Fear The Opposition
- Peace can be achieved by dialogue and moral suasion and common vision, without reliance on deterrence or coercion, and without maintaining our military might (itself a dangerous inducement to war), because the nature of both men and their governments is inherently generous and cooperative – except when it comes to caring for the poor and downtrodden, in which case private giving is wholly inadequate, so money must be extracted by force from the miserly citizenry and distributed by the government.
- Government is the only possible mechanism for implementing the ‘common will’, or for groups of like-minded people to band together for some common purpose. All other forms of cooperative endeavor are ineffectual, ridiculous, or worse, self-serving and corrupt — except for labor unions, environmental lobbies, class action lawsuits, protest marches, citizens’ advocacy groups, and the Democratic party, which are indisputably effective, vital, altruistic, and honest.
- The sanctity of the individual as a free and independent agent, with his/her own self-contained moral purpose and moral responsibility, is to be denigrated as outmoded and selfish, subjugated at every opportunity to a duty to a higher ’social responsibility’, to a moral obligation to ’serve the needs of society’, and to a ‘collective guilt’ over the actions of society past and present — except when the individual whose sanctity and independence is in question is a denizen of death row or a pregnant woman who wants to abort her fetus.
This may seem a caricature – it may seem extreme or downright paranoid — and it is. But is it any more extreme or paranoid than the view self-described liberals have given of our new president — George the Hun and his agenda of barbarian conquest? Is it any more extreme or paranoid than their vow never to accept his legitimacy, the rest of the electorate be damned? What I infer from their diatribes is desperation borne of fear and helplessness. They foresee everything they hold dear under threat – their “progressive” agenda publicly mocked, their hard-won policy gains incrementally reversed, their institutions under attack, their lifestyles marginalized, their sense of justice and morality replaced by something they perceive as harsher and crueler. Their world is to be turned upside down, their home to become alien. They feel change in the wind, their traditions displaced, their futures in the hands of enigmatic strangers whose very humanity they doubt. The storm has not yet broken, but it is coming, friends, and it will lash us with no mercy before it finally recedes and leaves us to rebuild on the ruins of our former glories…
I think their angst is overdone, that the tempest they fear will turn out to be no more than a passing thunderstorm. I am also sure they will never be convinced of that, even after it is over. Private angst may be destructive, but public angst is too useful to be relinquished: it creates community, and community provides certitude and hope.
Nonetheless, amidst their collective despair I would ask them to reflect on a truth: the fear they feel now, the sense of everything important to their lives slipping away, the sense of impending suffocation by moral repugnance, is what their conservative opponents have felt for the last eight years — and would still be feeling had the election turned the other way. I would ask them to reflect on that — to begin to view their political opponents as they view themselves: as people honestly afraid of losing all that is dear to them in the arrogance of our winner-take-all political system. I would ask them to take from that an insight into how fear has shaped our politics and shapes it still. If in so doing they can learn to reach across political differences, rather than exacerbate them, perhaps the next election will bring back a true “government of the people” – of all the people, rather than only of those who think and live like ‘us’.
© Copyright 2001, 2005, Augustus P. Lowell