Refusing to obey, refusing to capitulate
We have been here before and recovered completely
The rush to surrender in anticipation is palpable but a mistake.
We are a cyclical people, given to wild swings and just-as-wild recoveries.
We’re also talking two years — max, before the next “change election” (going all the way back to 2006).
Fatigue sets in, of course. What’s the point?
But this is the joy and promise of living in the future.
It’s all still possible and, in many instances, inevitable. Things stabilize, the system evolves, enemies turn into friends, competitors turn into partners, technology rescues, and people are stunningly creative.
It all depends on who you read right now, so choose wisely, with your mental health in mind.
Oh... I'm living in the future.
I feel wonderful.
I'm tipping over backwards
I'm so ambitious
I'm looking back
I'm running a race and you're the book I readTalking Heads, “The Book I Read,” 1977
I wrote America’s New Map exactly for times like this.
Seriously, and almost entirely for myself — for my mental health.
Here is a solid warning from Tim Snyder from the first time around with Trump:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.
I grew up intellectually on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — my senior honor thesis at U Wisconsin in 1984 (no less!). I have since spent decades refiguring authoritarianism in my brain, along with all the horrible places it takes humans (Holocaust, “Gulag Archipelago,” Mao’s Cultural Revolution). A major guide for me was the late Judith Shklar at Harvard — the “theorist of belonging.”
Just one graduate seminar with her, but she had that level of impact on students.
[Yes, I was tickled pink when she posthumously was cited and celebrated on “The Good Place”]
All such things start small, leveraging true crises, and then extend only so far as people let them in their hurry to obey in advance and, by doing so, seek to save themselves by allowing others to be taken first.
That’s why you fight tooth and nail on every issue.
Pulling back our lens: we have been here time and again.
Recall the Know-Nothings (H/T Jake Roland) of the 19th century:
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements in American political life had their inception in the 1840s, due to the arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants at that time and the increasing role being played by the Catholic Church in education and other areas of public life. The best known of these nativist groups came to be called the American Party, and its adherents as Know-Nothings. The aim of the Know-Nothing movement was to combat foreign influences and to uphold and promote traditional American ways. Sworn to secrecy, the Know-Nothings derived their name from their standard reply to questions about their rituals and mysteries--"I know nothing about it." The movement had considerable success in the 1850s, electing governors in Massachusetts and Delaware, and placing Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) on a presidential ticket in 1856. Thereafter the party went into a swift decline.
As a side note: when I was accepted into both Harvard and Yale in 1984, with the latter offering me more money, my Irish Catholic mother told me she’d pay the difference and that I was going to Harvard:
[Mom] And let me tell you why: Harvard wouldn’t let in the Irish! So you’re going there and telling those people…
[Me] Tell ’em what Ma? …
[Mom] You’re … just letting them know!
So yeah, these hurt feelings linger across generations.
See if any bells ring with this blast from our past (I am Scot-Irish/German, BTW):
From 1820 to 1845, anywhere from 10,000 to 1000,000 immigrants entered the U.S. each year. Then, as a consequence of economic instability in Germany and a potato famine in Ireland, those figures turned from a trickle into a tsunami. Between 1845 and 1854, 2.9 million immigrants poured into the country, and many of them were of Catholic faith. Suddenly, more than half the residents of New York City were born abroad, and Irish immigrants comprised 70 percent of charity recipients.
As cultures clashed, fear exploded and conspiracies abounded. Posters around Boston proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Convents were said to hold young women against their will. An “exposé” published by Maria Monk, who claimed to have gone undercover in one such convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn’t matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco.
There’s your Gangs of New York, with Daniel Day-Lewis’ character based on an infamous Know-Nothing leader by the name of William Poole.
[Oh, you know I was pulling for Liam Neeson on that one! He just hadn’t developed all those special skills by that point in his acting career.]
So what wiped this movement out?
A bigger crisis known as the Civil War.
By the end of the Civil War, most former Know Nothing members had either joined the Democratic Party or aligned with the Republicans, leading to a substantial loss of political power for the movement.
It all has a vaguely familiar feeling to it, does it not? The casual talk of civil war, the profound demonization of “vermin” immigrants, the fierce desire to break some skulls and send those bastards back to their shithole countries!
But fevers break.
