My Father’s Disgust

by
Peter Radford
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from Peter Radford

I am in a grim and introspective mood this morning.  I have been reflecting on how my father might react to where we are.  He was one of those who fought against fascism.    His life was shortened by being wounded during that fight.  As a result, I never knew him as a healthy person.  What, I wonder, would he make of America’s turn away from democracy and towards autocracy?  What would he make of the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources as payment for so-called “aid” given by America in the past few years?  What would he make of the sudden alliance between America and Russia?  And what, most of all, would he make of the abandonment of the essence of the alliances forged back then and by people like him on the front lines?   At the very least he would, I think, feel betrayed.  Perplexed, dismayed, but above all betrayed.

History has been overturned.  Surrender is presented to us as victory.  Our very language is being distorted to hide the lies and intention of those in charge. They do not lead.  They are merely in charge.  My father respected leadership.  He was a natural leader.  I am embarrassed on his behalf.  We have forgotten, have we not?  We have substituted cowardice for bravery.  We have turned freedom inside out and presented it to the world as a succession of ever more perverse transactions.  We have fallen for an enormous conjuror’s trick: democracy has been sawn in half for real.  Yet all we see is the image of it still as complete.

So here we are.

Beginnings are always fraught with the unknown.  What, we wonder, lies ahead.  But the excitement of a new adventure allows us to set such fears aside, and we move on regardless.

Endings have a different tone altogether.  The journey is run, its path known.  We look back and not forward.  We recall the familiar rather than postulate novelty.  Nostalgia invades inevitably and crowds out hope.  Memories linger and distort reality with their exaggeration of what we wish the path had been rather than what it was.

Yes, here we are.

The “west” is no more.  Set that concept aside.  Bury it along with all the other comfortable and well-worn ideas that protect us from the harshness of the present.  I imagine that in a distant future a generation will come across the “west” in a dusty corner of our collective attic, and brush it off for study.  What, I wonder, will they make of it?

I do not care.

I do not care because there is a more and immediate urgent task.  We must start again.  A new journey awaits.

So this is both an ending and a beginning.  Is that not always true?

The clash between liberty and democracy has reached fever pitch.  And liberty has taken on a distinctly odd form.  It has been captured, twisted, altered beyond recognition and turned against itself.  Liberty has become a lie.  Liberty has become decoupled from freedom and is now oppression.  The autocrats are back with a vengeance.

The problem with liberty has always been its implication: liberty for whom?  The academics love this kind of puzzle.  Whole careers and reputations are built around the ever more fine parsing of concepts like liberty.  They disappear into their peer-reviewed  foxholes and engage in endless debates and discussions about the precise meaning of a sentence uttered long ago by someone trying to make a larger, more general, point.

That isn’t useful.  Not now.

We need clarity of purpose.  Not precision of definition.

Our civilization has never been able to resolve the inevitable clash between the two forms of liberty that have evolved into the foreground of modern life.  Liberty of the individual runs inevitably into the face of liberty of the group.  That is to say, in post-industrial parlance, capitalism and democracy are always opposed to each other.

In an older age the equivalent conflict was between the landowning, religious, and military elite against the peasantry.  It is an ancient story.  Our conflict is merely an updated version.  Autocracy is the method the oppressive elite always resorts to when it feels sufficiently empowered.  It hoards its rents, frames the rules, and protects its privileges through violence and other, softer, sorts of coercion.  Like lying.

One of the most egregious errors of the last century was the misreading of democracy as oppression of the individual.  We are living with the consequences of that error.  It was never oppression.  It was a search for balance.  The forces available to the elite: its wealth and education, its ownership of the nation’s assets, its exclusive access to the use of violence, and its ability to define the rules of the game, need to be offset by collective counter-action.  Resistance can only be sufficient en masse.  Democracy exists to resist the elite and then express the wishes of the majority.  The oppressed majority.

This is not a novel observation.  It is a forgotten observation.

