Right now, I find that more people in more places all over the world are politically attuned and active than any time I can remember in my 74 years. The women's march, for example, took place all over the world. Facebook teems with political dialogue. People have come alive, and we are having some impact.
Now we need to understand more. Many do not seek the bigger picture but are caught up in the moment of reacting to TrumpTweets and trolls, wobbling between hope and despair, encouragement and fear. But I think we will be well supported by seeing a larger picture, so we can retain our balance amidst the chaos this Administration deliberately generates to distract from what is going on.
To see what is going on, people need to step back and see a larger picture. So moving from the present moment, you could back up to the intermediate picture -- what's been happening. This is what you've been explaining since 2004: what the Republican party has been up to.
It's true that few have been listening these past dozen years as you've been warning about this destructive force that's captured the Republican Party. But they might listen now. Many liberals have awakened from our slumber, and we are looking around. Your prescience these past dozen years will increase your credibility, and your bigger picture could help us respond now with more clarity and power.
Then, after you move back from the immediate crisis to the intermediate level, you could widen the lens back still further to the bigger picture--the answers to the big questions with which your piece now begins, about the forces that have shaped the human world.
Having begun with people's immediate concerns, you can lead to something along the lines of, "Why did I see it and few others did? BECAUSE I SEE A BIG PICTURE. Anybody interested?"
Surely, it must be clear that we need to move from where we are now--in this nation and beyond. And I think you will be a good guide on that journey, having spent your adult life in the development of understanding the forces that move history.
And I hope that people will accept your invitation here. I just think that more would do so if you started with where their energy and concerns are right now.
Andy Schmookler responds:
You might be right, Ed, about starting with the immediate crisis and then pulling back by degrees to show the larger picture. But I have good reasons to believe you're not.
Over the course of more than a decade, I've been trying to lead people from the immediate story -- what's happening now that grabs people's attention -- to the larger story, and have had ample opportunity to observe what does and doesn't get attention and generate enthusiasm. The more I stick with the concrete and immediate, the more "successful" I am.
Even pointing to the intermediate levels seems to leave behind most readers out in the political blogosphere.
For example, I've written dozens of pieces about Donald Trump since July of 2015, shortly after he declared. Often, I have tried to show that Trump has become important only because enough of the base of the Republican Party has wanted to make him important and, in turn, that the base has responded favorably to such a man only because for a generation the right-wing media and the leaders of the Republican Party have systematically worked to shape the patterns of thought and feeling of their followers into the form that Trump then stepped in to exploit.
There are, of course, more steps to go after that--the forces that came together to shape the Republican Party into what it has become over the past generation. But the evidence -- in terms of numbers of readers, and the nature of the comments -- suggest that people were more interested in whatever was the latest thing in the news about what this particular man had said or done.
You suggest, Ed, that the upsurge of activism in Liberal America makes people hungrier for a deeper understanding. I have my doubts that the activation has that effect. It is easier to change the emotional level -- the activation from the evocation of fear -- than to change patterns of thought, and beyond that people's basic sense of what constitutes a good picture of the world.
In our times, from what I can see, most people do not see the world as a place dense with interconnections. It's like there's been a shipwreck, and the various pieces of the ship are floating around on the surface of the sea, and those who discover the pieces don't conceive of anything like a ship that those bits of wood and canvas once constituted.
I agree that people are now quite concerned with what the election of Trump has brought to the surface. But I don't believe that such intense concern translates into an opening for conveying an integrated, three-dimensional picture of a destructive force--a force that has been ascendant in America over the past generation, gaining in power by exploiting even deeper and longer-standing aspects of brokenness in American civilization.
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