The goal is no less than to defeat the evil that, in recent years, has risen to ascendancy in America. Finding the optimal strategy for achieving this is no small challenge.
In part, it's a challenge because, in matters of the spirit, the reality is always so complex and many layered that it is beyond our capabilities to understand fully. In part, it's because when a cultural system has been so swept up into pathology as ours has lately in America, the disease is likely to have infiltrated even the thoughts and feelings of those who wish to cure the system. It behooves us, therefore, not to be driven by our impulses but to think and proceed with care.
One of the complexities of the present challenge is that we are now called upon to accomplish two things simultaneously which are in contradiction with each other. On the one hand, we must wage and win the battle against the Bushite forces, taking away their power, discrediting them in the eyes of the public, driving the evil spirit they represent back into the recesses of the American cultural system. On the other hand, we must erase the deep and destructive imprint these forces have left on America, and an important part of that imprint is the pervasiveness of conflict and division in our social and political processes.
We must, that is, both wage war and build peace.
On the one hand, there is good reason for the passion that many of us feel about going after these Bushites to bring them low. We are rightly enraged at their lies, their crimes, their arrogance, their wanton disregard of any value other than sating their lust for power and wealth without limits. It is doubtful that any holders of the highest offices of the land have ever, in the course of more than two centuries of American history, been more deserving of impeachment. And so lawless has this administration been that even impeachment may not satisfy all the rightful demands of justice.
At the same time, we need to understand that our rage and our urge to avenge the wrongs done to us and our country, however justified, is also a manifestation of a pernicious characteristic of evil: that its patterns are contagious.
Engaging in battle now, when power has been put into the hands of the opposition, may be necessary and right. But it is also a means of perpetuating the destructive pattern that the Bushites have imposed upon our society. To them, politics was never about bringing people together; for a generation, the Bushites' have pursued a deliberate strategy of polarizing groups of Americans against each other. Governing, for them, was never about serving the common good; it was about waging battle against enemies to vanquish and humiliate them.
It is the nature of the forces of destruction that they compel even those who hate them to conform to their pattern. (This, indeed, is the heart of that work of mine that I regard as the most important thing I've ever written, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, the first chapter of which has been posted at http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=262.) Part of evil's arsenal of tools is war, the fracturing of human systems into division and conflict and destruction. And part of the work of overcoming evil is to recognize those divisions, to enter into those conflicts, and to destroy the forces of destruction. A paradox, but an inescapable one. Sometimes it is indeed necessary to fight for peace.
Indeed, part of the failure of liberalism in America over the past generation has been a failure to recognize the nature of the enemy that was rising from our body politic to destroy all that has been best about this nation. It is good that so many of us have now come together, energized to fight and defeat those forces. But we need to build on this election to bring still more of our countrymen together with us.
It is in large measure thanks to our passionate determination that a substantial piece of power has now been wrested from those evil forces. And now the fight must go on. Yet it must be done with great care, lest the storming of the Bastille once again lead to the Reign of Terror.
We must envision the task of building the structures of goodness simultaneously with the task of destroying the existent structures of evil our enemies have embedded in our still-sick body politic. Otherwise, evil can work through us to extend its domain.
The "War to End All Wars," history sadly shows, just laid the foundation for the next, still-more-terrible war. The greater accomplishment was achieved by the victors after that next war: the way the allies –and in particular, America-both defeated the fascist enemies and helped those nations back onto their feet to grow into a healthier form.
The healthier form that America now needs for us to build is a body politic that is not riven with polarization, but has relearned the ability to come together around a shared sense of the common good. It is to the nature of that task that I will turn here next.
The Seventy Percent Solution: Rebuilding the Middle Around Shared Values
Part of defeating this Bushite evil, therefore, will involve undoing the polarization of the American citizenry that these forces have assiduously labored for a generation to develop.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
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