Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdom
in matter of government are disposed to ambition.
Because without public employment in council or magistracy
the honor of wisdom is lost.
And therefore eloquent speakers are inclined to ambition,
for eloquence seemeth wisdom, both to themselves and others.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
OK, it's been almost three weeks since our national mistake and the initial sense of the costs of our collective failure are starting to become clear. A boorish billionaire whose only qualifications to lead the free world are that he's white, inhumane and rich and who was elected supposedly to dismantle the very system that has enabled this natural tragedy in the unfolding. In a word, we're f@#ked.
How did it come to this? In part because of ignorance and in part because of arrogance ... on both sides of our very apparent national divide. There are those who are triumphant, hoping against hope that our new 'leader' will take us back to a mythical time when all was well. (For some that is, apparently.) And there are those of us experiencing great despair and trepidation because our best case scenario involves years (if not decades) of concerted effort to overturn the regression sure to come in a single term of the President-elect (and our worst case scenarios being too hard - indeed, crushing - to contemplate).
The ignorance of the 'winners,' those able to overlook the fundamental inhumanity of our next elected leader, is palpable: even the concept that we could somehow stop time and revert back to a simpler, better one is farcical and thoroughly discredited by history, including our own.
Remember the Camelot of the Kennedy Administration? It lasted just 2-1/2 years and, though we've wrapped it in gauzy, rose-colored ahistoricity, the reality of it was far less fantastic. There were real problems then, and that administration handled a few excellently and many poorly - you know, as in beginning the military 'observation' that blossomed terribly into the Vietnam War a few years later - so our choice to remember the good and forget the bad is misguided at best and quite dangerous at worst.
And the behavior of so many who supported our President-elect was both deplorable and revealing: so many of the -isms still plaguing our society were bewilderingly evident in both the Deplorables themselves and their leader. Having drunk the Fox News and Alt-Right (read = reactionary radical racist fringe) kool-aid for years, their espoused beliefs are a mystifying mix of unreality - that a capitalist who does his own manufacturing overseas would defy globalization to save their manufacturing jobs and even bring untold millions of "good" ones back, etc. - bordering on insanity.
Objectively so many of the issues that were supposed to be important or the challenges that were besting us were, in fact, untrue. For example, America is experiencing greater economic prosperity than ever (and thus not in need of some supposed return to greatness) ... it's just that the equity in its allocation is becoming ever more skewed. By shrewd political design and (largely immoral) social infusion, the trickle down theories of a generation ago have now shifted the balance of the respective returns between labor and capital decidedly in the favor of the latter.
It's greater now than ever before to be a capitalist - an actual 'haver' and thus investor of capital - and is beginning to suck ever more meaningfully for those who possess little more than their own labor. That this system disproportionately benefits those at the top is no accident, and neither is the completely mystifying reality that so many of those in the middle and toward the bottom keep voting for it. To sell masses on an economic policy that largely disenfranchises them, the ruling elites have commingled these self-defeating prescriptions with 'social' and 'wedge' issues - like abortion, so-called 'religious freedom' laws, etc. - and created an expedient reality that means that in order to support the latter, many have also condoned the former to their own and increasing detriment. I don't care how much you hate abortion, having your and your children's life chances increasingly narrowed economically is way too high a price to pay for it (especially since the two are in no way inextricably linked in the real world).
The 'winners' also exhibited an arrogance that was hard to fathom as well. Sure the plutocrats among them have reason to be proud of their insulation from the harsh realities of daily life, but the lesser of them displayed a perplexing sense of superiority. For example, their support of violence to silence dissent seems an odd one: do they not realize that though they may not like the dissenters in their midst at the President-elect's rallies, those folks' First Amendment rights are no less immutable and thus shouldn't be subject to challenge? Does it not occur to them that, following their own logic, they, too, may be subject to being silenced soon should they step outside of the groupthink orthodoxy? Martin Niemoller's observation about for whom "they" come seems especially apropos here.
Further, their conflation of their candidate's standing and ultimate victory with God's will seems especially misguided: given their history of harsh judgment for anyone who didn't fit their supposedly conservative, evangelical Christian mold, how can one own and celebrate the elevation of a man who's a walking repudiation of all that they claim to hold dear? You know, how do you reconcile that God has chosen to gift you - and, by extension, the rest of us - with a thrice-married, philandering, sexual assault-prone, xenophobic, racist, etc., feigned adherent to "Two Corinthians" as a leader? I just can't wrap my head around how anyone claiming to be of the Christian Right can support such a person, let alone lift him up ... but perhaps that's because I don't have the temerity to claim to know God's will as much (or, truthfully, at all), as some clearly do....
