Who do we wish to be?
In conversation at The Ink, Eddie Glaude, Jr., Princeton professor of African American studies, ponders, in essence, “Who do we take ourselves to be?” in the wake of 50 years of Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism. That framework is collapsing. What kind of society have we created?
Madison and others insisted on the importance of character, that we had to be certain kinds of persons in order for democracy to work. And this 50-year run has exacerbated some of the distortions in what makes us who we are. We’ve always dealt with the dangerous and disfiguring effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of class ideology. But over the last 50 years, they’ve congealed in a particular sort of way.
For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we’ve been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we’re going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it’s currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other.
Glaude considers the intractability of prejudice in a social system with roots in slavery.
Reaganism rode the backlash to greater equality for marginalized Americans that accelerated in the second half of the 20th century. It might be trite by now to cite, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” but it’s clear some of those formerly more privileged Americans are now aggrieved Americans. And less American for it. The progressive era sense of American purpose, of governing for the common good, has been rejected for the zero-sum view Heather McGhee described in “The Sum of Us,” intended to preserve historical stratification Elizabeth Wilkerson outlined in “Caste.”
Thus, it’s not just Reaganism breaking down, but the ties that once bound the country together, however imperfectly and inequitably. It’s one thing to wistfully imagine a more perfect union. It’s another to grapple with sharing it with people unlike yourself in a society that looks very different from the one in which you grew up.
And you knew who you were then
girls were girls and men were men
Those are real challenges. Practical challenges. There is a budding fascist movement springing from those anxieties that we cannot wish away among people who would rather break the country than share it. The kinds of people Madison thought necessary for a stable democracy have been depleted like the icecaps.
Rolling coal on America
Michele Goldberg has noticed:
John McEntee — who started out carrying Donald Trump’s bags and rose to become, in the chaotic final days of Trump’s presidency, his most important enforcer — has a TikTok account. In a video he published last week, he explains how he likes to keep “fake Hollywood money” in his car to give to homeless people. “Then when they go to use it, they get arrested, so I’m actually like helping clean up the community,” he said.
With his boyish face and slicked-back hair, McEntee, the former director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and a man likely to be central to staffing a future Trump administration, comes off a lot like Patrick Bateman, the homicidal investment banker played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film “American Psycho.” The clip’s smug villainy, I think, offers a clue to why South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, thirsty for a bigger role in MAGA world, might have thought she could ingratiate herself by bragging about killing a puppy.
Right wingers often rain contempt on what they call virtue signaling, a performative kind of sanctimony epitomized by the “In This House” yard signs that once dotted progressive neighborhoods. Partly in response, they’ve developed what’s sometimes called vice signaling, the defiant embrace of cruelty and disdain for social norms. Think of “rolling coal,” the practice of modifying diesel engines to make them belch dark exhaust in an effort to trigger environmentalists, or the way George Santos’s promiscuous falsehoods endeared him to hard-core MAGA acolytes.
They wave American flags with a kind of Pythonesque “French taunters” flair. Thuggish displays of dominance stand in for statesmanship even among what Republicans now consider leaders and Madison might have considered barbarians.
In a show of force, Donald Trump summoned a gaggle of them to his Manhattan trial on Monday, the day former Trump thug Michael Cohen arrived to tesify against him. With Trump facing jail for further violations of his gag order, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) arrived to attack Cohen outside the courtroom.
I was a professional engineer, a PE. I’ve worked with PEs who were useless and PhDs who were clueless. Credentials do not impress me. Nor does it impress me that people with degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale — Vance, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others — threaten the republic from titled positions in Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nominally, they support the constitution they swore an oath to defend. In reality, they mean to renounce any application of the law to themselves or their sovereign now on trial.
Glaude considers what we must do in response:
I use this phrase in the book over and over again, “close to the ground,” and this is really coming out of my reading of Ms. Ella Baker. We have to understand the problems that are right in front of us. The local becomes the space where we do this work, right in our communities, where we are. So we can have this fight over education in our communities. We can have this fight, understanding that elections are important, but elections are really just one moment in the hard work that democracy requires of us. Part of what Ms. Baker taught is that those problems are right in front of our noses, and all we need to do is stop looking to D.C. and look where we are.
We have to be better people, better than the kind simply invested in securing power for power’s sake. Freedom? Liberty? They are mere shibboleths on the right, things to be individually hoarded not used to secure a more perfect union or for the common pursuit of happiness.
To overcome where we are we must recommit to who we want to be as Americans. What’s scary is who some of us are and like it.
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