Who is Driving This Bus?

What in tarnation is going on here in the United States of America?  Is anyone driving this bus?  Because it sure doesn’t feel like anyone is driving the bus. 

Were we this collectively hateful during the late 1960s?  I was a little too young then to assess the national mood.  I do remember my sister Tricia coming into my room to tell me that Richard Nixon had been elected President.  Didn’t make much difference to me. My green toy soldiers were green regardless of who was in the White House.  

The late 60s was a time of great social unrest, of class and generational divide, of distrust, and opposition to a war that seemed to serve no strategic purpose. Citizens expressed their frustrations in many ways. They rioted. They protested and sat-in. They staged hunger strikes and, in extreme cases, they set themselves on fire. We hit bottom on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen fired on and killed four of their fellow countrymen during a protest at Kent State University. Was that the event that caused Americans to look around and think, “Hey man, what the hell is going on here? What are we doing?” That tragedy certainly eroded what little appetite Americans still had for waging a distant war in southeast Asia. The rifts brought on by the war and the domestic unrest it caused took time to heal, but they did heal. 

Fast forward fifty-five years and it seems as though we have found our way back to that dark place. I have made a point of asking those who are old enough to remember whether what we are experiencing now is a parallel to the late 60s.  Those who avoided the pharmacologically-induced memory loss that being a hippie in the 60s made them susceptible to give me an answer that is something like this:

The issues now aren’t the same as the issues then, but the national mood is just as bad.  The distrust in our institutions is definitely worse, however.

I thought that was an interesting observation.  What begat this loss of trust? The internet certainly was the vehicle, as it gave a mainstream platform to the conspiracy theorists who previously had existed on society’s fringes.  What, though, was the seminal moment?  Was it the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy? Bengazi? The Biden laptop? QAnon? The 2020 election? What was it?  I suspect it was the sum total of the events of the past twenty years that finally caused people to throw up their hands and state that, yep, they are out to get me and nothing and nobody should be trusted.  It has become much more convenient to embrace conspiracies than to accept personal responsibility. This is troubling, to say the least. 

One thing is for sure. Donald Trump watered and fertilized the seeds of institutional doubt and brought them to full flower.  There are millions and millions of Americans who agree with him about the 2020 election and just as many who believe that Donald Trump has been more damaging to this country than any elected official ever.

His "fake news" pronouncements gave an alibi to anyone who disagreed with anything they heard or read, even in the face of factual exactitude.  In this new reality facts are subjective. This subjective bias is a social poison and is eroding the underpinnings of society. 

In an opinion piece for the New York Times on January 18, 2020, Yuval Levin had this to say about the loss of faith in our institutions:

We trust political institutions when they undertake a solemn obligation to the public interest and shape the people who populate them to do the same. We trust a business because it promises quality and reliability and rewards its workers when they deliver those. We trust a profession because it imposes standards and rules on its members intended to make them worthy of confidence. We trust the military because it values courage, honor and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation and forms human beings who don‘t. 

We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy. This can happen through simple corruption, when an institution’s attempts to be formative fail to overcome the vices of the people within it, and it instead masks their treachery — as when a bank cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.

The media, the clergy, the police, our schools, and most importantly our government now are led by those who violate our trust and disappoint us regularly. With nothing to ground us, we are adrift. Anchorless. Rudderless. It starts at the top. Congress' lack of decorum is appalling and more befitting a kindergarten playground dispute than the hallowed halls. Calling each other names? Interrupting a State of the Union address? Unbelievable. These are the people we look to for leadership? Grow the f**k up.

These same leaders would have you believe that those with whom you disagree are dangerous. Their currency is fear. They promote the belief that those who have differing views are going to take from you that which is yours. In their view, the people who sit just across the aisle from them in Congress are the enemy and we are at war with their followers. The mission now is not to win the argument, but to triumph absolutely. Unfortunately, that's not the way our government works. It is for this reason that Congress is broken. 

Our government works best when both sides understand that compromise is the way. You give something in order to get something. Government works when both sides come away with something from a negotiation. We have settled on a two-party system, but that does not mean that there are only two possible solutions to every problem. In fact, the solution most often is found in the in-between. We don't win when the other side loses. In this climate, a loss merely ensures that the losing party will seek retribution when the balance of power shifts. And this is where we are now. The extreme elements of both parties demand total victory. Scorched earth, as it were. This is the road to stalemate. To pettiness. To nowhere. To abysmal Congressional approval ratings and the loss of institutional trust. 

I like to remind people that Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill were as far apart politically as they were geographically. Reagan, the President, a conservative Californian and O'Neill, the speaker of the house, a Massachusetts liberal. They didn't take their political differences personally and found common ground on many issues. This common ground was often forged over dinners they shared as they worked for the betterment of all at an agreeable cost. That type of cooperation is unthinkable today. 

When will we have our Kent State moment? Will we? When will the majority—defined as those who see themselves as moderates of either party—regain their voice and take back power from the whackos currently in charge? What will it take for us to realize that magnanimity is a strength and not a weakness? When will we understand that our current behavior is destroying the greatest and most successful political experiment ever devised? What will it take? 

Hopefully it won't involve firing on our own citizens.