The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. WB Yeats
I was talking to a friend lately about how bad things had gotten for our country under the Bush administration. He is a Vietnam vet who voted for Gore but tried to be positive as positive as he could about Bush’s election in 2000–much more positive than I was capable of being. He’s a silver-lining kind of guy, and I’ve always admired that about him. And I’ve always relied on him to give me perspective when I’m in a pessimistic funk.
But in this recent conversation he was saying that he thinks it’s time to take to the streets. He’s outraged and frustrated as he watches what this administration is doing to our country, and he can think of no other course of action. He doesn’t see the consultant-driven Democrats as having what it takes to take the country back. And my response was, again typical of my pessimism, "Well, what are people going to rally around? What concrete goal can they hope to achieve by demonstrations? What would be the point?"
And that’s why I thought the ‘impeach-ins’ idea that I posted about yesterday was worth considering, and still do. What else is there to rally around? It can give some constructive focus to the frustration so many of us feel, and even if it doesn’t succeed in removing Bush from office, at least it will be an outlet for constructive action and an opportunity to talk about the things that need to be talked about at a grass-roots level. But there is a danger: Will it also become an outlet for the passionate intensity that is the worst that comes out in the best of us in political conflict? That’s another cause for pessimism; it probably will.
Along these lines, MZ’s comment under my "Impeach-ins" post yesterday is well taken, and he points to a fear that I share: these impeach-ins will more than likely become a polarizing Bush hate fest. True, but he’s more optimistic than I am that the Democrats in office will be able to deliver. I see them as useful as a way to stop Republicans from doing more damage, but I don’t put my hope for the future in their hands. Something has to arise from the grass roots.
When I think about what it means to take political action, I think about the sobriety and dignity of the early civil-rights marches–serious ordinary people, grass-roots people, asking the country to look at and do something about a serious problem, and all decent, right-thinking Americans recognized it as a shameful legacy that needed forceful remediation. MLK was among the "best," but he combined a sobriety with passionate moral intensity that we need badly at this time. For now the "best" are as Yeats described them, lacking conviction about how to find a way forward.
But what most people think of these days when they think about political action is the way political dissent was coopted by the secular left during the sixties and seventies, who are now for the most part the same people who organize all the anti-war protests now. For too many people their leadership, fairly or unfairly, de-legitimizes political dissent. They find it difficult to join with them because they fear being associated with a world view and values that they don’t share. Don’t get me wrong–my hat is off to the secular lefties, even the flakiest among them, for getting out there and doing something–but so long as they are perceived as defining the values center of any protest against the government, legitimate protest will be easy to discredit and marginalize.
People like King, Mandela, and Gandhi were so widely accepted because they appealed to the deep moral sense, to what everybody knew deep down was right, and they did so by using religious language and appealing to religious ideals. They were all very traditionalist in that respect. They did not let their darker passions–their fears, their anger, their resentment–get the better of them. And you can be sure their refusal to be ruled by those passions required enormous spiritual discipline.
The civil rights movement in this country lost its way after King’s death because no one had his moral authority to prevent those negative passions from being unleashed. And civil right became associated with militant black power that had a polarizing effect. That was not the case in South Africa, which was far more successful in engineering a justice-based reconciliation of oppressed and oppressor, because the progressives there were led by people with religious ideals. They were able to purge the resentment and effect a genuine peace, a peace we never really achieved here in the states.
And that’s still our problem in this country beyond the lingering problems surrounding race relations. There’s no one who has emerged in our time who has real, universally acknowledged moral stature. So there is no one to oppose this administration who has the moral authority to speak the truth that needs to be spoken in a way that all fair-minded, decent Americans can hear it. Everything sounds like propaganda, and everybody hears only what he wants to hear.
Americans know that things are much worse with Bush than they believed a few years ago. They’re beginning to see the deceit and the corruption that has always been hiding behind the smokescreen about religious and traditional values. But they accept it as the default, because who’s offering something better? Who’s offering them an alternative that will call them to a deeper sense of what the American ideal is?
I think there are many, many decent people in both parties, but they are as Yeats described the "best": lacking all conviction. They don’t know what to do–it’s all so complex. There is no clear path forward, and that’s just the way it is. There is simply no one with moral stature on the national stage today to point the way. But, like my Vietnam-vet friend, I’m ready to take to the streets, to do anything if it thwarts this death spiral we’re in now. It may be futile in the long run, but at least we will be able to tell our grandchildren that we tried.
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