Agreeing to Our Harm

Some years ago I spoke at a conservative church in northern Michigan. I talked about military-style guns and the culture of fear and resentment that rationalized the zeal for them. My point was that they and the passions associated with them should have no place among people who claim to be Christians. When I finished there was silence. Then a woman raised her hand and asked why no one had been prosecuted for the Iraq War. It was not a question I expected, to say the least. I had no answer.

The woman was gracious, not at all confrontational. But clearly she had asked her question as a kind of rebuttal to what I had said about guns. When I had time to think about it, I decided she was asking me which was the graver danger—that weapons had seized upon the imagination of an important subset of the population, together with threats and fantasies of using them against people and institutions within their own country, or that a president could throw the American armed forces unprepared into a war, with heavy losses on both sides, and that he could do this on the basis of thin or doubtful information, if not simply from a sense of private grievance and a privileged indifference to other considerations. Now the Supreme Court is mulling the possibility of making real in law the presidential immunity from prosecution, the privileging of power that had, as fact, offended the woman’s sense of justice and safety.

To weigh one grievous threat against another is not a very useful exercise. There is no point in seeming to minimize either one. If I had understood that the woman was questioning the choice I made in deploring where I did, if I’d had my wits about me, I would have said that the problem with guns was accelerating past the possibility of legal control. The choices of individual people would be crucial in determining how widespread the ownership of these weapons would finally be and what ethics on one hand or terrors and delusions on the other would govern their presence and use.

The woman sat quietly while I went on to other things, then left without saying another word to me. But I can imagine that, when she had a moment to think, she might have asked me how I could be sure, in the absence of a deterrent, that the risk of unjustified war was not as great as ever, and as liable to reflect disordered thinking, or grudges, or self-aggrandizement, as the visions of the gun cultists. And she might have added that while it is true that I can speak with people who will indeed, as individuals, influence the presence of weapons in society, I cannot speak—she might say preach—to the people who choose between peace and war. There might be one more question she could have put to me: Did I know, or know of, anyone who died in that war?

I have devoted a good part of my life to studying American history and literature. And I have regretted the habit of self-disparagement that has caused things of great worth to be undervalued, including the habits of respect that make debate possible. I mention this because there is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands. A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America. In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism.

But to return to the question the lady in Michigan didn’t ask me. More than 4,400 American military personnel died in the Iraq War. Say their average age was twenty-five and their life expectancy was seventy-five years. Then our civilization was deprived of some 220,000 years of productive life—soldiers are healthy and competent people in the vast majority of cases. I am not speaking here of economic loss—our tendency to bring this measure to bear on virtually everything is a disheartening and destructive habit. I am speaking of everything they might have done to enjoy and enhance life, charming us, dazzling us, simply sustaining us in the course of finding occupations and rearing families. The death toll among Iraqis was vastly higher, and a calculation of the cost to civilization of the kind I have made here would be proportionately more unfathomable.

But my subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.

It is taken to be true that the Trump phenomenon reflects the feeling in a large part of the population that they are “left behind.” This view is obviously too smug to deserve the acceptance it enjoys. Why does this movement have no vision of a future, beyond the incarceration of whomever Trump chooses to vilify? Why have its members proposed no reforms to narrow the economic divide? Why is there no response to the ambitious investments President Biden has made, designed to stimulate the economies of struggling areas? A “populism” whose lieutenants have an impressive number of Yale Law degrees and whose idol is a Manhattan moneyman is not to be understood as a flaring up of aggrieved self-interest. Nothing we normally think of as profit will accrue to these foot soldiers.

An anger that is too intense and immediate to pause over possible consequences, whether desirable or not, seems to make a better account of this movement. Having no vision, it would certainly have a future. Trump is an old man, and he will soon go the way of his ancestors. But the very arbitrariness of his being chosen as the hero of the disaffected means that when he goes he is likely to be replaced in their angry adoration by someone equally improbable, perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is truer because Trump has proved that law can be scorned without consequence. He has shown us that there is a kind of loyalty that neuters outrage, and he has established a breadth of latitude for scurrilous and threatening speech that can only be of profound use to every scoundrel who succeeds him.

