MARCH 25, 2023 – If you turn check the news these days—or any days—you’ll either investigate Canadian citizenship or follow my example and take matters into your own hands, as in . . .
I’m going to be arrested on Tuesday. There, I’ve put it out there. (You can too.) The phone lines and website are now open for donations. I expect by Monday that $1.5 million in campaign donations will roll in—my campaign to combat the deep state, George Soros, extreme leftist Democrats and the worse abuse of prosecutorial discretion . . . let’s be all-inclusive and call it “of all time” . . . not to mention my candidacy for president, assuming that I’m elected, because if I’m not, you’ll know the election was fraudulent, in which case my supporters will storm the Capitol again, except this time, who knows, maybe they’ll succeed, so like Frank Sinatra, I can have it, “My Way.” Because, after all, loser that I am, I’m always a winner.
For good measure, I’ll schedule my next rally for Nuremberg, Pennsylvania and deny that it has any connection to Nuremberg, Germany, site of the Nazi Party mass rallies of the 1930s. The Pennsylvania Nuremberg just happens to be more or less between Pittsburg and Philadelphia, the two most populous cities in an important swing state. (But pssst: Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, take note.)
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If this all were the stuff of a cheap graphic novel, I could ignore it and move on. But it’s not, and I can’t. Nor is it fiction that in many quarters, most notably Florida, the very people who oppose “big government” want it to ban books from school and public libraries and fire teachers and administrators who don’t toe a puritanically prudish line. The authoritarian streak in our body politic is alive and afoot.
I like to think that in principle, at least, our national political culture once embraced the concept of the common good; that in devising and implementing policy, we held to an implicit understanding that all citizens were in the same boat, and that however imperfect the vessel and unequal our individual accommodations might have been, at least we agreed upon which end of the ship was the bow, which was the stern and that everyone was entitled to a life-jacket and an assigned seat aboard a lifeboat. These assumptions were consistent with representative democracy.
Perhaps unity around democratic principles was always a fiction. Maybe the vitriol hurled among the Founders and their followers was, for its time, just offensive as the diatribes of our day. Possibly—nay, probably—unity was never achieved to the extent glorified versions of our history suggest, despite the “united” in United States of America. Bear in mind that we’re a nation of all-comers from every corner of the earth, with boatloads of African slaves thrown in. If this nation of immigrants was e pluribus unum in its decimation of native populations and exploitation of the earth for individual gain, it was by sheer size and diversity, also e pluribus crazymum. If we wound up with a single national flag, we still have 50 state flags, and the black-on-yellow, coiled-snake-ready-to-strike flag of 18th century individualism—“Don’t Tread on Me!” Both our imported and acquired DNA was in many ways the polar opposite of “We all do better when we all do better.”
Most confounding, however, is that our “rugged individualism” has now merged with a disturbing attraction to authoritarianism.
Historical and cultural habits and perspectives are difficult to modify under the best of circumstances, and what we’re experiencing today is not the best of conditions for changing ingrained attitudes. The deck of the national vessel, as it were, is cluttered with the obstacles created by our past: puritanical religious beliefs; institutionalized discrimination against already marginalized sections of the population; acquiescence in growing disparities among citizens; an archaic fetish with attributes of the wild frontier; a common belief that natural resources were limitless and to be exploited for maximum short-term gain.
Except for the Civil War, our differences were never such to cause dissolution or disintegration. But we now live in an era when tensions among us are fanned by big winds, amplified by communication technology at everyone’s fingertips. More than ever we face an imperative to recognize our common interests and therefore the common good. But our political consciousness has been manipulated in the opposite direction. Amidst fear mongering, many fall sway to the age-old false security of authoritarianism.
Where are we headed? I can’t predict any better than those who get paid handsomely to do so—nor can they foresee any better than I, who looks into the same fog and opines without pay. But I have an uneasy feeling about where this ship is headed and how it will weather the voyage.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
