My high school English teacher wrote recently, discouraged by the state of the nation, as are so many of us. Pizza Joe, our town’s street-corner philosopher, says it’s because we believed the lies we were taught as children.
George Washington could not tell a lie. It took until midway through the Trump administration and much hand-wringing by the establishment press for the media to start reporting on lies from the White House, using the actual, three-letter word.
“To make an untrue statement with the intent to deceive,” is how Miriam-Webster defines it.
Before Trump, presidents didn’t so much lie as they shaded the truth, added spin, told half-truths, dodged the truth or told lies of omission. Every rookie reporter knows that most every politician will respond to a question, very often with many words that don’t begin to answer it.
Politicians, parents and even history teachers will say any old thing.
But my English teacher needn’t worry.
Our nation has survived rougher weather. Our bloodiest war came when another rabid minority was convinced that people had a right to own other human beings as property. Fortunately, the Union outnumbered the Confederacy about three to one.
Fortunately, reasonable people in this country still have the numbers. Our wackos are a minority. They’ve got good representation in the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court right now and some stand willing to reverse a 250-year history of expanding personal rights, but that’s the result of a kind of appendicitis, government vestigial institutions of dubious value gone sour.
Like the Electoral College and a U.S. Senate design that represents real estate instead of people.
Reaganism unsurprisingly metastasized into an American form of light-beer fascism, but that won’t last. Every political philosophy fades after it reaches and embraces its most logical extreme.
Robert Reich, a champion of American progressives, printed a column this week on 10 reasons he had hope, including that we’re a more diverse society than ever before and there’s nothing Tucker Carlson can do to stop that.
Reich noted that ideas like unions, Medicare for all, and free college education are backed strongly by a younger generation facing or already fed through the meat grinder we’ve made of capitalism.
While encouraging people to take a day off from the news now and then, Reich ends his essay with the observation that today’s political battles are a “long game.”
“The struggle is exhausting and hard because there is no other way forward. Those who are hoarding power will not give it up without a fight, so we must too,” he says.
I’m afraid Reich didn’t go far enough. Any cursory review of history reveals that no one enjoys the luxury of expecting progress. Progress is a battle for hearts and minds, and one that must be fought every day just to keep from losing ground.
It is a wearying battle. It is a discouraging battle. It’s a soul-devouring battle, understandably. French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault famously inverted Carl von Clauswitz, observing that “Politics is war fought by other means.”
We may take leave of it from time to time, but the battle never ends.
Perhaps the most harmful lie we were taught as children is that human progress is a continuum. History teaches the opposite: Our species repeats its dark ages due to a surplus of hoodlums standing ready to lead us into another.
To the ramparts we go, if we give a damn.