Depending on who you read, listen to, talk to, hear from, we didn’t vote for this. Not even those who quite explicitly did vote for this.
What was voted for was an image. An image of “toughness” in the face of a fractal reality that seemed to offer no purchase on what the real problems are, that kept putting forth apparently smaller and smaller groups claiming rights and privileges from the larger society that itself was having difficulty managing what life threw at them.
Back in the Seventies I encountered a concept that addressed a kind of exhaustion in the public responses. Caring Capacity. The ability, on any given issue, to extend empathy to groups and individuals we may, in ourselves, have little or nothing to do with. The demands of charities and diplomatic issues requiring interventions, starving children, education, epidemics, the impoverished in places many people here couldn’t even locate on a map. The post World War II era was a burgeoning landscape of problems we never knew existed and calls upon our largesse—because we had the resources—grew and the fires never seemed to be put out. We were reaching a limit to our Caring Capacity, Many people felt overwhelmed by the calls for aid.
And then the Iran Hostage Crisis happened. I see that as the turning point, because it led to the election of Ronald Reagan, who, while he may have been one of the greatest cheerleaders we ever had, was in specifics one of the worst presidents we ever had, and we are still dealing with the fallout. One of the things I heard from average citizens in town halls, talk shows, radio, and even in private conversation was how they were “tired” of all these people, for whom we had done “so much” for, turning on us and treating us so horribly. Many people saw the Iranians as basically ungrateful.
We haven’t gotten out of that mindset yet.
Of course, most of these people knew nothing about the history of our foreign interventions that did so much to antagonize and even terrorize the people living in so many places. We generally knew little about how we had installed the Shah, overthrowing a democratically elected leader in the 1950s in order to facilitate his return to power, and how the Shah ran Iran as a dictator and whose state police terrorized his people. We don’t talk about such things in school. You can find out about it easily enough if you care to look, but the easier narrative that we were the good guys fighting communism painted over so much pain in so many places that have now become thorns in our side. We all became aware when the embassy was seized and Americans were held hostage. Suddenly, there was Iran, there were these anarchists, there was this issue. As if nothing had gone before.
And Reagan took advantage and rode a wave of nationalist resentment into the White House, where he established the narrative that we had as a country lost our verve and he would make us great again.
What Reagan began has brought us to this.
The thing that fascinates me is how even then people thought they were voting for something else. Something they didn’t get.
Emotionally, people wanted to feel pride in the country and to not be made to feel responsible for the catastrophes that never seem to go away. Now, to be fair, many of them were not our fault. Not directly. But look at the record. Southeast Asia was destabilized and underwent decades of one tyranny after another after we left Vietnam. That one is on us. Central America became a chaos of violent groups trying to seize power from each other because in the Fifties we destabilized governments that appeared to be leaning a bit too far left for our comfort. They’re still a mess, because many of these groups started funding their actions through drugs and became, in many instances, the cartels with which we’re dealing today. People are fleeing the violence and coming here for refuge. And now we’re trying to send them back. In many cases, sending them back to death. South America likewise had a long period of having to deal with people like Pinochet because we interfered in elections to keep “communists” out of power. One has to ask, how bad could the Leftists have been considering how bad the dictators were?
We went through a period after WWII when we took on an ideological fight against communism that left ruin in too many places. The only thing I can say about why is that ideologues here took advantage to advance their own agendas by basically keeping us frightened of something we barely understood.
The Right got its chance with Reagan and now look at us. The military is being used as police, elected representatives with questions are being bullied, harrassed, arrested, and now, recently, shot.
Nobody voted for this.
So what did you vote for? What did you think would happen?
Two things, it seems to me, have operated on people. Both myths, but powerful. I’m speaking now of tactics, but these are the things put forth to justify a claim on “patriotism.” The first is, we quite cynically assume all politicians lie. This usually manifests as a belief that none of them say what they actually mean. So a pass is given when outrageous things are put out in the media. The other is that government always—always—wastes our money. So when the argument is made that waste is going to be addressed—a perennial—people just assume this to be true, that there is so much waste. So we get a demagogue who promises to cut out all the waste—what was that delightful phrase? Drain the swamp?—those two things come together to blind people to what is going on. No one (well, no one who supported him) really took him seriously in what he said he would do and no one thought he would actually jettison working programs, defining them as categorically wasteful, even when they demonstrably are not. People generally thought the programs benefiting them were fine. But now those programs are being cut and the dismay would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.
All behind this is the question asked by too many people for too long—”why are we spending money on that?” Nothing wrong with asking that, but then there’s no follow-through. The people asking it don’t actually want to know the answer, they want to demonstrate their anger over issues they can’t address.
What issues? Oh, there are many, but there is one I believe underlies all the rest. The one no one wants to seriously address.
Wealth inequality.
Congress is arguing now over what is called the Big Beautiful Bill. The central component of that is extending tax cuts to people who don’t need them. This will be at the expense of people who are falling farther and farther behind economically.
The harrowing of waste done in the name of paying for those tax cuts, with the claim that we can’t afford it anymore, begs the question of how we can afford another two to three trillion dollars gifted to the ultra-rich if we can’t afford Medicaid? And no one in the GOP and too few among the Democrats are looking the reality in the face. Of course we can afford the safety next that is now being shredded. Raise taxes on the wealthy. Especially corporations, who are not, despite the legal fiction we have embraced, people.
But deal with this we will, because at the core of almost all our multifaceted and seemingly intractable problems is this—the disparity between rich and poor is too wide and growing. Despite the popular myth that those who have the most have “earned” it, this is presently a culture of pillage, and if that is allowed to continue, the crash will be civilization-ending.
The Distal Muse
So, What Did You Vote For?
