#480: What Stands Before Us

     “We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.”

--Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb, 1-20-21

Amid the optimistic pomp of Joe Biden’s inauguration lurked an undercurrent of realism--as when Biden himself referred to the “cascading crises” that we face. 

This new year brings us (1) the worst public health crisis since the 1918 “Spanish flu,” (2) the worst economic crisis since the 1930s great depression, and (3) the worst civil unrest since 1968.  This triple catastrophe is without precedent in our history.

Trying to process this reality, my mind reaches back to my own childhood to retrieve two keys to understanding what this moment means and why it matters.

Key #1: Peaceful transfer?

It is a 1959, and my sixth grade teacher Mr. Peirce conducts a current events quiz each morning.  It’s the height of the Cold War and Mr. Peirce indoctrinates us daily on the superiority of America over Russia.  Nikita Khrushchev has only recently emerged as the Russian leader, and we’re told that when Joseph Stalin died a few years earlier a vicious power struggle ensued to determine his successor.

But the U.S. is different, Mr. Peirce tells us.  In America we have elections, and no matter who wins, his rival concedes and power passes to the winner.  The process is routine, predictable, and free of struggle or conflict.  So Truman gave way to Ike (who would, in turn, give way to JFK). 

This, at age 10, is my first civics lesson: America is great because it has maintained the peaceful transfer of power since its founding.  In our way of life, no one is indispensable, we’re a government of laws not men, and no one may rise above that law.

The election of 2020 has changed all that.

On September 11 2001, the terrorists attempting to attack the U.S. Capitol failed, as heroic passengers crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field.  But on January 6 2021, homegrown terrorists succeeded where foreign terrorists had failed, halting the certification of an election by invading the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.  It took police and National Guard action to restore order. 

So the transfer of power to Joe Biden has not been peaceful--it required the suppression of an armed insurrection. Yes, “democracy prevailed”–but the unbroken string of peaceful transfers has been permanently broken.  Our system is more fragile than we believed. My boyhood civics lesson is now obsolete

Key #2: Fantasyland

It is 1953.  I sit watching our 10-inch black and white TV screen as Walt Disney introduces the very first broadcast of “Wonderful World of Disney.” Each week’s episode, he tells us, will visit a different world: “Frontierland,” “Adventureland,” “Tomorrowland,” and “Fantasyland.”

I love Fantasyland.  It’s a land where elephants fly, where broomsticks fetch water in buckets, where the gods still reign on Olympus, and where skeletons ride horses up from their graves.  It’s a land of dreams (and nightmares!) where anything can happen.  It’s a place where magic rules, untethered by facts.

I love it, but even at age five I know it is not real.  I don’t expect our cat to talk, or a magic wand to appear, or a genie or fairy to grant me my fondest wish.  However much I love the TV fantasies, I remain grounded in reality.  I love playing make-believe with my friends, I die hundreds of pretend deaths on make-believe battlefields.  But I know that real soldiers, shot dead, do not walk away.

But now, I fear, Fantasyland has taken hold of millions of Americans.  They seem possessed by magical thinking. They seem to be watching a movie in their own minds, a movie where a make-believe  world obeys their desires. 

In that magical land, Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. He won a landslide victory.

In that fantasyland, the Covid virus is not a terrible pandemic causing 400,000 American lives. It is no worse than the flu. It is not to be feared.

In that make-believe land, climate change is not real.

In that pretend realm, there is no systemic racism, no white privilege, no white supremacy movement.

In that alternate reality, Russians never interfered with the U.S. elections.

In that imaginary existence, vaccines do not protect us--they make us sick—or worse, they wire us for surveillance.

Such widespread magical thinking constitutes nothing short of a wholesale denial of facts.

It strikes me that these two phenomena - - the breakdown of peaceful transfer and the prevalence of Fantasyland thinking--are the two barriers we face in overcoming our cascading crises.  One threatens our constitutional order, while the other threatens our public discourse.  Both threaten our national unity.

