We, the People
Are Violent and Filled with Rage: A
Nation Spinning Apart
|
| School shootings,
hatred, capitalism run amok: This 4th
of July weekend, we are in the midst
of a tragic public derangement. |
| By Jim Sleeper |
Salon |
| |
By the rude
bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard ’round the
world.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn,”
1837
 For
centuries most Americans have believed
that “the shot heard ’round the world”
in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts,
heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into
history. Early observers of America
such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon
and Edmund Burke believed that, too.
A new kind of republican citizen was
rising, amid and against adherents of
theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy
and mercantilism. Republican citizens
were quickening humanity’s stride toward
horizons radiant with promises never
before held and shared as widely as
they were in America.
The creation of the United States really
was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order
of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware,
if fumbling and compromised, effort
to live by the liberal expectation that
autonomous individuals could govern
themselves together without having to
impose religious doctrines or mystical
narratives of tribal blood or soil.
With barely a decorous nod to The Creator,
the founders of the American republic
conferred on one another the right to
have rights, a distinguished group of
them constituting the others as “We,
the people.”
That revolutionary effort is not just
in trouble now, or endangered, or under
attack, or reinventing itself. It’s
in prison, with no prospect of parole,
and many Americans, including me, who
wring our hands or wave our arms about
this are actually among the jailers,
or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others
into the cage and have locked ourselves
in. We haven’t yet understood the shots
fired and heard ’round the world from
74 American schools, colleges and military
bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre
of December 2012.
These shots haven’t been fired by embattled
farmers at invading armies. They haven’t
been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated
our surveillance and security systems.
With few exceptions, they haven’t been
fired by aggrieved non-white Americans.
They’ve been fired mostly by young,
white American citizens at other white
citizens, and by American soldiers at
other American soldiers, inside the
very institutions where republican virtues
and beliefs are nurtured and defended.
They’ve been fired from within a body
politic so drained of candor and trust
that, beneath our continuing lip-service
to republican premises and practices,
we’ve let a court conflate the free
speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with
the disembodied wealth of anonymous
shareholders. And we’ve let lawmakers,
bought or intimidated by gun peddlers
and zealots, render us helpless against
torrents of marketed fear and vengeance
that are dissolving a distinctively
American democratic ethos the literary
historian Daniel Aaron characterized
as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined
and free.”
Many Americans are adapting to living
with variants of force and fraud that
erupt in road rage; lethal stampedes
by shoppers on sale days; security precautions
in their homes against the prospect
of armed invasion; gladiatorialization
and corruption in sports; nihilism in
entertainment that fetishizes violence
without context and sex without attachment
; the casino-like financing of utterly
unproductive economic activities such
as the entertainment I’ve just mentioned
and the predatory lending that has tricked
millions out of their homes; the commercial
groping and goosing of private lives
and public spaces, even in the marketing
of ordinary consumer goods; and the
huge, new prison industry that Americans
have created to deter or punish broken,
violent men, most of them non-white,
only to find schools in even the whitest,
“safest” neighborhoods imprisoned by
fear of white gunmen who’ve often been
students themselves.
Abroad, meanwhile, thousands more shots,
fiendish and celebratory, are being
fired into the corpses of American national-security
and nation-building projects by terrorists
and fanatics we were told had been decimated.
These projects cost trillions of dollars
and hundreds of thousands of lives,
limbs, homes and hopes, including those
of American soldiers, contractors and
idealists. Their sacrifices can’t justify
retroactively what shouldn’t have been
undertaken in the first place.
Stressed by all this republican derangement,
millions are spending billions on palliatives,
medications, addictions and even surveillance
designed to protect them from themselves.
All those vials, syringes, security
systems and shootings reflect the insinuation
of what Gibbon called “a slow and secret
poison into the vitals of the empire…”
until Roman citizens “no longer possessed
that public courage which is nourished
by the love of independence, the sense
of national honour, the presence of
danger, and the habit of command. They
received laws and governors from the
will of their sovereign, and trusted
for their defence to a mercenary army.”
Only a few late-Roman republicans, recalling
their old freedoms, concluded, with
Livy, that “We have become too ill to
bear our sickness or their cures.”
What went
wrong?
You might argue, and quite rightly,
that “We, the people” have always subverted
the truths we’d held to be self-evident,
beginning with slavery and continuing
with plutocracy. Yet somehow the republic
kept experiencing what Lincoln called
“a new birth of freedom,” thanks only
partly to the fortuitous confluence
of two oceans’ protection, a vast continent’s
ever-alluring frontier and unending
streams of aspiring immigrants:
Not like
the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land
to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates
will stand
A mighty woman with a torch
Whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,
And her name: Mother of Exiles
True enough, the republic thus limned
by Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus,”
her poem for the Statue of Liberty,
needed those exiles for its labor market.
And it still had a guiding aristocracy
of sorts, but supposedly only “an aristocracy
of talent and virtue,” as Jefferson
put it, and not one of blood and ill-gotten
wealth. True, too, certain lingering
Puritan beliefs had nourished in the
embattled farmers (and, even long before
1775, in some of the Puritans themselves)
a conviction that resistance to tyranny
is obedience to God. That injunction
to defy worldly power sometimes in the
name of a Higher Power legitimated individual
conscience and autonomy right up through
the nonviolent defiance of the best
of the civil-rights and anti-war movements
of the 1960s.