Depending on who you read, listen to, talk to, hear from, we didn’t vote for this. Not even those who quite explicitly did vote for this.
What was voted for was an image. An image of “toughness” in the face of a fractal reality that seemed to offer no purchase on what the real problems are, that kept putting forth apparently smaller and smaller groups claiming rights and privileges from the larger society that itself was having difficulty managing what life threw at them.
Back in the Seventies I encountered a concept that addressed a kind of exhaustion in the public responses. Caring Capacity. The ability, on any given issue, to extend empathy to groups and individuals we may, in ourselves, have little or nothing to do with. The demands of charities and diplomatic issues requiring interventions, starving children, education, epidemics, the impoverished in places many people here couldn’t even locate on a map. The post World War II era was a burgeoning landscape of problems we never knew existed and calls upon our largesse—because we had the resources—grew and the fires never seemed to be put out. We were reaching a limit to our Caring Capacity, Many people felt overwhelmed by the calls for aid.
And then the Iran Hostage Crisis happened. I see that as the turning point, because it led to the election of Ronald Reagan, who, while he may have been one of the greatest cheerleaders we ever had, was in specifics one of the worst presidents we ever had, and we are still dealing with the fallout. One of the things I heard from average citizens in town halls, talk shows, radio, and even in private conversation was how they were “tired” of all these people, for whom we had done “so much” for, turning on us and treating us so horribly. Many people saw the Iranians as basically ungrateful.
We haven’t gotten out of that mindset yet.
Of course, most of these people knew nothing about the history of our foreign interventions that did so much to antagonize and even terrorize the people living in so many places. We generally knew little about how we had installed the Shah, overthrowing a democratically elected leader in the 1950s in order to facilitate his return to power, and how the Shah ran Iran as a dictator and whose state police terrorized his people. We don’t talk about such things in school. You can find out about it easily enough if you care to look, but the easier narrative that we were the good guys fighting communism painted over so much pain in so many places that have now become thorns in our side. We all became aware when the embassy was seized and Americans were held hostage. Suddenly, there was Iran, there were these anarchists, there was this issue. As if nothing had gone before.
And Reagan took advantage and rode a wave of nationalist resentment into the White House, where he established the narrative that we had as a country lost our verve and he would make us great again.
What Reagan began has brought us to this.
The thing that fascinates me is how even then people thought they were voting for something else. Something they didn’t get.
Emotionally, people wanted to feel pride in the country and to not be made to feel responsible for the catastrophes that never seem to go away. Now, to be fair, many of them were not our fault. Not directly. But look at the record. Southeast Asia was destabilized and underwent decades of one tyranny after another after we left Vietnam. That one is on us. Central America became a chaos of violent groups trying to seize power from each other because in the Fifties we destabilized governments that appeared to be leaning a bit too far left for our comfort. They’re still a mess, because many of these groups started funding their actions through drugs and became, in many instances, the cartels with which we’re dealing today. People are fleeing the violence and coming here for refuge. And now we’re trying to send them back. In many cases, sending them back to death. South America likewise had a long period of having to deal with people like Pinochet because we interfered in elections to keep “communists” out of power. One has to ask, how bad could the Leftists have been considering how bad the dictators were?
We went through a period after WWII when we took on an ideological fight against communism that left ruin in too many places. The only thing I can say about why is that ideologues here took advantage to advance their own agendas by basically keeping us frightened of something we barely understood.
The Right got its chance with Reagan and now look at us. The military is being used as police, elected representatives with questions are being bullied, harrassed, arrested, and now, recently, shot.
Nobody voted for this.
So what did you vote for? What did you think would happen?
Two things, it seems to me, have operated on people. Both myths, but powerful. I’m speaking now of tactics, but these are the things put forth to justify a claim on “patriotism.” The first is, we quite cynically assume all politicians lie. This usually manifests as a belief that none of them say what they actually mean. So a pass is given when outrageous things are put out in the media. The other is that government always—always—wastes our money. So when the argument is made that waste is going to be addressed—a perennial—people just assume this to be true, that there is so much waste. So we get a demagogue who promises to cut out all the waste—what was that delightful phrase? Drain the swamp?—those two things come together to blind people to what is going on. No one (well, no one who supported him) really took him seriously in what he said he would do and no one thought he would actually jettison working programs, defining them as categorically wasteful, even when they demonstrably are not. People generally thought the programs benefiting them were fine. But now those programs are being cut and the dismay would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.
All behind this is the question asked by too many people for too long—”why are we spending money on that?” Nothing wrong with asking that, but then there’s no follow-through. The people asking it don’t actually want to know the answer, they want to demonstrate their anger over issues they can’t address.
What issues? Oh, there are many, but there is one I believe underlies all the rest. The one no one wants to seriously address.
Wealth inequality.
Congress is arguing now over what is called the Big Beautiful Bill. The central component of that is extending tax cuts to people who don’t need them. This will be at the expense of people who are falling farther and farther behind economically.
The harrowing of waste done in the name of paying for those tax cuts, with the claim that we can’t afford it anymore, begs the question of how we can afford another two to three trillion dollars gifted to the ultra-rich if we can’t afford Medicaid? And no one in the GOP and too few among the Democrats are looking the reality in the face. Of course we can afford the safety next that is now being shredded. Raise taxes on the wealthy. Especially corporations, who are not, despite the legal fiction we have embraced, people.
But deal with this we will, because at the core of almost all our multifaceted and seemingly intractable problems is this—the disparity between rich and poor is too wide and growing. Despite the popular myth that those who have the most have “earned” it, this is presently a culture of pillage, and if that is allowed to continue, the crash will be civilization-ending.
Share this:
Like this:
Related