Yet, deplorable as the are, the 'winners' were not the only ones guilty of arrogance. To many of the losers, especially those of a more progressive stripe, simply assumed that the rubes' insouciance about their candidate's flaws, though unfortunate, could not be determinative. Really now? There was an assumption that their own candidate, because she was arguably the best-prepared in history and clearly more capable when the two squared off over the course of three debates, was the only real choice and thus, despite the narrowing polls before the election, destined to win. Oops!?! And soon to be "Ouch!!!" for us all.
And the arrogance of their dismissal of the admittedly craven and fake email (or, before it, Benghazi) scandal has been proven exceptionally misguided. Simply put, the Left confused reality and what's right with politics, a realm that lately seems to have become devoid of both.
And then there's the Left's ignorance of the very real pain which too many of our fellow citizens feel. Some of it is certainly economic: these are the blue collar Reagan Democrats who were unpersuaded by Mrs. Clinton's cerebral (and far more intellectually defensible) approach. And some of it was certainly social: many of our neighbors feel like the world is changing in ways that are hurting them - whether or not these hurts are real or largely conceptual at this point - and that this pain was only seemingly deeply appreciated and reflected by one candidate. To put a finer point on it, when the majority of women vote for the admitted sexual predator, you have to admit that the problem runs deeper than you thought/realized. Perhaps this painful lesson will bring more of our progressive neighbors down out of their ivory towers in the future....
Sadly, on both sides, ignorance and arrogance have done us in and now we are about to suffer mightily. The pain will be both multi-faceted and real, symbolic and literal. And even more than this, the sense of common decency that allows us to collaborate across our differences will be under severe attack, making our recovery even more tenuous, costly and uncertain after the storm has passed.
I hate to sound like the funnily facetious comedian and social critic Lewis Black, but, truly, America, you've f@#ked yourself, at least for the next four years. (And for those of you who think that the President-elect could be impeached sooner, remember that the transition to a new order thereafter will take some time, likely at least the same four years.) Let's hope that we choose education and humility as a result, as the costs of our ignorance and arrogance become all to clear and painful in the days and years to come....
How did it come to this? In part because of ignorance and in part because of arrogance ... on both sides of our very apparent national divide. There are those who are triumphant, hoping against hope that our new 'leader' will take us back to a mythical time when all was well. (For some that is, apparently.) And there are those of us experiencing great despair and trepidation because our best case scenario involves years (if not decades) of concerted effort to overturn the regression sure to come in a single term of the President-elect (and our worst case scenarios being too hard - indeed, crushing - to contemplate).
The ignorance of the 'winners,' those able to overlook the fundamental inhumanity of our next elected leader, is palpable: even the concept that we could somehow stop time and revert back to a simpler, better one is farcical and thoroughly discredited by history, including our own.
Remember the Camelot of the Kennedy Administration? It lasted just 2-1/2 years and, though we've wrapped it in gauzy, rose-colored ahistoricity, the reality of it was far less fantastic. There were real problems then, and that administration handled a few excellently and many poorly - you know, as in beginning the military 'observation' that blossomed terribly into the Vietnam War a few years later - so our choice to remember the good and forget the bad is misguided at best and quite dangerous at worst.
And the behavior of so many who supported our President-elect was both deplorable and revealing: so many of the -isms still plaguing our society were bewilderingly evident in both the Deplorables themselves and their leader. Having drunk the Fox News and Alt-Right (read = reactionary radical racist fringe) kool-aid for years, their espoused beliefs are a mystifying mix of unreality - that a capitalist who does his own manufacturing overseas would defy globalization to save their manufacturing jobs and even bring untold millions of "good" ones back, etc. - bordering on insanity.
Objectively so many of the issues that were supposed to be important or the challenges that were besting us were, in fact, untrue. For example, America is experiencing greater economic prosperity than ever (and thus not in need of some supposed return to greatness) ... it's just that the equity in its allocation is becoming ever more skewed. By shrewd political design and (largely immoral) social infusion, the trickle down theories of a generation ago have now shifted the balance of the respective returns between labor and capital decidedly in the favor of the latter.
