The Three Confusions

We always thought it would come from the outside – the direct attack on America, upsetting our institutions and our democracy.

It had never occurred to me, except in those Cold War thrillers like Seven Days in May, that the coordinated assault would come from inside our own borders. And yet this is what is happening now, in more ways than one.

The worst of what’s happening now, we are doing to ourselves. It also appears that many of us don’t perceive the full reality of it. Small wonder, what with all the noise on social media and the angry hair-trigger street-corner arguments.

I might call these the “Three Confusions” - the conditions that keep us from seeing what’s happening, provoke us to castigate each other so, and from realizing what truly can be done about it.

1. It’s Not the Russians.

Putin and his minions are spreading quite enough mischief, mind you. U.S. intelligence agencies have made that much crystal clear. But the real culprits sowing our current domestic unrest are much closer to home. 

It’s not the Russians who are chiefly to blame. The anxious turmoil here in the U.S. today comes from dis-information that we ourselves tolerate. It’s our own failure to stay focused, our capacity for being easily distracted, our condition of being so downright gullible on a staggering scale in this current age. That is the behavior that leads to old friends attacking each other, siblings not just disagreeing but verbally assaulting one another. The scorched earth even within families and between old friends is something new and very wrong. It is a failure in the spirit of our citizenship. It blinds us to the strength of our own diversity, and to our belief in each other.

There are plenty of threats from hostile parties elsewhere on our planet, the regimes that wish us ill. (Arguably there are even more now that President Trump has abandoned or offended historical allies, even as he defends Putin and Russia.) In the current world order, we Americans wake up some mornings and seem to find ourselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

This is happening now, on our own shores, and on more than one level of government, that seem determined to erode democracy, public health, and our general welfare.

2. It’s Not Trump, but Ourselves.

In my view, it is not President Trump nor his counter-factual administration that fundamentally troubles America now. They are easy targets. But what ails us in our country is deeper, angrier and has raged much longer than even the coronavirus.

It is the deeper sickness of racism, the savagery of violence, the maladies of selfishness. Trump only sanctioned bad actors, though our civil society is paying the price now.

Trump is not Hitler, nor Mussolini, nor any one of the world’s current crop of dictators. He is, rather, like Senator Joe McCarthy and any number of other dangerous bad actors and clowns who have stained our civic arena and our own history, a bully who names shadowy villains that suit his own purposes.

The enemies of democracy now, sadly, are some governors and legislators and secretaries of state, the ones who might – but don’t – make voting safer, more secure, and more fully participated in. They also rarely explain themselves, except in the most narrowly procedural ways.

This is our true national malady, not one President. Trump is just a symptom.

We can do better than this.

3. We Are Too Quick to Trigger

Regrettably, any criticism of the Trump government is met with such now-standard retorts as these:

“You just hate Trump.”

No, I don’t hate anyone. Hatred is not what I feel. Moreso, I feel sadness, mixed with defiance and knowledge that we can do better. I am opposed to the erosion of our norms and the failure of anyone in authority - in any municipality, any state administration as well as federal - to address the challenges to fairness and injustice.

“So you like the Democrats better?”

No, I don’t favor one political party over the other. What I want is good government. For that, we need both parties truly competing and in the process fashioning good policy, not the arrogant smugness and silence of super-majorities.

It is time to call a stop to any of these confusions.

A good election will help. If, that is, we understand our duty as citizens, the lessons of history, the need for competent leaders, and cast our votes for freedom and the future. And that we are not kept from broadly doing so.

But it will take more than one election to undo the deeper damage. And our hearts have to be in it, not just partisanship.

© Keel Hunt, 2020