Our Constitutional Order

The long stability of our constitutional system is no longer assured.  It took multiple recounts, 50 court cases, the Supreme Court, the suppression of a coup, and an impeachment to get us from President Trump to President Biden.  This was the very definition of a power struggle, not a peaceful transfer.

We might hope that this struggle was a one-off recurrence, and never to be repeated.  But the signs are ominous.  Since 2000, Americans have been increasingly ready to question the legitimacy of presidential elections.  In 2000, people questioned the Florida recount, which determined the overall outcome.  In 2008, Trump and others questioned Obama’s very birthright to the presidency.  In 2016, 33% of Democrats and 50% of young Democrats considered Trump’s victory “illegitimate.” In 2020, similar numbers of Republicans disputed the election results.

I submit that, unless we find a way to conduct elections acceptable to all, we’re in for trouble.  There already has been too much unrest--Biden called it our “uncivil war.”  Too many norms had been broken, making me wonder if norms are enough to maintain our fragile fractured system.  Disrespect for our institutions is now dangerously widespread.  And it appears that America’s celebrated “individualism” has metastasized to the point where any sense of “common good” maybe too weak to motivate Americans to set aside private interest for a unified future.

The last year has finally exposed how fragile our civil stability has become, and the trends of the last 20 years point to further breakdown. The growing, infectious willingness of millions of Americans to reject outcomes they do not like is the mark of a failed state.  That infection must be stopped.  But that depends on repairing public discourse.

 Public Discourse

An open society requires dialogue among people of differing views. But differing opinions are only constructive if they respond to the same facts.  Facts are the currency of public discourse: we must agree on facts before further discussion can proceed.  Thus the cliché: the “you have a right to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.”

If facts are devalued or even dismissed, dialogue breaks down. People begin to fabricate their own “alternative facts,” and they enter that fantasyland where the real and the imaginary merge and blend

“Conspiricism” poses a special threat. While conspiracy theorists merely concoct a scheme that explains to them the true meaning of a PARTICULAR event (say, the assassination of JFK or 9/11), people infected with conspricism believe that such schemes lurk behind ALL events. For them, ANY reportage of news is merely the smokescreen behind which reality lurks. The smokescreen is part of the conspiracy and the reality behind it is evil. Thus all of life’s events, all the facts presented, are mere distractions luring us into a hidden evil. Our lives come to depend on dismissing facts and replacing them with our own imagined schemes.

In such a fact-free country, public discourse withers. Different people form different opinions based on different sets of facts, some of which exist only in their minds.  They end up with nothing to say to each other beyond epithets, name-calling, insults, and threats.  Instead of helping to reduce our civil unrest, this reign of fantasy fuels discord, conflict.  In the end, people decide discourse is futile, and then, as we saw on January 6, “initiative becomes the privilege of violence.”

Our Task

The year 1968 also brought a parade of horrors: the Tet offensive, the student riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots burning up whole sections of our cities, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the police riot in  Chicago, the Soviet tanks invading Prague, the election of Richard Nixon, the bombing of North Vietnam.  In the wake of that awful year, I quit my political science studies and my political career ambitions because I had lost faith in our political system’s ability to solve the nation’s real problems.  

It is possible that 2020 was as bad as, or worse than, 1968.  If so, my conviction is confirmed: more than 50 years later, we have still not resolved the issues that plagued us then. 

Martin Luther King named three great evils that threaten America’s greatness and threaten us still: racism, materialism, and militarism.  He knew civil rights alone could not solve these problems, so he called for a “revolution of values,” that would transform America’s culture.  He was calling, not for political reform, but for spiritual transformation.

We get the government we deserve, and since 1968 we have not deserved the best.  Our civic stability is fractured, our people too often choose fantasy over reality, and so we have brought the “cascading crises” of Disease, Depression, and Disorder upon ourselves.  “What Stands Before Us” now is the same vast task King named then: a revolution of values.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2021