American illusions

Last week I pounded Trump and the Republicans for their mindset of denial and delusion. This week I am moving on to the so-called moderates and liberals. Hopefully, soon the deadly delusions of Trump and his monolithic GOP supporting cast will be consigned to the cesspool of history. Biden and the moderates and the liberals seem to be in the driver’s seat. Their illusions are less irrational and unpalatable than those of the right-wing, but they may be a greater obstacle to fundamental change in the long run.

Liberal illusions start with the mantra “this is not who we are.” Really? The conviction in American innocence, like belief in God, is impervious to any challenge about lack of evidence or reason. The illusion of innocence is as false as the right-wing fantasy that there was a golden past when America was great. We believe in American innocence because we want to believe it, we need to believe it, and doubt would require a reckoning and change.

So, let us take stock of who we are (and have always been) and puncture some liberal illusions through a Zola-style J’accuse, a bill of indictment.

Start with the genocide and dispossession of the Native population of North America. This happened all over the world where colonialism took place. What is galling here is that it seems not to have shaken the illusion of innocence at all. Indeed, we are so far from coming to terms with our guilt over this crime and the other great national crime, slavery, that the portrait of Andrew Jackson, scourge of the Native Americans, slaveholder, violent thug, who invaded Florida and waged war against the Spanish colonists without bothering to receive authority from Congress or the President, still hangs in the White House.

Indeed, in a ceremony honoring Native American World War II heroes, President Trump used the portrait of Jackson as the background. To rub it in, he alluded to the Pocahontas story to attack Elizabeth Warren, a political enemy. More recently, Trump chose Mount Rushmore, symbol of the establishment of the nation over the lands and the corpses of the natives. Unrepentant.

Follow with the enslavement of a vast number of Blacks whose toil built much of the economic foundation of this country, something which has never been recognized. Repentance, reparations? For most white Americans that is a crazy radical idea rather than a belated kind of justice. Unrepentant. Who, me? I wasn’t even alive then. Unrepentant to the point of believing in the innocence of every cop who kills or beats the hell out of a Black man, with the rare exception of when there is a clear an unequivocal video, and even then…Remember Rodney King.

It’s hard not to read in the history of non-prosecution and acquittal of police officers that kill Blacks under dubious circumstances the thought that blue lives matter more than black lives.

Let’s go now to the founding of a Republic in which “all men are created equal” but women are left entirely out of the political process. Patriarchy is universal, what is characteristically American is the halting progress toward equality compared to other countries and the enduring force of the antifeminist backlash, a vampire always returning, now in the form of the effort to create an abortion-proof Supreme Court.

Moving from gender to the illusion of equality. In the Constitution Blacks were counted as a fraction of a person and were not allowed to vote. Neither were whites who lacked property. Class and race are denied as big influences on the American story, and yet they continue to be, perhaps more salient than ever. Class differences were small compared to Europe during most of our history. Now the opposite is true.

Unrepentant. The master narrative of the ruling elites is not about how a tiny elite virtually monopolizes the wealth of the nation. It is about the how much the rest mooch (Mitt Romney’s 46 percent and Reagan’s welfare queens) on the rightful gains of the rich through the instrumentality of government.

Probably the most general illusion is the belief that this is the best, most democratic country in the world. False. In democracies who wins the most votes in an election wins the contest. This has not been the case in two of our last five elections.

The Electoral College and the Senate are relics of the horse and buggy era, archaic and designed by the Founders as an obstacle to full democracy. They have continued to function as formulas for elite rule.

Another relic of the 18th century, the Second Amendment, has turned out to be an unintended formula for carnage, something the Founders could not have imagined. We are not the greatest democracy in the world. We are the best Republic money can buy with many archaic anti-democratic features.

Parallel to the illusion of democratic exceptionalism is the illusion of unequalled prosperity and benevolence. Americans believe we are at the top of the world in everything. In fact, we trail most advanced countries in most everything that counts from a human perspective. Mortality rate. Human development as measured by a slew of statistics like education and access to health care. Economic equality. Provisions for child-care. Foreign aid. And we are at or near the top on all the wrong things. Gun violence. Incarceration rates. Capital punishment.

The geographical size of the country is another element of the notion of greatness and illusion innocence. About a third of the country—California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada—was acquired through a war of aggression against Mexico rationalized by an excuse more bogus than weapons of mass destruction. A huge land theft. How many Americans know this or would be willing to accept it? Repentance, hell no. We want to build a wall to keep out the people from which we stole the land.

This is all older than Donald Trump. We need to get rid of Donald Trump and the Republican Senate, yes, but we should also recognize that they are not even half of our problem. The return of decency and a few tweaks to our system are welcome but would not solve our fundamental problems. What we need is a refoundation. We need to look at ourselves and our history in the mirror with blinders off. Discard the illusion of innocence.

This illusion blinds even the best and the brightest with the most impeccable liberal credentials. I remember reading Leonard Pitts, in the wake of the patriotic orgy after 9-11, saying that they, al Qaeda, kills civilians while we don’t. I thought, really? Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The carpet bombing of Vietnam. And that’s a very, very short list.

Characteristically, Pitts won a Pulitzer for this. Even those who have been most grievously wounded by this country’s hypocrisies cannot always step back and see reality except through patriotic lenses. This blindness is rewarded and honored.

Biden will probably win, although this is no sure thing, even with COVID, given the high Idiocy Quotient of so many American voters. But Biden is a reformist all about incremental change, and he is not going to preside over the refoundation needed to fundamentally change this country’s mediocre record on health, human wellbeing, democracy, and the carnage of guns.

The best we can hope is that Biden will beat down COVID. But to do this he would need to lock down hard a big swath of the economy and society for as long as the virus persists. Will he be tough enough to endure the protests, the moaning and the crying of the businesses that will go under if the Republicans refuse to break with their norm of free market miserliness and instead throw them under a bus?