Americans are essentially good people, some of the best this world has ever known in our foresight, generosity, and diligence when it comes to righteous causes.
But only under the right conditions, per my Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
When the middle is happy, everybody is happy.
Just as frightening to me as our temptation to internally surrender to authoritarianism, or, in today’s particular instance, White Christian Nationalism, is the temptation to surrender externally — or globally.
The sky-is-falling types are sounding alarms:
POLITICO: Donald Trump Is the End of the Modern Era; The post-WWII world order of American dominance is over. Donald Trump proves it.
Everybody is always so eager to bury Henry Luce:
In February 1941, Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Timeand Life magazines, penned an article heralding the “American Century,” a post-war era in which the United States would apply its newfound standing as the “dominant power in the world” to spread “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Luce envisioned the United States as “the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas” and “the dynamic leader of world trade,” and saw in this future “possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination.”
The next several decades would prove Luce right …
But now it’s all gone, as evidenced by Trump.
Donald Trump’s second presidential victory represents a sharp break, and perhaps a permanent one, with the American Century framework. It’s a framework that rested on four key pillars:
A rules-based economic order that afforded the U.S. free access to vast international markets.
A guarantee of safety and security for its allies, backed up by American military might.
An increasingly liberal immigration system that strengthened America’s economy and complemented military and trade partnerships with the rest of the non-Communist world.
And finally, in Luce’s words, a “picture of an America” that valued — and exported to the rest of the world — “its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors … developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”
Major ouch!
But I’m not buying.
The rules-based order is alive, if not well. We are in a period of profound transition from unipolarity to multipolarity, and that economic development has raced ahead of our political adaptation — as so often is the case.
A ruleset reset is inevitable. Anticipate it.
Trump’s ability to screw-over allies is more limited than realized. Americans do not like to lose — no matter the fight. Here, the posturing is mostly about negotiating, and that’s fine.
As for immigration, the GOP is playing a very hypocritical game. Virtually all of its leaders know full well that immigration is a key economic strength and that it is necessary given our aging population and declining birth rate.
They play this dangerous game with the public because it wins elections by mobilizing the fear of a declining White majority.
And sure, when the pitchforks come out, the strongest nativists are often those who just arrived and are more than happy to slam the door shut if it means they’ll somehow gain acceptance. This is a classic strategy of the picked-upon vis-a-vis the bully (my PhD diss).
My Scot-Irish did that in spades, too.
From my book:
As a synthetic nation with a multiverse of cultures, America has historically processed immigrants by first demonizing them as “invaders,” then condemning them as “parasites,” then criticizing their slow assimilation, then mocking their entry on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, then begrudging their ascent, then accepting them into sports and entertainment, then admitting they are “not so bad once you get to know them,” then allowing them into the corridors of power, and finally admiring their “immigrant journey.” Outside of Anglo-Saxons, every immigrant group has traveled this pathway once reaching America, their consolation being that any inbound population is immediately granted a status superior to Blacks—the enduring target of Armageddon- triggering, ultra-right-wing visions of race war.
We have all been there and done that.
So no, we toss some bathwater, but keep the baby.
The big problem we have right now, as I constantly harp about, is our nostalgia for the past.
In yearning for an irretrievable past, nostalgia is a lie concocted by our younger minds and sold to our present selves. An internal dialogue of grief, it is the death of strategic vision.
When politically weaponized, nostalgia ruins our appreciation of the present and deadens our anticipation of the future. It reduces leadership to steering by the rearview mirror. As an animating ideology, nostalgia is a rallying point for culture warriors determined to roll back time—the knee-jerk response of religious fundamentalists across the world to globalization’s liberating dynamics.
In economic terms, nostalgia often profiteers on prejudice by idealizing yesterday’s less-equal society. It narrows ambition and suffocates innovation by idealizing a simpler—but always more patriarchal and constricted—past to which return is impossible without re-subjugating those who have since achieved agency, thus disparaging their contributions (What have they ever done?) while discounting their consumer demand (Why must I serve those people?).
Worst, in its rosy memorializing of the “good old days,” nostalgia is social escapism bordering on emotional disorder. It is unhealthy and un-American.
Such nostalgia clouds our present foreign policy.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: America Is Cursed by a Foreign Policy of Nostalgia; Washington Needs Something Better Than “America First” and “America Is Back”
It must be banished if we are to progress.
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