Those of you who have been reading me for a while know that I’ve long said the Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy. Brian Beutler articulates something on the subject that’s been rattling around in my mind for the last couple of months and I’m glad to see it:
For my entire adult life, I’ve watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense. Many of the architects of U.S. interventionism have been breezy cynics, cavalier about violence, happy to visit it on far off strangers to advance corrupt or bloodless ends. That overgeneralizes, but not by much. A war profiteer is more evil than a practitioner of realpolitik in some abstract sense—a distinction that may be of interest to God—but when their interests align, the result is mass destruction that they own jointly. There’s a reason their critics call them The Blob.
They’ve chosen war for reasons morally upright people would never countenance, then justified it in terms meant to assuage them: Domino theory, democracy promotion, nuclear nonproliferation, choose your window dressing.
When Donald Trump wields the same power in superficially similar ways, it’s thus tempting to take comfort in familiarity, or long-burning cynicism. We’ve been looting the third world, including in Latin America, for decades. Meet the new boss, etc. If you believed those old pretexts and false pretenses, you’re a chump.
Well, I didn’t believe the old pretexts and false pretenses. I found them despicable. Yet what’s so alarming to me about the recent dark turn in American politics is the fact that they’re gone.
He asks, as I have asked myself, are these things worth missing. and why am I so uncomfortable now that they are gone? Isn’t it better to know, upfront, what these people are up to?
Actually, it is not. Hypocrisy is better:
If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.
Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.
This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.
They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.
As Brian points out, Trump (and Miller) think the people are as malevolent as they are.
I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.
That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse. That the Senate just passed a war-powers resolution meant to foreclose further unauthorized military action. These things matter. They mean we aren’t changed. Yet.
Ultimately, the problem is that losing even the gesture toward decency, values and civilized ideals brings out the worst in everyone, particularly those who are both angry and violent. So far, most people aren’t succumbing to the lizard brain “might makes right” rationales coming from the right. Yes, there is still a sense of inertia and paralysis but maybe it’s starting to crack?
My greatest concern remains the fact that so many — tens of millions of us — led by the President and his henchmen, are going along with this program, aroused by it even. It’s as if I always knew that there were aliens from another planet living among us but I never knew there were so many.