But the American emphasis on individual
conscience and autonomy also gestated
a liberal capitalist republic that has
reduced individualism to market exchanges
in ways that are now destroying both
individuals and the society.
A liberal capitalist republic has to
rely on its citizens to uphold voluntarily
certain public virtues and beliefs that
neither the liberal state nor markets
can nourish or defend. The liberal state
isn’t supposed to judge between one
way of life and another, after all;
and markets reward you as a self-interested
consumer and investor, not as a citizen
who might put such interests aside at
times to advance a greater good that
self-interest alone can’t achieve.
The moral silence and often bankruptcy
of states and markets leaves citizen-leaders
to be nourished and trained all the
more intensively in institutions that
stand somewhat apart from the state
and markets. The Puritan founders of
America’s oldest colleges understood
this, but they expected that those colleges’
graduates would serve a theocratic state
that would control markets and everything
else. We’re right to dismiss the Puritans’
theocracy because it was repressive
and hypocritical. But we’re wrong to
have lost a side of its animating spirit
that would have kept markets from controlling
and devouring republican government
and even our bodies and ourselves.
Symptoms and
scapegoats hide the disease
Having miscarried republican self-discipline
and conviction so badly, we find ourselves
scrambling to monitor, measure and control
the consequences, such as the proliferation
of mental illness and the glorification
and marketing of guns, as if these were
causing our implosion.
They aren’t. They’re symptoms, not causes
— reactions to widespread heartbreak
at the breakdown of what Tocqueville
called republican habits of the heart
that we used to cultivate.
Equally symptomatic, not causal, are
self-avowedly “deviant” and “transgressive”
gyrations by people who imagine that
the sunset of civic-republican order
heralds a liberating, Dionysian dawn.
Sloughing off our bad old repressions,
we’ve been swept up by the swift market
currents that turn countercultures into
over-the-counter cultures and promote
a free-for-all that’s a free-for-none
as citizens become customers chasing
“freedoms” for sale.
Even our war-makers’ and -mongers’ grand
strategies and the growing militarization
of our domestic police forces are more
symptomatic than causal of the public
derangement that’s rising all around
us.
But turning the bearers of such frightening
symptoms into our primary villains or
scapegoats would only deepen our blindness
to the disease, which is as old as the
biblical worship of the Golden Calf
and as new as Goldman Sachs. It runs
deeper than anything that anyone but
the Puritans and their Old Testament
models tried to tackle.
I’m not suggesting we can or should
return to Puritanism! Anyone expecting
to recover that faith and way of life
is stumbling up dry streambeds toward
wellsprings that have themselves run
dry. But we do need wellsprings that
could fortify us to take risks even
more daunting than those taken by the
embattled farmers. We’d somehow have
to reconfigure or abandon empty comforts,
escapes and protections that both free-market
conservatives and readers of Salon are
accustomed to buying and selling, sometimes
against our own best hopes and convictions.
Our cure would also require reweaving
a fabric of public candor and comity
strong enough to resist the rise of
ressentiment, a public psychopathology,
once associated with the rise of fascism,
in which insecurities, envy and hatreds
that many have been nursing in private
converge in scary public eruptions that
diminish their participants even in
seeming to make them big. Ressentiment’s
“little-big man” seeks easy targets
for frustrations borne of exploitation
by powers that he’s afraid to face and
reckon with head-on. Blaming scapegoats
warps his assessment of his hardships
and options and drives him to wreak
vengeance on them as soon as there are
enough little-big men (and women, of
course) to do so en masse under a Glenn
Beck or a Sarah Palin.
Whether ressentiment erupts in racist
violence, sectarian fanaticism, anti-Communist
witch hunts, totalitarian show trials,
politically correct cultural revolutions
or sadistic escapism, its most telling
symptoms are paranoia and routinized
bursts of hysteria. Under the ministrations
of gifted demagogues, its grievances
and pain assume a fleeting brilliance
that soon collapses, tragi-comically
or catastrophically, on its own cowardice
and lies.
Its targets often shift. The 9/11 attacks
brought a reprieve of sorts to African-Americans,
the republic’s most enduring scapegoats,
when the burden of white censure pivoted
toward Muslims. Louis Farrakhan’s Nation
of Islam lost credibility, but so did
whites such as the neoconservative Daniel
Pipes, who kept on insisting years after
9/11 that the first black president
was a Muslim and a friend of terrorists.
The slipperiness of scapegoating became
clear to me in 1993, as I wrote about
a deranged black gunman, Colin Ferguson,
who’d opened fire in a Long Island Rail
Road car, killing six passengers. Even
while holding him responsible, I saw
him bearing symptoms far more widespread
than his private demons. Noting Ferguson’s
enthusiasm for a politics of rage, paranoia
and death threats then prominent on
a black radio station and in demagogic
street politics, I warned that even
deranged loners are sometimes better
attuned to our subconscious hatreds
and fears than we care to admit. That
was true, too, of Jared Loughner, the
white paranoid-schizophrenic and anti-government
fantasist who killed a U.S. District
Court judge and six other people while
trying to kill but severely wounding
U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13
others in 2011. |
| |
|
Page 2 |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
 |
|
