What’s Left of America?

I’m writing this before the final call of the November 2020 presidential election and the outcome of the struggle for control of the U.S. Senate. So far, it seems, Joe Biden is closing up on getting a win thanks to small leads in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. But we won’t know the final outcome, I fear, for many days. This limbo time after the presidential election has become a national neurosis, a fuming agony of suspended animation that Americans have come to experience as the source of high anxiety.

Still waiting for closure on this election though we may be, other kinds of realities seem to be breaking through the fog of political combat to leave a shockingly clear picture of America, or of what’s left of it.

Nearly half the country cast their vote for the president. It’s inconceivable to the majority of Americans that millions of their brethren could overlook four years of race baiting, woman hating, conspiracy propaganda, climate change denial, pandemic stupidity and endless verbal cruelty and vote the way they did.

People on the so-called left of our culture are also deeply troubled by the force of hate that is directed at them from the so-called conservative part of our culture. And now, after years of Anne Coulter/Rush Limbaugh-Fox News-like liberal bashing by a seemingly endless sewer of slander media, we’re finding ourselves feeling a deep anger and disgust for those who hate us so doggedly, especially now.

Even as the right seems teetering toward ultimate presidential defeat, people on the liberal spectrum are wondering about who might be the next GOP candidate seeking the White House in 2004. From Nixon to Reagan, from Bush/Cheney to Trump, the evolution of Republican tyrannosaurs leaves us asking “Do we get a real tyrant next, not just another ‘I am not a crook,’ C-minus, sociopathic joker?”

It’s clear to many Americans now that our national culture has become bifurcated into two deeply hostile worldviews and opinions about human nature, ones that tend not to override local cultures, but undergird and inflame their basic discomforts and anxieties. And there is a third worldview gaining enormous focus and fury that feels estranged from the left, though belonging to it, and furiously hostile to the right and its patriarchal, white supremacist, segregationist, anti-science and anti-environmental zealots. And there’s a political faction on the right that feels estranged from the old guard GOP, other than Trump and McConnell, and is rooted in the racist, woman-hating, patriarchal, class-conscious ideology of white-on-white bully boys and political skinheads.

Neither faction understands the other, neither wants to, nor really can, locked as each is in anger, disappointment and sense of grief over what they both see as having “lost faith in their country.” They’ll have nothing to do with each other. And make no mistake, both right and left are armed to the teeth.

At a time when climate change and pandemics are threatening everyone on the planet, America is culturally and politically stalemated, quite literally out of the game, dead in the water and utterly useless when it comes to trying to solve the ravages facing all of us in the very near future.

No country can afford to be run by a man like Donald Trump for very long. No country can do anything at all without some sense of civility and respect for differences. And just when we need a common purpose, we find ourselves in what can only be called a culture war, with both sides mirroring each other — both afraid of losing what’s dear to them and having their world view compromised, but both afraid of different enemies and threats. And fueling this “war” there’s a terrible toxic brew of hate speech being stirred up to make the “other side” seem like the devil, which apparently is not very hard for anyone to do.

If the essence of the culture war is a battle-weary stasis, where one side in power cancels out what the other side who lost its power had accomplished, then we are close to being culturally moribund and ready to decay into violence and autocracy.

How do we move in another direction? A wise friend of mine told me recently, we need a revolution, a “revolution in kindness.” We have to do everything we can not to become culture warriors ourselves. But is such a thing possible? Of course it is. It’s the very nature of the American constitutional experiment, which was itself a “revolution” in civility. By that I mean the whole system of checks and balances, states’ rights, an independent judiciary, traditions of free speech and dissent, and an unencumbered right to vote and lobby are designed to transform rancorous disagreement into a productive process of listening and of self-education in which those holding opposing views have a chance to understand each other and even accommodate themselves in part to the perspective of their opposition. Our mutual enmity has almost wiped that spirit out.

What it takes for that spirit to be revived is a “revolution in kindness,” not in niceness, necessarily, but in a radical reorienting of perspective in which one’s opponent is seen not as an alien other but as someone who is basically “of our own kind,” and worthy of respect and attention, wrong-headed or not.

Respectful listening is what breaks the stalemate of stasis, not dismissive high handedness. Of course politics is about taking sides, but the side we have to take here is the side of attentive open mindedness, aggressive fair-minded listening and a willingness to not compromise necessarily but to refine our thoughts and preferences in a spirit of maturity and reciprocity, not to pull your punches, but not to throw them either. Politics is not boxing, not cage fighting, not cultural combat. It’s trying to get useful things done with the consent of the governed, most of them, and in reasoned debate in the marketplace of ideas far from the the deafening roar of the mob.

This is all said in the spirit of self-improvement. I, for one, have a long way to go in disengaging from cultural warfare. But as much as I’d relish the fight, I really just don’t see any other way for us to become useful and humane participants again in events that are changing our world.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it