This anger is entangled with resentments and revanchism and varieties of opportunism, including Trump’s, that are readily seen as discrediting the entire phenomenon of unrest. But this is the kind of mistake that comes with the idea that the old symmetry of opposed parties is in play here. The MAGA side really has no politics. Its broad appeal lies in its galvanizing resentment, which is what anger becomes when its legitimacy is not acknowledged. Trump can reverse himself on any point, and his followers will simply realign themselves as necessary. If he were dealing with his followers in good faith, Trump would be offering them policies addressed to the relief of their grievances. Instead, he recites his own.

I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great many Americans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use.

When I calculated the loss of lives America suffered in the Iraq War, I might have implied that this immense loss was suffered by us all, and in a sense it was. But in a deeper sense it fell disproportionately on a part of the population described in other contexts as men without college degrees, men without higher education or training. And their families, and their communities. They accepted the inducements the military offers and were caught up in a war of frivolous choice. Many of them killed and died. Like the rest of us, on religious and other grounds they can be assumed to be deeply reluctant to take human lives. Their own deaths, without need or purpose, would be profoundly bitter for everyone who loved them. These fine young people entrusted their lives to authority they assumed would not make casual use of them, and when all was said and done, no one was prosecuted.

It is true that these men without college degrees often vote for Republicans. The Presidents Bush are seen in retrospect as exemplars of political civility, and perhaps they would be a little embarrassed by the crude thing their party has become. It is hard to imagine a purer example of privilege than father-son presidencies. Still, the Tea Party found a home for its “populism” there and opened the way for the kind of postpolitical disruptiveness now so strongly associated with the Republicans. Among their masses there is a disillusionment verging on nihilism that experiences itself as patriotic.

When I was a child the country was at war in Korea and at a loss to extricate itself. At the time that was the fourth-largest war in terms of American casualties, and it has been forgotten. Forgetfulness of the kind recurs throughout American history. It is an important aspect of national life, though it is itself forgotten. Otherwise we might learn from our experience. When he was running for president in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower said that if elected he would “go to Korea” and end the war. Some sort of settlement was reached, and Korea was divided, as it remains today.

When I was in college the country was at war in Vietnam and at a loss to extricate itself. We know how that story ended. Recently we were at war in Afghanistan. I think there is a clearly discernible pattern here. The World Wars gave us a sense of power and efficacy that we imagine we can recreate in other theaters, but finally the cost turns out to be too great. When it overshadows the object with which conflict was engaged, we bring the troops home, never quite sure why they were there in the first place.

Vietnam and the protests it provoked brought an epochal change. Richard Nixon ended the draft. This formalized a state of things that had already created a sharp division in American society. The system of deferments generally meant that college students would not be called up. Even at its best this amounted to favoring the fortunate. However, deferments had to be renewed at intervals, and they could expire. So the war was real to the whole population, and the scale of the protests against it became overwhelming. Nixon did not end the war. He did end the threat it posed to the relatively prosperous and their children.

Americans, when they try to understand the past, usually take a prosecutorial stance. They want to place blame. This can lead to oversimplification. It can amount to declaring a moral superiority to those singled out as malefactors that is not consistent with objectivity. But some things simply cry out for blame, in this case the widespread tendency at the time to treat soldiers returning from Vietnam as if they were at fault for what had happened there. They were stigmatized by the polemic against a war that they did not have the means to evade—no doctor to find bone spurs for them, no money or qualifications to keep them in school. Family or personal pride might not allow them to slip off to Canada. War is an appalling thing that most societies from time to time inflict on their youth on grounds that vary from case to case. Where blame lies is always an urgent and neglected question.

The Sixties was a sort of alembic heated to a temperature that altered the substance of many things. Among the effects of the bitter divisions of the time, there have been reassessments of cultural values that are of great importance. The civil rights movement and the movements it inspired were an epochal advance toward realizing human equality in American law and life. Now these same reforms are threatened by the cleavages that opened in society in the same turbulent period. The argument against equality was made by people, male and white, who had enjoyed a presumption of superiority and the benefits that often came with it. Women my age remember when the professions were virtually closed to them on the sole basis of gender. Biases had worked so strongly in favor of white men that the capabilities of women and people of color were more or less untested.

