|General, Leadership|0 Comments
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Hope at Home: Shifting Our Focus to Developing Stronghold Communities

One of Ronald Reagan’s favorite go-to one-liners was to suggest that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”[1]  Following the Viet Nam War and Nixon’s Watergate scandal that led to his resignation, Jimmy Carter tried to heal the nation with the disposition of a Baptist minister who sought redemption for his flock through his jeremiads built on the theological triad of sin, repentance, and salvation.  Reagan had a much simpler and more appealing approach, which made his defeat of Carter in 1980 a relative slam dunk.  Reagan offered Americans absolution by a theological slight-of-hand when he relocated the entire Calvinist concept of original sin away from the individual to the institution: Americans were not the problem, government was.[2]  In his words of absolution, Reagan began a movement to view the federal government as the enemy of the people that has slid from constructive criticism during his presidency to outright demonization in the current Age of Deceit that began with Bush 43.  The New Deal institutions and attendant bureaucracies that proved critical in America’s recovery from the Great Depression and World War II had become, in Reagan’s view, lead weights wrapped around the ankles of enterprising Americans.

The Republican Party under Reagan became as libertarian as it was conservative, which eventually manifested as the Tea Party movement at the onset of Crisis IV in the early aughts that mixed a rather schizophrenic blend of libertarianism with social conservatism.  This progression of anti-government sentiment made way, finally, for Trump’s faux-populist ethno-nationalism to destroy the federal government’s institutions whenever and wherever possible to give cover to, and create space for, the exploitation of government by Trump and his co-conspirators both inside and outside government.  Trump’s “Drain the swamp!” mantra, which is a common anti-government trope has, of course, only resulted in the expansion of the swamp into a small ocean with small craft advisories posted daily, punctuated by the occasional orange-hued hurricane.

This progression—from Reagan’s focus on individualism over institutionalism where government was the problem to Trump’s claim that only he can fix it (while in reality being, himself, the existential threat)—has ridden a wave of growing anti-government vitriol resulting in most American’s view of the federal government as a very expensive travesty of trust.  In fact, since 2007, American’s trust in the federal government—”to do what is right always or most of the time”—is the lowest in more than fifty years.  78% of Americans report either being frustrated with, or angry with, the federal government.[3]  Congressional approval ratings, which is probably the best proxy for American sentiment toward their federal government, have languished in the mid-to-upper teens for most of the recent decade, ironically only breaching 20% once the impeachment of Trump began.[4]  In this Age of Deceit, marked by extraordinary partisan divisions, the silver lining here is that most of us—a clear majority—actually agree on this: the federal government does not serve our interests.  Even though a sad commentary on the federal government, this consensus is also our common ground from which to begin the restoration of America in the Age of Deceit by shifting our focus, our energy, our resources and power away from the federal government and toward our state and local governments.

Notwithstanding the many social, political, and economic issues that divide us, America is, as Yoni Appelbaum, ideas editor at The Atlantic pointed out, “a land of continual change and a nation of strong continuities.”[5]  Things must change; that much is clear, but the remaining continuity—the common ground—that all of us must embrace is that the hope of restoring America begins at home—away from the klieg lights of congressional investigations, narcissistic Twitter feeds, and the shrill cable TV pundit-criers—where it is far more likely to reach agreement due to the communal necessities of compromise, performance, and accountability.  It is one thing to sling insults at your opponent through national and social media, it is much more difficult to sustain such behavior when you have to stand next to that person in the grocery store checkout line, or passing the “peace’ in a church pew on Sunday morning.  We tend to find common ground more easily when the ground beneath our feet is where we must stand every day.

These structural realities are fortunately also met with a higher general trust of local government, which has been rising, rather than falling, during the Trump presidency. In fact, approval ratings for local government at 72% are the near-inverse of those for Congress and the federal government.  Even state governments garner a 63% approval rating.[6]  Potholes cannot tell the difference between Republican and Democrat tires.  That’s not to say ideology and partisanship remain clear of local politics, but the simple reality is that problems just out your front door are less tolerable and, therefore, more likely to be solved through creative compromise.  The immediacy of issues creates an intrinsic sense of urgency all on its own.