The achievement of modern prosperity lured us into forgetfulness.  We forgot the struggle of our ancestors.  We dishonored their fight.  Wallowing as we do in our present comfort, and afraid of the consequences of struggle, we abandoned the principles of freedom.  We became our own enemy.

Freedom is hard work.  Losing it is not.

Freedom is not the facile waving of a flag.  Nor is it the doggerel of blind recitation of constitutions.  Nor is it the steady accumulation of endless arrays of material.  Nor is it the bland parroting of vague values.

It is the constant vigilance against the oppression of the elite.

That is the essence of modernity: the rejection of the inevitable rise of an elite sufficiently empowered to run roughshod over the majority.  Containing the overweening greed of the elite is the duty we must all accept in order to maintain our dignity and the integrity of history.   Rich people do not like sharing.  They need to be forced.  Their coercion needs to be reflected back onto them.  Yes, it is hard work.  It requires effort.  Collective effort.

Elites beguile and distort truths.  They project liberty as pure individuality.  Freedom, they argue, is the lack of interference by the force of the collective.  This lie is age-old.  It is designed to fracture the majority which then becomes a series of minorities.  And minorities can be picked off one by one.  Control of the majority is ever the goal of the elite.  After all, the elite itself lives in terror and its self-awareness of its precarious hold: it is the ultimate minority.  It can only protect its rents if it can fight on an even playing field against the majority.  Hence liberty as individuality.  Individuals are a rabble not an army.  Rabbles are more easily coerced and herded.  Ultimately, the only freedom that concerns the elite is its own.

That error of the last century was not, however,  that of the elite.  It was fully aware of the perversity of its claim.  It adopted the lie that democracy was corrupting freedom because it was its own freedom being corrupted.  The lie was truth to the elite.  It is falsehood only to the majority.  No, on reflection, the error was the complacency of the majority who imagined that it’s presence on the stage and its share of power was permanent.  The elite thought — it knew — otherwise.  It was only a question of engineering the deception.  The gravity of history always pulls in one direction: to the benefit of the elite.

After the postwar experiment with democracy the elite sought to re-establish its superiority.  The sense of equality and fairness that had infected politics and thee economy was the source of corruption of elite power.  So it was necessary that society did not exist.  Society, after all, implies citizenship and the entitlement of being present at the table of power.  Whatever engine of society that produced entitlement t had to be debased.  The very word “entitlement” had to be turned against itself.  Thus, it was necessary that the government be portrayed as an invasion of individual freedom.  It was vital that the victories of the masses, as masses,  be undone and forgotten.  How else was the elite going to re-assert its access to the distorted distribution of the common wealth?

That distortion has become so pronounced that any reference to overall growth of wealth is meaningless.  We now need to ask whose wealth?  Whose income?  Whose GDP?  It is not “ours”.  It has become”theirs”.

Again.

A return to the gilded age.  A fall from freedom.  A fall from any conception of shared prosperity.

And now?

And now the denouement.

The west is no more.

During that brief interlude of democratic intrusion into elite domination there was the illusion of shared attitudes towards fairness.  These attitudes were expressed in different ways in different places.  The differences were papered over, and underlying it all was a common ground and common purpose: resistance to autocracy.  That outside threat was sufficient to cohere the variety of conceptions of freedom into a single, if variable, entity.

Decades of such seeming coherence produced an odd but inevitable decay of understanding.  Within that surface solidity were interpretations so diverse that once the outside threat abated fractures would inevitably appear.

So they did.

America has never been as committed to democracy as its rhetoric suggests.  Its very beginnings belie its myth.  Its system of governance is deliberately skewed to thwart rule by the majority.  Its history of rapid economic and demographic growth has masked its lack of commitment to collective imagination.  It has yet to understand what Europe realized long ago: elites always exist and always need to be resisted.  Democracy must overcome capitalism.  Otherwise autocracy is inevitable.  Europe’s history is autocratic.  Only recently did it reject that history.  America’s history is ambivalent.  It is s short series of experiments.  None have lasted long.  Now it seems headed into autocracy.  Its vaunted constitution has collapsed under its ancient weight.  It is ineffective when challenged with sufficecneit force.  It is genteel and enlightened only under a sunny sky.  But we live within a storm of oligarchs tightening their grip on us.