The experiment has been completed, and the results are in. There is no longer any argument to be made on grounds of competence. We have learned, however, that there is a kind of vehemence that lives on in the atmosphere after the arguments it sustained have lost force, an energy that will take new forms, simulacra of causes and grievances. This is not to say that inequities that are not effectively articulated are not real. It is certainly not to say that the failure to acknowledge them is not dangerous. The Iraq War was proof that an elite can impose itself drastically on American lives.

And now we all talk about an elite, elitism. It is a meaningful issue, despite and because of the general pointlessness of the rhetoric that surrounds it. Billionaires and their offspring can be excused from this disfavored category if they are conspicuously crass or ignorant. Insofar as the potent term is securely linked to any group, it is associated with the highly educated and their institutions and with people whose politics are liberal. There is nothing more American, historically, than education. It has had a glorious development in this country, starting in the seventeenth century. It has been thought of as something good in itself, an enhancement of life for those inclined toward it and with the means to pursue it. Unfortunately, perhaps, it has also been proved to have many practical benefits. Its dimensions as a cultural presence have been shrunk to accommodate that irksome metric—education is, materially speaking, a sound investment. It confers many benefits and advantages, including even increased longevity.

The prototypical university, in this country and in Britain and Europe, was designed to educate clergy. It offered an education largely centered on the humanities and was not at all utilitarian. This remnant of the days when there were so many pulpits to fill is now under furious attack, a special irritant to people who resent the fact that education conveys benefits that some may find difficult to account for but that are indisputably real. This great Christian legacy is offensive now to people who claim to be defenders of Christianity, at least of the diminished thing they are making of it. At the same time, education is undermined by the hollow elitism that allows the wealthy to work the system, making the children of wealth look interesting to selective institutions, as they would not without the ministrations of coaches and, in effect, ghostwriters, to put the bloom of promise on their young cheeks.

Societies generate hierarchies. They value skills that people perform more or less well. They admire prosperity. Injustice exploits this stratifying tendency so regularly that rankings that should be provisional, conditional, related to circumstance, become ossified. Our democracy was not designed to eliminate structures of authority but to make as sure as possible that they were arrived at legitimately and that they were appropriate to their function and were, above all, temporary. Marxist language has entered the thinking of the right—whether because those on the right consciously recast it for their own purposes or have picked it up because it sounds ideological, therefore intellectual, who knows. But the fact that something has been associated with the left doesn’t mean that it forever will be.

The effectiveness of the opposition to medical expertise during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates this perfectly. The attack on the universities is of the same mind and spirit. This bitterly divided country actually agrees to its harm on many things. The universities themselves have been pondering elitist biases that might have led to the privileging of cultural products—Dante, Shakespeare, Dickinson—and by extension their own fundamental reason for being. This is interesting enough, appropriate to institutions that aspire to rigor. But it has left them in a weak position when they are suddenly required to defend their place in society. If elitism is a thing that is deplored in academe itself, this looks like a fig leaf on the foolish and discreditable rise in the cost of higher education. This hostility to the universities traces back to the social polarization that associated them with privilege and immunity rather than with the humane value of learning for its own sake.

Because of the system of student deferments, universities became associated with draft dodging. To the degree that they had ever conferred social advantage, this was compounded by the immunity they offered from the stark claim the government was making on the lives of the population as a whole. They were largely and appropriately centers of resistance to the war, an opposition that could not entirely mitigate the appearance, or the reality, that some lives were being treated as having more value than others. The struggles for minority rights and women’s rights should have taught us that an inequity is also an insult, and that a sting can persist long after a law has been repealed.

All the flags and chants give the Trump rallies the look of traditional nationalism. Trumpism is in fact very singular, however, in its insistence that America is a failed country, a scene of hideous crime, invaded by depraved aliens and betrayed by depraved liberals, all of whom should be jailed or worse. Trump’s America is a thing of sham institutions and fake information—this should be a joke, considering, for example, Trump University and the fakery of the National Enquirer—and is altogether so fallen that it must defer to the wisdom of Vladimir Putin and autocrats in general. All this seems less like love than loathing. By every measure I know of, the country is doing well. Comparisons are always difficult. We know from the reportage of Tucker Carlson that Moscow has one highly polished grocery store. How appropriate it is to generalize from this fact we cannot tell. And, of course, what should it matter to anyone who prefers a little democratic clutter to an (apparently) immaculate authoritarianism? This choice has presented itself before.