There is another structural trend that supports turning our attention away from the national level toward the state and local level, and that is the waning influence of the nation-state.  Globalism, decried by Trump and other faux-populist wannabe dictators around the world, is affecting the decline of influence and relevancy of the nation-state.  In their attempt to debase the very idea of globalism, Trump and several white nationalists have even tried to restore  globalism as an un-patriotic anti-Semitic slur.[7]  However, the fact is that centralized state authority is being slowly but surely diluted by the distributed information systems that affect all aspects of our lives enabled by digital technologies.  All forms of communication and commerce may now occur without the participation of the nation-state, unless impeded with even stronger technologies to interrupt the channel, as China does with its peoples.

Hierarchies of all kinds are being challenged and usurped by horizontally aligned, web-styled networks.  Regardless of attempts to keep the world dumb—as in disconnected—the benefits and efficacy of connection—of a smart world—are simply too attractive and too durable to be suppressed in the long run.  The collision of imagination and critical thinking that drives creative solutions does not require nation-state intermediation in a smart world.[8]  It is highly likely that what we are seeing today, both in America and across the world, represents the last agonizing dyspeptic reflux of centralized authority as people realize more and more every day that America’s Trump, Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, Hungary’s Orbán, Philippines’ Dutertes, Iran’s Khamenei, China’s Xi, and North Korea’s Kim have little interest and even less capacity to meet the needs of their peoples.[9]  Borders are, after all, a manmade artifact of the nation-state era that become meaningless when transcended by technology and the will of people.  We may as well turn our attention away from the crazies at the national level and connect our communities directly, without the intermediation of the nation-state.  As Lincoln showed in his address at Gettysburg a “government of the people, by the people [and] for the people” draws its legitimacy and power from one source: the people.  Both because of, and in spite of, our national leaders, the time is now to move “the people’s” attention to the local development of stronghold communities.

“Stronghold” is actually a term borrowed from Tucker Malarkey, author of a book of the same name that recounts the valiant efforts of Guido Rahr to create stronghold habitats for wild salmon across the Pacific Rim.[10]  Stronghold in the case of human communities means a shared place that is largely self-sustaining and foundationally resilient; which looks no further than its common interests to guide its application of power and resources; and which seeks to achieve a sense of virtuous humanity where every member holds both the responsibility and opportunity of participation in advancing the objectives of the community (in spite of the interests of outside forces like the federal government).

Regardless of how the impeachment proceedings or the 2020 presidential election turns out, we, as in We the People, have it within our power (paraphrasing Thomas Paine) to begin America over again.  Restoring America is unlikely to occur at the national level.  In 2020, we should begin a movement for the development of stronghold communities by demanding a slow but certain inversion of power and resources back to the local and state level.  Rather than continue to stare at the circus in Washington, D.C. we need to elect people who embrace the stronghold ethic and affect the restoration of the American Dream from the ground up.  Yes, we may end up being the Affiliated States of America, rather than the United States, but I am afraid that we really have no choice.  And, those communities that achieve stronghold status will, very likely, become the most attractive and successful in America while others, stuck in the deceit of “Making America Great Again” will, no doubt, languish; that is, until the truth comes home to roost.

 

[1] Ronald Reagan, Presidential News Conference, August 12, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/news-conference-1/.

[2] See William Steding, Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy: Jimmy Carter the Disciple and Ronald Reagan the Alchemist (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 100-101.

[3] Samantha Smith, “6 Key Takeaways About How Americans View Their Government,” Fact Tank News in the Numbers, Pew research Center, November 23, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/23/6-key-takeaways-about-how-americans-view-their-government/.

[4] “Congress and the Public,” GALLUP, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx.

[5] Yoni Appelbaum, “How America Ends,” The Atlantic, December 2019, p. 51.

[6] Justin McCarthy, “Americans Still More Trusting of Local than State Government,” Gallup, October 8, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/243563/americans-trusting-local-state-government.aspx.

[7] See Ben Zimmer, “The Origins of the ‘Globalist’ Slur,” The Atlantic, March 14, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-origins-of-the-globalist-slur/555479/.

