After the Trump quasi-victory in 2016, courtesy of the smoky room compromise and delusion of democracy called the Electoral College, I asked a simple question: Why? Why did Harpy Hillary lose to Tantrum Trump? Neither one was at all qualified to run a modern liberal republic, each being more suited to infest a back water, oligarch haunted dictatorship, so what was the difference? What had we, the self-enlightened liberals in the USA, done to lose the respect of the burger flippers, nee nut and bolt turners, of working-class America? And what need we do to win it back?
I never got an answer, only accusations and poison tipped talking points. I had watched the American Empire decline for decades, having been completely cut lose from reality after the restraining influence of our political doppelganger, the Soviet Union, had collapsed (some said been betrayed internally) in the 1990’s. That restraining influence had been removed and we seemed possessed by the urge to trundle after it as quickly as possible. Still, I hoped for better.
Declining does not mean dismantled and descent does not imply destruction after all. Both are klaxons blaring and lights blazing on the console of statehood while time fleets by, each tick of the clock not yet inevitable. Not yet. There’s still hope. There still exists dialog between equals of opposite persuasion in the west. If we could each realize that we want the same things, maybe we could turn them around to both of our satisfactions. We’d done it before. That’s what irrational, smokey room compromises like the Electoral College are all about, two sides grudgingly agreeing on a third way. Rational discourse had not been completely lynched by the teleology of, ‘Me too, fuck you’ as of yet and the fall of America was not yet certain, though perhaps near enough to terrify us all.
Then I read this from foreign correspondent Chris Hedges:
Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.
“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”
Today’s American Underground Man has abandoned discourse in total. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and respect.
No comments:
Post a Comment