Running Out of Empathy for Americans
The American voting public, roughly a hundred and forty million people, is divided neatly down the middle between a faction that wishes The United States of America to cease to exist and dissolve itself into the United Nations, after abjectly apologizing for its existence while shamefacedly redistributing all of its wealth to the rest of the world in an act of penance for its unjust and illegitimate success, and another faction which vaguely, or not so vaguely, wishes The United States of America to be the entire world, i.e., for the world outside of its borders to cease to be outside of its borders, and to be reduced to nothing but a bunch of satellites of the mainland United States — plus, of course, Russia, where Vladimir Putin would be America’s greatest ally or co-ruler of “the Christian world.” In effect, then, roughly one hundred percent of the American voting public has, ipso facto, utterly abandoned the idea of The United States as founded, in all of its essential elements, in favor of a progressive authoritarian nation-state with progressive authoritarian leaders, and more importantly, a progressive authoritarian populace, with the only matter to sort out being which of the two currently competing images of progressive authoritarianism will be the dominant one. For it is a populace that has abandoned the notions of individual self-determination and of America as a beacon to the world, in favor of collectivist totalitarianism in one of its two fashionable faces, namely corporate-socialist nanny state micromanagement in which America would become the world’s social justice activist-in-chief, or a corporate-capitalist protection racket in which America would reign as the CEO of the world, and specifically a CEO addicted to the method of hostile takeover.
It is a sickening prospect for those of us outside of the U.S. who always loved and respected what that country represented, with all its flaws. For now we are looking at a country that has become, in the sense of having been boiled down to, all its flaws, and which has in its currently ascendant faction come to embody the worst and most unjust stereotype that we former admirers of that nation had always rejected and debunked as an absurd, small-minded, envy-driven caricature. There is nothing to envy any longer, and the stereotype now holds sway: The Ugly American is just a fact now.
Of course there are exceptions. There are many exceptions, although presumably the largest proportion of these reside among the non-voting public, which is to say among the disaffected and disengaged. But most of the exceptions among the voting public, obviously, will be people who have simply become too ignorant, due to relentless indoctrination and tribal infatuation, to think through what they are actually accepting and voting for, and who therefore deserve the kind of pity that one reserves for those too stupid to understand what is good for them at the most basic practical level. The upshot of all of this, then: It is time to stop looking at America as I did until not so long ago, namely as a nation in which a goodly proportion of the population consists of essentially good-willed, reasonable, common-sense-driven, and conventionally moral people who are gradually being herded and manipulated by usurping authoritarian-minded, money-grubbing “leaders” of one faction or another, and to see America as she is now, a nation determined in its leadership by a voting public that has gone off the rails with regard to any notion of what their country was, what their constitution is, what their moral principles were, and has, out of a mixture of immoderate fear, nihilistic despondency, and misplaced guilt — for various reasons — simply co-opted and thus come to embody the worst attitudes of the worst people in the rest of the world.
In other words, most sadly, we cannot just blame this disaster on the leaders anymore. True, generations of devious American government have, for the sake of their own financial and vainglorious advantage, intentionally eroded the institutions and moral conventions that had made Americans the kind of people of whom it was reasonable for Ben Franklin to say that the Framers had given them “A republic, if you can keep it” — that is, the kind of people who could reasonably be seen as being up to such a noble challenge. But in the end, as with any individual soul, the soul of a nation’s public must be held accountable for its choices, insofar as those choices are not literally forced upon them or undertaken unconsciously. Degraded and abused as they are, today’s American voters, whether on the “right” or the “left,” are still, one must assume and grant, nominally rational and responsible adults capable of making decisions about the immediate alternatives before them. They have chosen, in succession, a series of “leaders” worthy of a people that has lost its self-respect and thinks only through the filter of most its craven lusts and dreads. If they deserve the respect due to ordinary adults in any other time and place, then they deserve the blame that ought to come to adults who make the kinds of choices they are making in their representatives today. Yes, they are being lied to and taken advantage of for profit. But they are also, most of them, intelligent enough to know this. And yet they actively, and in the end with self-blinded enthusiasm, choose the liars and profiteers of their preference. This is on their heads. No more hiding behind “What choice did we have?” No more “we,” in fact. Each American voter, in either of the two dominant factions, has himself and his own heart to blame for what has become of his country. Diminished as he may be, if he is still a man, and still wishes to be judged as a man, then accepting responsibility for what he has wrought of his own country is the very least he can do to assume the status of a man.