[8] See Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the Science of Ideas (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

[9] See David Brooks, “The Revolt Against Populism,” The New York Times, November 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/opinion/populism-protests.html?searchResultPosition=3.

[10] Tucker Malarkey, Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2019).

By |2020-03-11T19:12:12+00:00December 11th, 2019|General|0 Comments
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The Neverwillbe Reagans

As the Republican presidential hopefuls gather at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this coming Wednesday evening, there will be, no doubt, a number of attempts to borrow the alchemic allure of President Reagan as each candidate seeks to channel his homespun American exceptionalism.  However, the top-tier, including Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, and Mitt Romney, have very little in common with Reagan.  They are the product of an angry and twisted exceptionalism steeped in religious certitude, nationalistic fear, and elite entitlement.  Perry espouses state’s rights and secession in a manner not heard since Southern Confederates used the same arguments to preserve the institution of slavery.  Bachman suggests we deserved our earthquakes and hurricanes as a rebuke of our evil ways, while Romney claims that corporations are people too.  At its core, their exceptionalism holds a contempt for Americans—especially for those who do not look like or believe as they do—and for the liberal ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Furthermore, while hope is a dirty word for today’s Republicans, commonly derided in the phrase “hope is not a strategy,” hope is exactly what Reagan brought to America.  (While President Obama tried too, he has thus far failed.)

Reagan gave Americans access to a special grace that his predecessor Jimmy Carter couldn’t or wouldn’t offer; largely due to the fact Carter was locked in his evangelical revivalist trinity of sin, redemption, and salvation.  Where Carter admonished Americans to sacrifice in order to alleviate a “crisis of spirit,” Reagan simply offered Americans absolution.  Reagan’s theological innovation was transferring the concept of original sin from the individual to the institution.  On the domestic front, Americans were good, while government and its bureaucracies were bad.  In foreign relations, the Soviet Union was evil, but Gorbachev (the human) was worthy of Reagan’s respect and consideration.  Reagan exalted Americans regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, or even Party affiliation.  Reagan’s ire was reserved for communism, not Americans, which he saw as the principal threat to God’s gift to humankind: freedom.  Reagan’s America was the chosen land inhabited by chosen people who had a responsibility to the world: to establish a divine imperium of freedom.  While Reagan did battle with his political adversaries like Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, when the day was done they would share a drink, a story, and a song.

As charming and effective as Reagan was at attracting political support, it is easy to find fault with his presidency.  Besides his promises, government got bigger, deficits swelled, and illegal activities were conducted from the desks of the National Security Council.  Reagan never delivered on the social agenda of the Religious Right, although that should have surprised no one; as Governor of California, he allowed abortion to be legalized and he supported gun control.  He was often heralded as a great communicator, but he was also a lousy executive.  He lived in his own world where too often fantasy trumped fact; where reason was set aside for faith.  But, Reagan gave Americans something that the dismissive angst spewed by today’s field of Republicans will never accomplish: Reagan made Americans feel better about themselves.

It is a long road to the election in November 2012, and America is indeed in dire straits.  Things might get better by themselves, although right now I’d bet on worse.  But, we’ve been here before; there have been many dark days in our history.  What’s required now is a humble sense of self, a platform of mutual respect, and above all, the courage to do right by our founders and our children.  Reagan’s alchemic American exceptionalism may not be the answer today, but believing in each other and taking personal responsibility to make the country and the world a better place while setting aside certitude, fear, and elitism would honor his legacy in the most worthy manner.  Less than one hundred yards from where the Republican candidates will debate Wednesday night is Reagan’s tomb.  Above it, carved in granite, reads, “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is a purpose and worth to each and every life.”  Reagan loved his God and his country, and he loved Americans.  That is a message the Republican candidates would do well to heed.

By |2017-05-23T19:54:57+00:00September 2nd, 2011|General|0 Comments
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The Reagan Echo: Donald Trump

In my forthcoming study of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, tentatively titled “The Disciple and The Alchemist,” I wrote about Reagan that,

He was a transcendent optimist—a spokesman-as-leader—who employed alchemy and soaring rhetoric to obviate contradictions.  He stood, as appropriate at any given time, near either Democratic or Republican mirrors to reflect and project his appeal through a libertarian prism, matching the prevailing mood of the electorate.  From the threat of communism, to fatigue of government intervention, to the embrace of an evil enemy, he knew how to change the angle of the camera and strike an appealing pose for his audience.

