IS IT WORTH DYING FOR ? A personal point of view

It is always important to be willing to revise one’s opinions. It is equally important to be critical of views with which one agrees but which seem to evolve from points of view with which one disagrees.

In my browsing through news media, I came across an opinion piece by Tom Nichols, published on USA Today, entitled “Trump is not ruining democracy, we are. And it's been anguishing to confront”. In it, he writes (inter alia):

The people I have always counted on to be patriotic, sensible, and steady – like our ancestors had been under far more trying circumstances than our own – were now sirens of drama and complaint. Everything, they said, is as bad as it’s ever been. These, they were sure, are the worst times ever. We are all victims. Someone must pay……

We, ourselves, have become unwilling to engage in civic life at even the most basic level of regular voting. We, ourselves, have embraced consumerism that demands ever better and ever cheaper products no matter what the cost to our own economy. We, ourselves, have chosen to be solitary viewers of television and social media, and then to express ourselves in public only with performative and childish rage…….

What’s going on? Ironically, this growing illiberalism is not the product of bad times, but of a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards. The United States and other democracies have real problems, but the rise of a sour and selfish abandonment of democracy is not happening because of social injustice or “economic anxiety.” Worse, our democracy now practically must run on autopilot independently of a public that is happily and wilfully ignorant of the issues and wants nothing to do with the dreary business of governing. And with increasing frequency, our form of government is under attack by bored working and middle-class citizens – led by clever political and television figures – who have no use for democracy other than as slogans and window-dressing around their need to be the constant centre of their own reality show…..

This is not the America in which I was raised. Something was wrong, and I wanted to know why millions of the citizens of my own nation – some of them near and dear to me – were now, astonishingly, embracing illiberalism and authoritarianism…..

The January 6 rioters were the most extreme example of this stupefying level of narcissism. These insurrectionists were not disenfranchised or oppressed people trying to engage in a peaceful assembly. They could barely express a coherent political thought. Rather, the whole event was a day-camp outing for middle-aged, middle-class, gainfully employed Americans who wanted to be heroes storming Congress – and perhaps lynching the vice president in the process – and then go back home to sell real estate, attend work retreats in Mexico, and brag about it all on Instagram.

Over a half-century ago, the writer Eric Hoffer presciently saw the way such madness might overtake the democracies when he warned that anti-democratic mass movements begin not with deprivation and suffering, but with boredom and plenty. “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some,” he wrote in 1951. “To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.”

The United States has fallen into this very trap. Our parents and grandparents had the fortitude to endure the 20th century, with two world wars and an economic disaster. In the 21st century, we lack the resilience even to overcome a pandemic, much less the great trials of a war or a depression. Worse, we are not mature or stoic enough even to endure the prosaic and often dull routines that are part of daily life.

We are suffering because we are successful. We are unhappy because we have what we want.

Time is running out. If we are to recapture our civic life and reinvigorate our liberal and constitutional inheritance, we must stop, right now, and – unpleasant and searing though it will be – take stock of ourselves and our own role in the decline of our democracy.

After reading that, perhaps, you can see my problem. Whilst I agree that Americans are embracing illiberalism and authoritarianism, to suggest that it is due to success and freedom from want, and that the January the 6^th rioters were middle-aged, middle-class, gainfully employed narcissists on a day camp outing, is as bizarre an analysis as one can imagine. The Hoffer quote is equally ridiculous, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some,” It is the sort of comment that an Oscar Wilde imitator might suggest in a rogue performance of the Importance of Being Earnest.

In a Wikipedia entry, Mr Nichols apparently describes himself as a Never Trump conservative. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Nichols argued that conservatives should vote for Hilary Clinton, whom he detested, because Trump was "too mentally unstable" to serve as commander-in-chief. Nichols continued that argument for the 2018 midterm elections.. After the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States, Nichols announced on October 7, 2018, that he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent and claimed that Senator Susan Collin’s yes vote on the confirmation convinced him that the Republican Party exists to exercise raw political power. He also criticized the Democratic Party for being "torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other" and said that the party's behaviour during the Kavanaugh hearings, with the exception of Senators Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar, was execrable but that the Republicans have become a threat to the rule of law and to constitutional norms. In an opinion column, Nichols cited the Mueller Report to argue that Trump failed in his role as a citizen and then as commander-in-chief by not doing more to prevent and punish the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

I am in complete agreement with Mr Nichols about the Republican Party having become a threat to the rule of law and to constitutional norms, nonetheless his political analysis of the American State of affairs is just that, an insular view overlooking the fact that there are more countries with allegedly democratic governments in the rest of the world. In that world outside of the United States, there is an equal trend towards illiberalism and authoritarianism, and in some cases towards confusion and muddle. I refer in particular to the United Kingdom which has a group of amateurs operating Her Majesties Government as if it were a part time job. They faff around talking of levelling up, fantasy growth, mixed messaging social order and immigration without any cohesion or sense of integrity. A Punch and Judy prime minister in charge who delegates any form of responsibility to people incapable of managing to even make a phone call.

Does that have anything to do with them being successful and having what they want or a stupefying level of narcissism? I wonder.

As to other ‘democracies’ turning towards the right, I again cite Professor Henry Giroux:

The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again, resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.”

I am more inclined to consider Mr Giroux’s view of this seemingly global trend towards authoritarian regimes; however, one cannot discount the energy of fundamentalists in following this trend. The twenty years of maintaining some form of order and new democratisation in Afghanistan, have seemingly come to nought. One could quite naturally assume that after twenty years of propping up an Afghan Government and defence force both military and civilian, that these nascent institutions would be sufficiently independent and capable of some resilience and strength, to sustain a new regime; yet, with surprising rapidity, Afghanistan fell back into the grip of the orthodox Taliban and Sharia Law. This is such an extreme view of the rule of law that not only dictates behaviour but thought. It is a religious straight jacket that has nothing to do with civilised civilian governance, and perhaps Mr Nichols view is correct in identifying it as a stupefying level of narcissism.

There did not seem to be even an attempt by the Afghan forces to stop the Taliban from rolling in. It seems they just threw down their weapons and changed out of their uniforms. Perhaps they felt that what they have built over that past twenty years was not worth dying for.  The level of commitment to a country by its citizens is always open to question and debate. The people of Myanmar and Belarus would know much more about that than I.