A healthy democracy requires that people be able to talk over their disagreements and come to solutions that meet the needs of the nation and help it grow in good directions.
How can one accomplish that when one of the main forces at work in the political realm is caught up with the spirit we see on those comments-- full of the spirit of war, and completely disconnected from reality? [see Note below]
Yes, ugliness of this sort has always been around. But I think that is a mistake to see that continuity as the central truth, rather than some profound discontinuity that has developed in the American political system. That discontinuity is the rise to considerable power of what I am calling an "evil force," a rise during which that force has taken over the political right, and made one of our two major political parties an instrument of its destructive purposes.
I agree that this kind of ugly and irrational stuff has always been there. But I believe, though I would not know how to prove it, that there is another element in the picture.
The issue is not whether the phenomenon is new, but whether it has become a larger part of the national picture. For a variety of reasons -- the dark force that's taken over the right, including the rise of things like Fox News and Limbaugh, and as you say the Internet -- we have an interconnected subculture that has been fostering and fomenting some of the darker aspects of the American mind.
Through the workings of collective processes, pushed along by dark forces, what was once a fringe craziness of the John Birch sort has become a powerful part of one of our two major parties.
Likewise, at the grassroots level, people whose parents might have been, say, 5% caught up in political craziness have developed together a set of crazy doctrines and destructive habits of thought and feeling that occupy a controlling portion of their political consciousness.
Two lessons here that seem salient to me, if I'm right about this:
1) The power of collective cultural processes to mold people's consciousness (thought and feeling) is enormous, and should be kept in mind as we consider what's happening in our country. (I find myself amazed at how fragile rationality turns out to be.)
2) It is of vital importance that we be alert not only to new things that arise, but also to dramatic shifts in the proportions of things, which can usher in major changes in a society using only old ingredients.
Our nation is in serious trouble. If my perceptions are correct, we have had a significant portion of our fellow citizens enculturated into a mindset that cripples our democracy, and results in our nation evolving in all sort of directions that are contrary to our values. (On plutocracy, on climate disruption, on what spirit is manifested in our political process.)
This is dangerous, and it is important that we perceive the nature of what it is that we're fighting against: the thing that produces those ugly responses to my Ferguson piece is the same thing that gave us official torture promoted from the very top of the American government, that gave us the Citizens United disgrace, that entitled a political party to make the failure of the president its top priority in a time of national crisis.
It is ugly. It is far more dangerous than almost anyone seems to be recognizing. And it must be fought and defeated.
See the evil. Call it out. Press the battle.
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