As I observe the improbable candidacy of Donald Trump for president today, I cannot help but hear echoes of Reagan’s appeal and alchemic modality.  And, the electorate seems to be just as depressed (or angry) today as it was in the latter stages of the Carter presidency.

The comparisons are eerie.  While Reagan espoused the “Gospel of Prosperity,” Trump promotes what David Brooks of The New York Times has labeled a “Gospel of Success.”  Meanwhile, Obama speaks of self-restraint and sacrifice the same way Carter spewed jeremiads of sacrifice-based redemption.  Like Reagan, Trump also believes in American exceptionalism based on overt power, projected for the benefit of Americans first.  Notwithstanding missteps, like Vietnam before Reagan, and Iraq/Afghanistan before Trump, for Trump Americans remain the chosen people in a chosen land, the new Israel.  Meanwhile, Obama, like Carter, tries to re-identify America as a force for moral good, waging humanitarian wars (Libya) and preferring cooperation to competition.  I can’t remember ever hearing Trump (or Reagan) utter the word ‘cooperation’.  Reagan’s Hollywood-styled past and Trump’s New York/Atlantic City slick-shtick (and multiple marriages) also place them in stark contrast to the Obama/Carter image of up-from-nothing populist purity.  Furthermore, I can easily see Trump reeling in the Religious Right the same way Reagan did with his “I know you can’t endorse me … but I can endorse you”; especially with either Palin or Huckabee at the bottom half of the ticket.

Trump has also taken a page out of Reagan’s early campaign playbook in his attempt to de-legitimize the President.  Reagan questioned Carter’s strength, patriotism, and decisiveness, while Trump has pounded the birther issue with the conviction of a Klansman.  Trump will easily get the angry white vote, and if he can co-opt the Religious Right (now Christian nationalists) with whitebread exceptionalism, he’s halfway there.  Trump’s next target will be to add the other half—fiscal conservatives—to his electoral coalition.  He’ll question Obama’s fiscal toughness in the face of huge deficits and the recent S&P outlook downgrade on US securities.  Trumps own fiscal follies will no doubt be recast as the scars of experience in a Hobbesian world.  He will ask the Reagan question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” and will couple it with “Who would you rather have at the negotiating table, a nice guy, or a winner?”  He might even say to Obama: “You’re fired!”

Reagan’s appeal resided in its simplicity; he pulled on American’s sense of patriotism and desire to “stand tall” again.  He re-imagined America’s special destiny as a “shining city on a hill.”  In a complex world full of nuance and strange alliances—one that calls for an Obamaesque mind and demeanor—Americans may decide they’d just like to feel good again.  They may prefer illusion to reality.  If they do, Trump’s orangish hair (like Reagan’s) won’t matter.  Some say Trump’s anger will do him in; this may prove to be wishful thinking by Obama supporters.  After all, aren’t we all angry?  Trump should summon his inner Reagan, and Obama better not make the same mistake Carter’s advisors did when they hoped they would face Reagan on election day.

By |2023-12-01T15:34:19+00:00April 19th, 2011|General|0 Comments
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Two Cups of Tea

With just a couple of days remaining before the midterm elections many people, including me, are bemoaning what appears to be a new low in political discourse that suggests a complete abandonment of America’s position as the standard-bearer of liberal democracy. If the evidence of yelling, screaming, head stomping, and complete disregard for the truth is any indication, on Wednesday, November 3, we could be facing a new Congress that is likely to turn the rotunda of the Capitol into a cage-fighting ring to settle petty political scores. And to be fair, neither party is innocent here. There are nasty people on all sides. It bears remembering, however, that American democracy has always been a messy and chaotic business and extremism is nothing new. Furthermore, extremism, like that which marks much of today’s Tea Party rhetoric, has a way of becoming diluted over time while offering new leaders a springboard to interpret underlying principles in more attractive ways.