It's greater now than ever before to be a capitalist - an actual 'haver' and thus investor of capital - and is beginning to suck ever more meaningfully for those who possess little more than their own labor. That this system disproportionately benefits those at the top is no accident, and neither is the completely mystifying reality that so many of those in the middle and toward the bottom keep voting for it. To sell masses on an economic policy that largely disenfranchises them, the ruling elites have commingled these self-defeating prescriptions with 'social' and 'wedge' issues - like abortion, so-called 'religious freedom' laws, etc. - and created an expedient reality that means that in order to support the latter, many have also condoned the former to their own and increasing detriment. I don't care how much you hate abortion, having your and your children's life chances increasingly narrowed economically is way too high a price to pay for it (especially since the two are in no way inextricably linked in the real world).
The 'winners' also exhibited an arrogance that was hard to fathom as well. Sure the plutocrats among them have reason to be proud of their insulation from the harsh realities of daily life, but the lesser of them displayed a perplexing sense of superiority. For example, their support of violence to silence dissent seems an odd one: do they not realize that though they may not like the dissenters in their midst at the President-elect's rallies, those folks' First Amendment rights are no less immutable and thus shouldn't be subject to challenge? Does it not occur to them that, following their own logic, they, too, may be subject to being silenced soon should they step outside of the groupthink orthodoxy? Martin Niemoller's observation about for whom "they" come seems especially apropos here.
Further, their conflation of their candidate's standing and ultimate victory with God's will seems especially misguided: given their history of harsh judgment for anyone who didn't fit their supposedly conservative, evangelical Christian mold, how can one own and celebrate the elevation of a man who's a walking repudiation of all that they claim to hold dear? You know, how do you reconcile that God has chosen to gift you - and, by extension, the rest of us - with a thrice-married, philandering, sexual assault-prone, xenophobic, racist, etc., feigned adherent to "Two Corinthians" as a leader? I just can't wrap my head around how anyone claiming to be of the Christian Right can support such a person, let alone lift him up ... but perhaps that's because I don't have the temerity to claim to know God's will as much (or, truthfully, at all), as some clearly do....
Yet, deplorable as the are, the 'winners' were not the only ones guilty of arrogance. To many of the losers, especially those of a more progressive stripe, simply assumed that the rubes' insouciance about their candidate's flaws, though unfortunate, could not be determinative. Really now? There was an assumption that their own candidate, because she was arguably the best-prepared in history and clearly more capable when the two squared off over the course of three debates, was the only real choice and thus, despite the narrowing polls before the election, destined to win. Oops!?! And soon to be "Ouch!!!" for us all.
And the arrogance of their dismissal of the admittedly craven and fake email (or, before it, Benghazi) scandal has been proven exceptionally misguided. Simply put, the Left confused reality and what's right with politics, a realm that lately seems to have become devoid of both.
And then there's the Left's ignorance of the very real pain which too many of our fellow citizens feel. Some of it is certainly economic: these are the blue collar Reagan Democrats who were unpersuaded by Mrs. Clinton's cerebral (and far more intellectually defensible) approach. And some of it was certainly social: many of our neighbors feel like the world is changing in ways that are hurting them - whether or not these hurts are real or largely conceptual at this point - and that this pain was only seemingly deeply appreciated and reflected by one candidate. To put a finer point on it, when the majority of women vote for the admitted sexual predator, you have to admit that the problem runs deeper than you thought/realized. Perhaps this painful lesson will bring more of our progressive neighbors down out of their ivory towers in the future....
Sadly, on both sides, ignorance and arrogance have done us in and now we are about to suffer mightily. The pain will be both multi-faceted and real, symbolic and literal. And even more than this, the sense of common decency that allows us to collaborate across our differences will be under severe attack, making our recovery even more tenuous, costly and uncertain after the storm has passed.
I hate to sound like the funnily facetious comedian and social critic Lewis Black, but, truly, America, you've f@#ked yourself, at least for the next four years. (And for those of you who think that the President-elect could be impeached sooner, remember that the transition to a new order thereafter will take some time, likely at least the same four years.) Let's hope that we choose education and humility as a result, as the costs of our ignorance and arrogance become all to clear and painful in the days and years to come....
Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence.
Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations.
No sirree.
Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate
and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state.
In fact, in a leader it's a lethal cocktail.
- Graydon Carter
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