The biggest obstacle that prevents decent, moderate Americans from seeing how their country is morphing into unAmerica lies in that the most negative developments do not directly affect them or their families and friends. This is certainly true about the war, and that’s the main difference between this fiasco and the one in Vietnam. The draft back then meant (almost) every family was affected. The typical moderate might now not like the war. He may think now that the invasion was wrong or a mistake. But because it doesn’t directly affect him, he’s not going to get too worked up about it. It will just work itself out sooner or later. No urgent need to pressure legislators. Let the experts figure out what to do over there.
And if this kind of psychological dynamic explains their soft disapproval of the war, think how easy it is for them to be even less concerned about "abstract" issues like the loss of habeas corpus, the broadening of surveillance powers and indiscriminate warrantless wiretaps, the burgeoning number of unitary-executive signing statements, the normalization of torture and rendition, the aggregation of wealth and power into the hands of the top five percent, the corporate consolidation of the media, the K-Street co-optation of the legislative process, the politicization of the Justice Dept., the administration’s repeated obstruction/destruction of evidence, or its lying about Iran’s nuclear capability. Anyone of these things should be a major scandal, but in our "moderate" mainstream public imagination, it’s just more of the same old, same old. My world isn’t changed by these developments, so why should I worry?
Many American moderates are well enough informed to be somewhat disturbed by these developments, but they tend to think of them in isolation and refuse to see a pattern. Cognitive dissonance makes it hard for them to believe that their government could do anything evil without good reason. It’s easier to dismiss as "extremist" or "alarmist" those people who are outraged by such developments and who insist that the administration is laying the infrastructure for the destruction of our democracy and the rule of law.
A typical moderate thinks it’s easier to believe that things are normal because his life hasn’t changed. Nobody he knows is really all that worked up about it, and these are not issues the mainstream media is harping on, so why should he be concerned? Besides if he starts talking about such concerns at work or among my friends, everyone will start thinking he’s a "liberal" or leftist or an America hater. After all, Isn’t that what he thought about all the people who criticized the war early on? Isn’t that what he thought about everybody who thought George Bush was a foolish man way out of his depth? And even though such people proved right about that, they still don’t have any credibility with him. Nobody he respects, i.e., nobody who thinks like him, thinks that way–at least now they don’t.
And so the country suffers from a massive failure of imagination because the people in the moderate middle will continue to assume that everything is normal until it is irrefutably proven to them otherwise or until it affects them personally. The problem lies in that when it finally gets to that point, it will be too late to do anything about it. They prefer to believe that things now are as normal as they have always been, and, sure, there are bad guys in government–there always will be–and they need to be weeded out. But most are decent people trying their best to do the right thing.
And so the bad guys who are destroying our democracy have a relatively easy task of keeping the moderates neutral by telling them what they want to hear and asking for their trust, knowing that what they do will not be scrutinized too carefully unless they’re stupid enough to commit some sexual indiscretion. Everything else is easy to get away with because it is relatively boring and requires too much effort from a lazy, house-trained MSM to understand and explain.
And it’s the complacency of this kind of conventional thinking that no longer drives me barking mad as it used to. It embarrasses and saddens me that this is what we have become. I am embarrassed for my boomer generation from which no leader with moral stature has emerged to awaken the justified outrage that lies dormant in every decent American’s soul. As a generation we’re a flat-souled, superficial generation that has failed to live up to its promise. The current congress pretty much represents the spinelessness and narcissism that is our generational marker. It’s so sad. So disappointing. And so predictable. And even if we boomers don’t suffer the consequences of our fecklessness, our kids and grandkids will.
And I’m as bad as anybody in my generation. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone if not at myself. I was naively complacent in believing the movement conservatism that Reagan represented was a temporary aberration, and that Americans would regain their senses. It took me a long while to recognize that the hard right in this country was as politically sophisticated as it was, that it was capable of running circles around the complacent Democrat establishment. I underestimated its organizational sophistication, the depth of its funding sources, its media savvy, and its psychological shrewdness in finding ways to make its extremist agenda appear mainstream.
I saw the hard right in this country as so abhorrently un-American, as a pack of not-to-be-taken-seriously frightened animals, as so pathologically selfish and paranoidal, that my own cognitive dissonance in this regard made it extremely difficult to embrace the idea that a majority of Americans would embrace the right’s agenda so uncritically. But I underestimated the right’s ability to infect the rest of the country with its pathology. And this pathology’s chief symptom is to make those infected by it to accept their illness as normal.
Of course lots of Americans have not been infected,
but
these people, like me, were the complacent New Deal types whose cognitive dissonance made it unimaginable that Americans would buy the self-absorbed libertarian logic that would return us to
the Robber-Baron era. It still astonishes me, to tell the truth. But
I am also in retrospect quite chastened regarding my own complacent
naivete regarding the resiliency of the hard right. Think about it:
even today utterly empty suits like Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, running on an elect-me-dictator-and-torturer platform are
taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States.
How is it possible, given all that we know about the empty ambition of
these men, that they aren’t laughed off the public stage?
It’s embarrassing and shameful. People in other countries, in countries that have suffered far more than we have, look at us and see a bunch of hysterical children. And they’re right; we are. But the fault lies with my generation. We have failed as a group when the mantle of leadership was passed to us to stand up, to challenge Americans to live up to their best selves instead of giving in the scare tactics of the right. It should be our job to inspire the magnanimity and courage that lies dormant in the American soul, and as a group we seem not to have the resources to do it. We’re all too comfortable, too complacent–too moderate.
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