Princeton historian, Sean Wilentz provides evidence of this phenomenon in his recent article “Confounding Fathers” (The New Yorker, October 18, 2010). He details an historical review of the John Birch Society and its tight parallels with today’s Tea Party. Wilentz argues that the extreme rhetoric of Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, and their many followers/imitators, is simply an update of the 1960s incendiary fodder produced by Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) and Willard Cleon Skousen (founder of the All-American Society and philosophical mentor of Glenn Beck). In essence, today’s tea is Birch Tea. As the 60s moved forward, the Birchers experienced a straightening and redirecting of their principles by cooler and more astute minds like that of William F. Buckley, Jr. As Wilentz points out, Buckley’s biographer John J. Judis, observed, “Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn rather than leading toward the kind of conservatism [his] National Review had promoted.”

Buckley and other more practical conservatives asserted the principles of right-wing extremism sans the bombastic bravado. I can still hear Buckley intoning his arguments on Public Television with sharp wit and rhythmic cadence without bludgeoning his political adversaries. He had a sense of decorum absent in the practices of Beck, et al. In time, he also had a candidate for president in the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s brilliance resided in his profound interpersonal intelligence. Historians have roundly criticized him for his lack of analytical skills and interests, but one thing he knew was how to connect with people. He used soaring rhetoric to be sure, but it was always a shade or two less hot than the Birchers. He also knew the difference between rhetoric and policy. He invited the support of social conservatives by embracing their passion against abortion and for school prayer, but knew better than to use his power as president to assert government control over what he viewed as personal liberties. He was a rhetorical conservative and a pragmatic libertarian.

In a recent interview I completed with Reagan’s son, Ron, he suggested his father would be a poor fit in the Republican party of 2010. Ron believes his father would be barely conservative enough on today’s scale to make “center-right.”   What is also clear, however, given this reading of history, is that our concerns of the day shall pass. Brighter and more reasonable minds will prevail. The rough and garish will realize that enduring power, like that which Reagan enjoyed, is won not just through coercion and fear, but also optimism and yes, hope. Reagan believed in American exceptionalism more than any politician in contemporary history. While it did not always serve him well, it did allow him to favor inclusion over division, and optimism over fear. He was a compassionate exceptionalist, able to condemn communism as an “evil empire” while befriending its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Together, they set the stage for the end of the Cold War and an unprecedented period of economic prosperity.

Birch Tea won’t last, but it will provide elements to cull from its leftover leaves, which, when combined with more mild herbs, will offer a less bitter cup of tea. Perhaps it will be called Reagan Tea.

By |2017-05-25T18:32:05+00:00October 31st, 2010|American Identity, General|0 Comments
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The Age of Apate´

In the last fifty years, the American experience has hurtled forward from Kennedy’s Age of Camelot, to the Age of Aquarius, and now the Age of Apaté (a-pat’-ay), named for the Greek goddess of deceit whose evil spirit was released once Pandora opened her box. The lid on Pandora’s mythical box (actually a jar) was loosened by the alchemy of Ronald Reagan and the ambition of Mikhail Gorbachev that ended the Cold War. When Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika-styled reforms slipped perilously toward revolution the Soviet model imploded. However, what was once widely considered a great victory over godless communism—the collapse of the Soviet Union—quickly became affected, or perhaps more accurately infected, by the spirit of Apaté. Hubris and deceit were easier and, let’s face it, more fun than humility and honesty. With the Soviets out of the way, we Americans were free to assume a wide berth of exceptionalism to expand our reach and reign. And, we did it on the wings of Apaté.

Today, many debate today whether we have entered another Great Depression, or just a Great Recession, but it may be more accurately considered a Great Deception. From WMD, to credit default swaps, to non-reform reforms and unreal reality shows, we Americans have elevated the art of deception from a hapless wizard deceiving a dream-addled girl from Kansas, to a metastasized algorithmic ethos denominated in fraud. We face unimaginable deficits while we continue to ignore their obvious causes lest a noisy constituency or moneyed lobbyist objects. We wage war without a clear objective and no exit strategy to, among other things, protect our access to a source of energy that compromises our health and security while slowly but surely killing the planet on which we live. We are re-writing our history books to expunge our liberal heritage in favor of Christian nationalism—a crown of thorns to replace Uncle Sam’s top hat—as we elbow both reason and tolerance out of the public square. Bigger lies and more hate are essential ingredients in contemporary narrative.

Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom, may indeed be the defining period piece of the era. As Charles Baxter aptly points out in his review of Freedom in The New York Review of Books (9/30/10), “the noble lie serves as the pivot point around which almost everything in Freedom turns.” Alas, at least all elements of American culture, including politics, economics, religion, literature, and entertainment are aligned—albeit around an axis of deceit.

Fear not, we will find our way out of this sticky web of deception; or perhaps more likely hurled into the stubborn certainty of a reality based in truth. The fanciful altered state of the last twenty years is coming to a painful end. As with most empires that vanquish their enemies, the last and greatest challenge is in facing itself. This too is America’s final imperial test. Our future rises or falls on our capacity to see things as they are under the blinding light of truth. We may or may not be different than the fallen empires that preceded us, but we will most certainly fail if we continue to indulge Apaté’s nefarious ways.

By |2017-05-25T18:38:13+00:00October 10th, 2010|American Identity, General|0 Comments
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The Real BFD

I appreciate Vice President Joe Biden much the same way I do habanero sauce: in small quantities and few places.  While it can make a meal, it can also ruin it.  I expect President Obama shares my sentiment.  Notwithstanding Biden’s (nearly) off-mic proclamation about the passage of the recent healthcare bill, there was a much larger BFD this week (than non-reform-healthcare-reform) with the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II (START II).  Those of you older than college age will remember this pesky thing we once called the Cold War, where our collective fears were frequently if not systemically stoked by the idea that the US and Soviet Union stood poised to annihilate each other with nuclear weapons.  (Remarkably, and an obvious illustration of how time flies, those college age or younger were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

The signing of START II is a BFD not so much by what it achieves, but by the relative ease with which it was accomplished and by the general lack of media attention it has received. Indeed, as Thomas Blanton and William Burr at the National Archives pointed out in an email to me today, “the new START treaty signed today in Prague represents ‘real’ but ‘modest’ cuts in strategic nuclear forces comparable to some Cold War alternatives but still higher than the most far-reaching proposals considered by Presidents Reagan and Carter.”  But, of course, this one got signed.  Having read the archived correspondence between Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev that surrounded the negotiation of predecessor Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II), I can assure you that these treaties don’t come easily. Correspondence and dialogue historically had all the trust and congeniality of an old married couple that have hated each other for the last forty years.  The US and the Soviet Union lived with each other in a quasi-psychotic symbiosis characterized by institutional schizophrenia. Fortunately, the Soviet Union collapsed under its own internal contradictions, and as a result Medvedev/Putin and Obama live with less, or different, demons.  If any president prior to Bush (41) had accomplished such an agreement in this manner, we would be witnessing a ticker tape parade similar to those that marked the end of World War II.  Today, the launch of the iPad received much greater attention.

The larger issue of course remains: the ‘miracle’ of the Manhattan Project—nuclear weapons—remain in ample supply throughout the world and are the highest ambition of terror networks and unstable states. The next BFD is dealing with that reality. Next week, forty-seven nations will meet in Washington to sort out what might be done. As with his recent ‘re-conceptualization’ of the use of nuclear arms by the US, Obama deserves credit here too.  Sam Nunn, former senator from Georgia and former security hawk, who now laments his support of nuclear arms development and heads National Threat Initiative (working to rid the world of ‘loose’ nukes) would like us all to view a new documentary, Nuclear Tipping Point (www.nucleartippingpoint.org). The message is chilling but credible: Will we choose cooperation or catastrophe? Will we allow terrorist networks and/or unstable states to turn our ‘miracle’ into further madness?

As much as we all wring our hands over domestic issues, and as much as they will decide short-term political futures, we need to take responsibility and attempt to put our ‘miracle’ back in the proverbial Pandora’s box.  It is a BFD, and as impossible as it might seem, we must try, try, and try again.

 

 

By |2017-05-25T21:36:12+00:00April 9th, 2010|General|0 Comments
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