Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Marshall McLuhan used to say, in various iterations, that “Whoever invented water wasn’t a fish.” In other words, it’s hard for us to perceive immersive environments when we exist within them. Melville said something similar about oysters. And the current environment of American discourse is, in some ways, a case in point. We are immersed in the abnormal, and it therefore seems normal.
How can we see the water around us? I make no special claim to perspicacity. Maybe, like McLuhan, I’m just looking around and making an educated guess – like a fish in the ocean saying: “I think we’re surrounded by water.” To repeat: What I see is a lot of normalizing of a deeply abnormal environment.
But it isn’t a total stab in the dark. Unlike fish, we can remember past political environments, when we were less polarized than now, and (just as important) differently polarized. We can make pointed analytical comparisons: i.e., distinctions as well as connections.
Let me pause here to note that the word “polarized” is itself problematic. It means not just separate or different but occupying opposite extremes on a spectrum or continuum. That’s an accurate description of the current situation, as far as it goes; but it’s also misleading, because one side has migrated beyond the bounds of the democratic spectrum -- the spectrum we’ve identified as red vs. blue since November 2000 -- while the other side has not.
That is a qualitative moral difference. It’s a whole new game, not the old game on a new playing field. It means there’s a basic asymmetry in the change that has occurred, as most of the traditional right has strayed so far that they now accuse the rest of being the real threat to democracy.
Clearly the term ‘real’ is a serious problem here as well. That’s new too: now they force us to actually litigate reality. Lies will do that.
What I see with my fish-eye lens is an environment in which democracy is at stake, which it hasn’t been in America for a long time (despite the struggles for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, native American rights, and so forth). The rule of law. Civility in public life. The right to vote and to have one’s vote properly counted. The value of truth. All of these values are out the window for those who’ve strayed to the dark side. “Dark Side” is no longer just a metaphor or rhetorical flourish. It really is dark where they are. And these calamities are hard to fathom, and invite us to reactions of dismissal, denial, or minimization.
We are no longer in a left-vs.-right environment, at least not the one we’ve known in the past. We’re primarily in a democratic-vs.-autocratic environment. And “autocratic” is a too-polite term for “fascist.”
Democracies strive, in theory, for political equality, despite much internal opposition even to that basic level of equal rights. (We’ve always had weak democrats; the number of anti-democrats is the newer thing.) Within that spectrum, democracies negotiate issues of economic equality or the lack of it. Now, we’re negotiating whether to remain a democracy. We’ve gone meta, you might say.
All of which is fine, if you’re living on Mars. But it’s terrible for America and therefore also for the world. It’s like strolling through the Louvre and having to debate whether art has any value or whether it should all be torn off the walls. Even having that debate undermines basic democratic values. Part of the culture of democracy (as opposed to the creaky gears of the machine) is an idea of what is and is not up for debate. That’s why the very existence of MAGA undermines our republic.
What’s interesting to me is not just the new terrain of discourse, but the quality (or better, the qualitative nature) of that discourse. Here again, we have to be careful about distinctions and connections.
We are emphatically not living in two realities. That idea, too, conveys something terribly misleading: that there are two equally legitimate but irreconcilable ways of seeing the world. It ignores the anchoring idea of truth on which all democracy (and all learning) depends. The universe hasn’t split into two separate channels of spacetime that can’t communicate to each other. What has happened is otherwise.
The anti-democrats haven’t re-invented reality, or discovered a new reality of their own buried under Mar-a-Lago. Rather, they have abandoned our common reality in favor of lies, myths, and conspiracy theories. Starting with normalizing the notion that Donald Trump was remotely fit to be president of the United States, and continuing with election denial, “Stop the Steal,” rationalizing January 6th, attacking the justice system, and doubling down on Trump’s lies, the anti-democrats have become not avatars of an alternate reality but pure fantasists. Liars who can’t un-tell their own lies.
By the way, since words matter: Jan. 6th was not a coup in the normal sense. The Jan. 6th thugs didn’t want to overthrow American democracy – they just wanted to hijack it to remain in power, and then continue to erode it. Admittedly, the distinction is a bit wobbly, especially when the crowd is yelling “Hang Mike Pence!” and has the gallows ready.
Maybe it was an insurrection, depending how flexibly we define that word. But at some point, we have to get beyond definitions, and their shortcomings, in order to identify things that our lexicon doesn’t account for. Truth doesn’t come from dictionaries.
The truth is that the anti-democrats have lied and lied, and have believed and continue to believe their lies. Whether Trump himself can even distinguish truth from lies is a debatable point, but his psyche is mostly irrelevant here. (If you want to know more about Trump’s psyche, and have the stomach for it, read Mary Trump’s excellent book, Too Much and Never Enough.) What’s more important is that millions of Americans continue to believe him.
Given the stakes, including the survival of our democratic experiment, it would be too generous to suggest that these people have been misled or deceived. Instead (not unlike pro-slavery Americans in the 19th century) they have erected their own psychic barriers to truth and human decency. They’ve followed Trump so far out on the anti-democratic limb that they’re ashamed to crawl back; they cannot bring themselves to see how wrong they are. They have past the moral point of no return.
They are not just misled; they are not children, idiots, or innocent victims. They are millions of people who are morally wrong, who support and espouse hate and tyranny and lawlessness.
Why morally wrong, and not just politically different? Because there is no morally acceptable form of government other than democracy based on the rule of law, however weak and inadequate ours may be at the present time. (And it positively reeks with corruption. Power is everywhere for sale. The Supreme Court is out of control and careening to illegitimacy.) But we’re still more democracy than anocracy; still better than Russia, China, India, Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, or the Philippines, just to name a few weak- or sham-democracies, in terms of the basic rights of their citizens. And in America the rule of law has been severely damaged, but not yet destroyed.
Where does that leave us? On one hand, we have a perceptual chasm that’s polarizing us. One side sees reality, the other makes up its own world up out of whole cloth. At the same time, we have an unbridgeable value chasm. One side believes in democracy and debate, the other side threatens, intimidates and vilifies its opponents.
No one wants to say it, but maybe we are enemies after all. Show me how we reconcile. Show me how this ends.
The Civil War was a remarkably similar case: there was a moral chasm so wide it could not be bridged or negotiated away. Slavery was an ancient abomination that our imperfect democracy could no longer tolerate, if only because of the tipping point of Westward expansion, which raised the slavery question in the new territories.
It took a severely violent rupture to even partly solve the problem; and the aftermath of the Civil War included a century of feudal oppression and apartheid in the South. The country and the Constitution weren’t exactly “saved.” And we are probably more polarized now than we were in 1861.
Like slavery, fascism is not just an affront to democracy but the end of democracy. It’s a kind of political slavery for all. Millions of lives were sacrificed to defeat it in the past century. We’re already deep in a cold civil war; no sane person is rooting for another hot one. (The recent film “Civil War” is interesting in this respect. It may not accurately reflect what a new civil war in America would look like; but it mirrors what we think it would look like.)
How then can our democracy, which first digested but ultimately vomited up slavery, tolerate the present generation of anti-democrats?
While pondering that question, we must not forget that we are no longer a left-right democracy with rival, equally dignified ideologies. And in no sense are we living in twin, equally real or legitimate “realities.” We are not twin anything. We live in separate and incompatible Americas, one real and democratic, the other mendacious and autocratic.
The intimate connections between democracy and truth, and between lies and fascism, have never been clearer.