In any case, this “nationalism” departs from tradition in that its foreign enemies are the desperate immigrants trying to cross the southern border—for all the excitement, an appropriate adversary for a bully only. Trump’s militaristic fantasies involve calling up the army to crush resistance on the part of Americans. I cannot account for these passions he seems to channel for his crowds except as a fusion of disillusionments, a sort of plasma not accessible to conventional political or economic analysis. I am far from dismissing it on these grounds. With the proviso that the part of the population that might show up at Trump rallies is small, and that many might be attracted by the febrile showmanship, even by the certainty that their own primal screams would startle no one in all that noise, opinion makers assume that these people do tell us what our future might be, beginning as soon as November.

If my analysis has any merit, one side in this opposition has a far richer and more nuanced geopolitical insight. A population more likely to provide troops for the military would have a livelier awareness of the fact that they are deployed all over the world, in places that are or at any time might become very dangerous. This might yield a different definition of globalism. On the other side, that regrettable gift for forgetting is a factor, forgetfulness of the weight of this burden. Trump’s utter lack of foreign policy beyond a resentment of Europe, his hinted readiness to capitulate in the face of what he constantly represents as superior strength and “genius,” seems never to thin his crowds. His antagonism toward NATO is expressed in mercenary terms, though the economic consequences of the fraying of the West would be unimaginably great. An era of smash-and-grab would benefit those inclined that way and well positioned for it. Trump never describes a future, which is sensible, since no policy he suggests would be less than disastrous.

All this is beside the point in the minds of his followers. Perhaps their zeal is driven by the thought of shaking the foundations of the existing order, which they passionately insist is not the legitimate order that would be restored by institutions and elections they accepted as having integrity. The problem is that they will never be satisfied as long as their resentments are channeled without definition, and without hope or purpose, into a political system that was designed and has functioned to produce a government. If their grievances could be made political, could be spoken of in terms of policy, in terms of justice and reform, of democracy, then Trump could concentrate on selling sneakers and Bibles. And the press and public should stop seeing his hectic road show performances as proof of health and vigor.

I have done the thing I deplore. I sat down to write about Joseph Biden and ended up writing about Donald Trump. President Biden is looking back on a long life, imagining a future that will return the country to its true work, of achieving fairness and mutual respect as norms of American life. The personal tragedies he has suffered are well known. It should be noted here that he lost a son to illness apparently related to military service.

Why does President Biden not receive credit for his remarkable legislative achievements? Whenever he announces a policy that is designed to benefit a particular region, this is interpreted in the press as a lure meant to attract swing state voters, which if true would only mean that the policy is welcome and likely to produce good results. Cynicism is an excuse for the failure to actually look at the substance of a presidency, and can only be a major contributor to the general sense that the country is adrift. Add to this the erasure of differences between parties and candidates that comes with cynicism, and the idea that voting is an empty exercise is reinforced. All this tends to delegitimize government, making it a thing of ploys and impositions no matter how wise and well-intentioned it may in fact be.

There is a tone of implied dissatisfaction among the commentators, in the absence of specifics, that functions in the public discourse as if it were weighty and considered objection. It is an attitude, not a reaction to actual circumstance, so there is no possibility of rebuttal. Jimmy Carter, now revered, his brilliance acknowledged, fell victim to this same hectoring. It is fair to wonder what the state of the environment might be if the press then were not so distracted by his cardigans and his southernisms. President Biden is old, and there is concern that his health might decline, leading to some disruption. But this consideration should be weighed against the fact that Trump promises only disruption. That he might pursue bad policies with enormous vigor should reassure no one.

The twentieth century left the world in a parlous state. Our foreign entanglements have passed through permutations that have made them truly baffling. We have always supported Israel. Now our strength is shackled to its weakness. The consequences of our even seeming to be about to abandon Israel could be cataclysmic, for it and for that region, at very least. So Netanyahu has a free hand, to the world’s grief and, it must be feared, ultimately to Israel’s. This state of things has been developing over many years. There is no simple, obvious solution available to an American president.

Americans have special obligations to reality. It is true and manifest that we will have an outsize part in determining the fate of the planet. If it should be that big problems cannot be solved and that we are left with the tedious business of managing them, we should discipline ourselves to patience and deliberation, the old courtesies that have made democracy possible. We have at hand the best resources that can be had to deal with our situation, if we can agree to respect them.