United States of insecurity
by Tom Sullivan
Addictive drugs start out delivering a quick, pleasing euphoria. Then life quickly spirals downhill. This story comes from one recovery website:
“I remember the first time I did heroin,” Parker says, thinking back to his first experience. “I felt like a God. Nothing could mess with me, I couldn’t do anything wrong and everything was how it was supposed to be.”
What Donald Trump promises supporters is just that: a shot-lived sense that everything is how it is supposed to be. He was going to make America great again. Not an improved now, but the way things are supposed to be in whatever imagined alternate reality. In the family separation policy the administration put into place on the southern border, in the tears and cries of toddlers and mothers, what the world saw was the weak restoring American “greatness” on the backs of the weaker.
But Trump’s caving to pressure and reversing his cruel policy is not a “come-from-behind victory for human decency,” Eric Levitz cautions. “It is very difficult to demonize immigrants who are still in diapers.”
Yet the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security tried. They tried whipping up support by demonizing infants as future violent gang members. They suggested desperate “families” fleeing violence at home were a false front for criminals bringing an infestation of drugs and crime and diseases. They condemned mothers and fathers as lawbreakers and poor parents for seeking safer homes and futures for themselves and their kids. Prejudice always tries to conceal itself behind socially acceptable pretext. Law and order. The Bible tells me so.
Trump’s fiddle is not just the politics of fear, but insecurity. What he is pushing to treat it is not opioids, but authoritarianism. President George W. Bush once quipped, “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator. Hehehe.” That wasn’t a joke. It was a Kinsley gaffe. Trump is not joking.
A study The Atlantic highlights confirms what the work of Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton suggested. “The failure of life to turn out as expected,” they wrote, “[is] consistent with people compensating through other risky behaviors such as abuse of alcohol and drug use.” Or authoritarian politics, I’d add unscientifically, speaking of compensating:
The authors of this paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relied on a survey called midus—Midlife in the United States—that interviewed American adults about their mental health in 1995–1996 and again in 2011–2014. They found that for the poorest whites in the sample, mental health consistently declined between those two times, suggesting low-income white Americans became less happy over the years. Meanwhile, higher incomes were “consistently associated with less distress and greater well-being,” the authors, Noreen Goldman of Princeton and Dana Glei and Maxine Weinstein of Georgetown University, write.
There is “substantial social stratification” indicated in the mental health of Americans. The authors speculate, “increasing income inequality and wage stagnation for the working class; long-term deterioration in employment opportunities that have led to intergenerational decline in economic security; reduction in stable marriages … increasing work-family strain; and weakening interactions within communities and associated social isolation” are to blame.
But these are effects of income inequality, not their causes. Poor immigrants who weren’t in the country did not produce it. The weak, the powerless, and non-natives are simply easy scapegoats. Cheap labor and (future) political competitors make them “threats” who could make a bad situation worse for those already insecure about their stations.
A notoriously needy and insecure president knows all about that. And as a veteran salesman, he knows how to exploit it.
But what this week’s family separation debacle proved (it’s not over) is that a country that professes all are created equal practices “kick down, kiss up.” As Jay Michaelson details, “It’s the law, and that’s what the law states” from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cannot hide how the distribution of justice is just as inequitable and capricious as income:
If the Trump administration were really enforcing laws without exceptions, it would have enforced them against Wells Fargo, Exxon Mobil, Devon Energy, Bank of America, and Equifax. In fact, the government chose not to enforce the law against each of them and many others, on numerous occasions over the last year.
“If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!” Trump tweeted again yesterday. But where there is one law for the poor and another for the rich, you don’t have a country either. You have a kingdom.
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