Never mind.

We are here.

The west is no more.

America is sliding backwards.  Its short and tepid attempt at democracy is under attack.  The outlook in the immediate future is bleak  The bulwarks of democracy are being overrun by the forces of erstwhile “liberty”: the rallying cry of oligarchs protecting their rents.

This is not novel.  I know that.  The eruption of the elite began in the 1970s and 1980s.  The steady erosion of democracy began back then.  The necessary stagnation of the masses has been orchestrated carefully by corporate and wealthy organizations ever since.  And every retrograde step was claimed as its opposite: a step forward towards greater individuality.  Trump is simply a consequence of failure.  The failure to resist.  The failure to do the hard work of democracy.  The failure to push back.  The failure to rally the majority.  The failure to recognize that our prosperous present is as fragile as we allow it to be.  Which is very much so given the callow nature of our so-called opposition leaders.

So it has turned out.  There was no resistance.  Indeed the centers of resistance became supporters of reaction.  It is no accident that some refer to the Democratic Party as the guardian against an uprising from the left.  Its job being simply to prevent the majority intruding into the machinations of the elite.  Just enough, but not too much, is tossed the way of the workers.  That leaves the most for the least.

Just look at the currently proposed budget: it slashes health care for the poor to create space for a tax cut for the rich.  The cruelty is explicit.  The withdrawal from enlightened fairness stark.  Greed courses through the decision making.  No more need be said about American democracy.  It is a hollow term.

This policy of fragmenting the majority worked to perfection.  Siloes emerged.  Identities proliferated.  Attention to the fundamental was overtaken by obsession with surface detail.  The misdirection of cultural change hid the work of undoing freedom for all.  The focus became diffused and ineffective.  The work of rebuilding privilege took place without opposition.  Indeed it was abetted by the cowardice and cooperation of the erstwhile opposition.  The complacent sat back and imagined that no effort was required to defend freedom.

So they lost it.

And here we are.

The persistence of democracy, however pallid, has fooled us into thinking its existence is permanent.  It isn’t.

America has declared itself to the world.  It has revealed its inner decay.  It is a paragon of myth replacing reality.  It is an example of how easily self-delusion can disable the very factors the deluded approve of most.  Those generous values are a veneer of misdirection: they impel us to look away from reality and towards the mirage of something imagined but not concrete.  A nation thus deluded is a nation in decline.

There is precedence.

British hegemonic decline and fall began in the 1870s.  It reached obvious reality in the aftermath of World War One.  Even then, during the 1920s  and 1930s Britain tried to behave as if it was still a power to be reckoned with.  The illusion was finally swept away after World War Two.  Still, the allure of past glory and colonial presence casts a debilitating pall over its domestic politics.  That’s over a century of decay and avoidance of truth.  America is following suit.

Its decay began with Reagan, his deficit, his attempts to undermine government, and his overly facile rhetoric.  The steady decline of attention to the interest of the majority has continued ever since.  America, like Britain before it, has paid more attention to its myth than its reality ever since.  It has drifted into steady contraction not, perhaps, of its overall wealth, but of its willingness to build and protect fairness.  It has become radically distorted.  Its image of freedom is a grotesque caricature of the reality enabled by its inequalities.  It can no longer cohere.  Its social fabric is tattered.  It has now decided to destroy the New Deal experiment that undergirded the growth of its famed middle class.  Or, at least, it is turning its back on any concept of collective freedom.  That is to say, it is becoming less democratic.  It is less generous.  It is less outward.  It is more inward.  It has reached the end of a cycle of greatness.  It is diminished by its own admission and the election of an autocrat.  It is siding with its former enemy against its former friends.

The west is no more.

To pervert Flaubert:

In a corner of every nation lie the moldy remains of its past.

It is time for Europe to locate and reinvigorate those remains.  The future of democracy depends upon it.

Meanwhile I imagine my father’s disgust.  He paid a heavy price for defending something that is lost.

For now at least.