The New Yorker of September 28, 2009, had an article by Adam Gopnik, Trial of the Century, Revisiting the Dreyfus Affair, which made one point which is quite relevant to current events and politics. Does the following sound familiar?
In any modernized country, the backward-looking party will always tend toward resentment and grievance. The key is to keep the conservatives feeling that they are an alternative party of modernity. (This was Disraeli’s great achievement, as it was, much later, de Gaulle’s.) When the conservative party comes to see itself as unfairly marginalized, it becomes a party of pure reaction, which is what happened to the French right after Dreyfus. Instead of purging the anti-Semites, people on the right decided to rally behind them. They came to hate the idea of the Republic itself.
The last three sentences could just as well refer to the U.S. radical right today. Instead of purging the haters, they rally behind them, and they hate the idea of democracy and of the U.S. republic itself.
What's the lesson here? Where do we go from here?
The U.S. of 2009 is similar in a number of ways to France in the 1890s. A large segment of the public is mired in superstition and "faith," led by a reactionary religion (Catholicism in France, evangelical Christianity in the U.S.), to the point of denying the most obvious verifiable truths. They are led into following destructive emotions, whether as awful as anti-Semitism or as silly as renaming fried potatoes or bread. They act against their own best interests and drag their larger country through the mud. In France, the "other" was the Jew; in the U.S., the "other" is still a number of minorities, with the ultimate insult to the radical right of a black man becoming President. They preach hate and preach killing him, not even knowing how hateful they are.
France had to suffer through another 50 years and two World Wars before conquering the worst aspects of their own nature. They still have a radical right fringe, they still have inequalities between the wealthy cities and the poor rural areas, and they are not dealing well at all with the immigrants who do the dirty work but refuse to conform to the ideal of the French citizen. But they have outstanding public education, transportation, health care, culture, and some of the best food and drink in the world. They look healthy, and they are healthy.
In the U.S. today, the radical right has not been marginalized as in France, there is a large minority of the country who are anti-culture, anti-egalitarianism, anti-good food and drink, unhealthy, and self-destructive. People buy crap from Wal-Mart and junk food and drink from everywhere. They look unhealthy, and they are unhealthy.
I don't know if there's a lesson here after all. Maybe we need many more years for this rot to burn itself out and let us build a better system. Maybe we need a revolution to replace our systems of government. Jefferson thought there would be one every twenty years or so, with a new and improved Constitution each time. Certainly California needs such a revolution, and we can only hope they can do it in the face of reaction there. Maybe getting some things right for once, like health care for all, would get people to buy in to a system that works rather than railing against a system that they think fails.
Just food for thought. Sorry, no easy solutions.