My mother turned 90 this week. She’s lived through the Great Depression, WWII, the Berlin Wall, the moon landings, the first Black president, and the Great Recession. Lately, she’s been witness to Donald Trump, a global pandemic, and what seems to be mass insanity. (Cue up Truckin’.) She may not understand all of it, but she sees it for what it is.
A friend this week noted how insane it is that so many people across this country have been infected not only by Covid, but by Russian propaganda spread through social media channels. The social contagion crosses wires and makes illogic seem logical. Then again, getting people who prefer to live in realities of their own creation to accept the irrational may not be such a great lift.
Fox Mulder wanted to believe conspircay theories are real, that aliens had abducted his sister Samantha, that shit doesn’t just happen, that there were answers “out there.” I want to believe some of these RWNJs speaking at school board meetings (see above) are simply doing bad performance art.
We noted a few examples yesterday of the rise of illogical logic. A few other examples appeared in my Twitter feed this morning:
We want to believe these conflicts are simply contests of idea. That good ones will eventually supplant bad ones. That is tough with Russians (and others) seeding, fertilizing and watering invasive bad ones across social media faster than the rest of us can uproot them and plant beneficial ones.
Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic that it is a conceit of smart liberals that what we are experiencing now are contests of ideas to be won (as we prefer) through dialogue and debate. But those only go so far, and that choice may not be left to us:
The fall of Kabul should refocus Americans—in the administration, in Congress, in the leadership of both parties, but above all, ordinary Americans across the country—on the choices that are now coming thick and fast. Afghanistan provides a useful reminder that while we and our European allies might be tired of “forever wars,” the Taliban are not tired of wars at all. The Pakistanis who helped them are not tired of wars, either. Nor are the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes that hope to benefit from the change of power in Afghanistan; nor are al-Qaeda and the other groups who may make Afghanistan their home again in future. More to the point, even if we are not interested in any of these nations and their brutal politics, they are interested in us. They see the wealthy societies of America and Europe as obstacles to be cleared out of their way. To them, liberal democracy is not an abstraction; it is a potent, dangerous ideology that threatens their power and needs to be defeated wherever it exists, and they will deploy corruption, propaganda, and even violence to do so. They will do it in Syria and Ukraine, and they will do it within the borders of the U.S., the U.K., and the EU.
We might not want any of this to be true. We might prefer a different world, one where we can stay out of their way and they will stay out of ours. But that’s not the world that we live in. In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle, a military battle, not merely an ideological battle. It cannot always be fought with language, arguments, conferences, or diplomacy, or by deploying human-rights organizations, UN declarations, and fierce EU statements of concern. Or rather, you can try to fight it that way, but you will lose.
Thus far, our domestic Taliban are satisfied to parade around with their weapons and flags threatening civil war. They grew up in a peaceful society not acclimatized to explosions, gunfire, and death. They might not find the real thing preferable to pretending. Even after Jan. 6, I want to believe they will never cross over en masse into open violence.
Aiding me in that belief is the fact that there are still sane ones among us:
WILLIAMSON CO., Tenn. — Amid a heated debate playing out in school districts across the country over whether students should be required to wear face masks, a Tennessee dad is going viral for an impassioned speech in which he explained why he is having his 5-year-old daughter wear a mask.
“She went to school and was one of just a few kids in her class wearing a mask, which made her ask why she had to. My answer was because we want to take care of other people,” Justin Kanew, of College Grove, Tennessee, said during a school board meeting Monday night. “She’s 5 years old but she understood that concept, and it’s disappointing that more adults around here can’t seem to grasp it.”
[…]
“To her credit, she’s totally seemed to understand that concept of helping other people and we’ve reiterated that to her over and over again,” he said. “We just tell her that we want to keep everybody safe and the more people that wear masks, the safer everybody can be and the sooner we can get back to not wearing masks.”
“She fully understands that and I wish more people would stop making this political and start making it more about taking care of each other,” Kanew added. “At the end of the day, we should be doing everything we possibly can to keep our kids in school and to get back to some sense of normal, and if masks are a path to that, that seems like a small price to pay.”
I want to believe there are more out there like Justin Kanew.
Update: Corrected typo. (h/t LG)