The Answer May Depend on Our Ability to Resist the False Prophets of Tribalism and Demagoguery.
The inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Soon after the 2012 election, I wondered whether America could ever recover from a campaign cycle that at the time seemed, to myself and others, like a “long national nightmare.”
How naive I’d been. How innocent! What I wrote then is infinitely more applicable today:
Americans’ political discourse this election season was barely worthy of the label ‘dialogue,’ dominated as it was by hyperbole rather than reason, by name-calling rather than bipartisanship. This was especially evident on Facebook and Twitter, where—shielded from the humanizing effects of eye contact—we proved only too ready to stereotype our political opponents as one-dimensional boogeymen.
Don’t get me started on the bigoted cesspools passing as comment sections on online news websites. As Americans, we’ve forgotten that we’re Americans. We see others as “the Other,” reducing complex human beings via pithy labeling to “traitors,” “racists,” “radicals,” “sexists,” “fascists,” “misogynists,” “misandrists,” “SJWs,” and “communists.” Some label any criticism of America “anti-American,” while others criticize America so much you’d think we were the world’s worst country.
We’ve become a nation obsessed with labels.
***
Alas, the wake of Obama’s re-election seems like a lodestar of American unity compared to the Trump era. After re-election, Obama recognized the country’s demoralized mood and acted to unify our weary nation with a bipartisan message stressing the sanctity of our values—equality under law, free speech, equal dignity. In this way, Obama was—always—a unifier. A statesman. You could tell he was sincere.
Trump’s expressed concerns for values like unity, equality, and free speech come off as ersatz in comparison, one-dimensional … utterly meaningless. Take his record on free speech. His support for that sacred concept seems utterly conditional on whether he agrees with the speech at issue. (In this way, Trump differs little from some far-leftists.)
Of course, Obama recognized that America’s values, its lofty ideals, don’t always correspond to reality. Yet he expressed an optimistic desire—fueled by an audacity of hope—to bridge the gap between our ideals and our reality. In accomplishing this great bridging, this aspiration to make the Declaration’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” real, Obama invited the country to work together. Why? Because we’re in this together. Because we’re Americans—all of us.
President Trump simply doesn’t care if America’s ideals match its reality. Indeed, he sometimes seems hesitant to condemn those like white nationalists who actively oppose American values—who wish to widen rather than bridge the gap between American reality and American ideals.
This has the feel of a seismic shift. I can’t shake the feeling that, at least for the latter half of the 20th century, politics was a bit more about such a common direction, this desire to bridge the gap between American ideals and American reality. Yes, we often disagreed on the means, but the end was clear: Lifting up Americans. Every American.
Now, perhaps since we’ve grown cynical about our values, or maybe because we lack a leader exemplifying those values, we are polarizing to such a degree that the “invisible threat” Jimmy Carter prophesied—a state where national unity is less valued than identity politics, greed, and selfishness—threatens to topple our dearest values.
We used to give our opponents the benefit of at least some doubt. Now, we reflexively doubt their motives. We used to cherish our ideals, represented by the Bill of Rights and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that made the Bill of Rights real for African Americans. Now, we scarcely remember or actively distort our nation’s shameful history of discrimination. Across the political spectrum, liberalism is dying, as is compassionate conservatism. All is tribalism. And tribalism, especially in its most extreme guise of white nationalism, renders national unity impossible.
Carter’s “invisible” threat threatens to become concrete. If we don’t tackle it soon our country will sunder. Irreparably. If we maintain our course, the “United” States will soon become, like the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, a misnomer.
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Changing course will be tough, for it is fundamental that doing the right thing is always harder than doing the wrong thing. Seeing the best in others isn’t easy, especially when those others are only too eager to see the worst in you, like many on the right and (increasingly) the illiberal left.
But because the president is no longer a uniter, the responsibility to stand up for our values and for the equal dignity of each and every human life falls to us, the people. We the People.
We’ve done it before. We’ve lived up to President Obama’s challenge: “[To] see in each other a common humanity, a shared dignity.”
We can do it again.
Follow Michael Shammas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelshammas9.
Another version of this piece was published on The Good Men Project, and is republished here with permission.