This Post-Truth Era is an offshoot of the broader Post-Shame Era. Post-shame is a cancerous condition of the human mind. It is dangerous and should be treated with great care.
For a long time now, we liberals have been yearning for some moment of shared national clarity to pierce through the media ecosystem so persuasively that it would instantly provoke Mitch McConnell to curl up in his shell, or John Boehner to hold a vote, or Donald Trump to admit he knows nothing.
What enlightened voice of emotional righteousness could wipe the bloated pasty-white smirks off the faces of North Carolina Republican legislators as they ram through anti-democratic legislation?
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
As soon as Joseph Welch, a Republican Army lawyer, stared down the witch-hunter Joe McCarthy in 1954 and plaintively uttered this simple question, America woke up from a slumber, remembering our collective sense of shame. As if by magic, we suddenly recognized what an utterly small crud of a human being McCarthy was.
The problem is such magical moments can’t be choreographed. When a nation forgets its decency, it embarks on a journey that takes some time to play out. (See worst-case scenario: Nazi Germany.)
That’s because, on an individual level, surrendering one’s shame is a perilous journey of the soul. Once the decision is made (and, yes, it is a conscious decision), all other decisions, tactics, and strategies are easily justified. Think of Marlon Brando, as Captain Kurtz (in the heart of darkness) explaining why cutting off children’s arms was a necessary and heroic act for a good warrior.
The irritatingly humanist radio network, NPR, has been specializing lately in finding articulate, intelligent Trump voters who speak sensitively about their profound discomfort with the man, and about their decisions to override their normal sensibilities and value systems in order to “save the country.” They are a wistful and grave group, because they so wish such drastic action had not been necessary. But, alas, fate had called on them to sacrifice their personal moral compasses for the sake of the ultimate greater good.
That’s what heroes do. They can’t be afraid of causing bloodshed or other consequences, for which (they tell themselves) they will bear with heads held high.
The return of shame can take a very long time. It took more than 40 years before Japanese-Americans received a US apology for World War II internment camps. It took until the 1950s before the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement gained a smidgeon of national respect for its moral vision.
The question is: What do we do, and how do we act, while we wait for the return of shame among our fellow citizens?
Michael Moore has been promoting the understandably rage-fueled strategic imperative that it’s time to “fight fire with fire” — although he’s vague about what that would look like.
Moore gives voice to a sweeping liberal faction that has lost all patience with the Obama ethic of “When they go low, we go high.”
As we’ve seen in today’s world of social media, memes (like Moore’s) travel like wildfire. This is worrisome because nothing constructive can emerge from the plague-like spread of the disease of the heroic mind. Normal remedies such as facts and shame don’t slow the epidemic. It has to run its course. Once the commitment to a heroic identity has been made, the hero is immune to push-back. She already expected that others might despise her. She already knew she would be bombarded by rationalists and “institutionalists.” This was all factored into her original sacrifice. Heroes have no time for shame or reflection. Once the battle has been joined, they will persevere until the end.
All of which is not to say we shouldn’t resist while we wait for the plague to end.
But, like Barack Obama, we should retain our dignity. Not for ego’s sake, but for the preservation of the institutions and norms that we’ve been painstakingly trying to build for centuries — structures that have, yes, incrementally, improved lives and culture. Structures that heroes like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump would incinerate if given half a chance.
We should fight for truth and facts. Fight for Electors. Fight for Constitutional laws and structures. Fight to retain the gains we’ve made in the last eight years. Etcetera. But we have to accept that we can’t control when the fever will break — or how. Many predicted Khizr and Ghazala Khan would turn out to be the Joseph Welch of our time, but that wasn’t what fate had in store.
It’s understandable that emotions on the Left are running high, but history supports the Obamas’ “high road.”
When FDR responded to GOP obstructionism by attempting to pack the Supreme Court (with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill) the result, according to historian Michael Parrish was a disaster:
The protracted legislative battle over the Court-packing bill blunted the momentum for additional reforms, divided the New Deal coalition, squandered the political advantage Roosevelt had gained in the 1936 elections, and gave fresh ammunition to those who accused him of dictatorship, tyranny, and fascism. When the dust settled, FDR had suffered a humiliating political defeat at the hands of Chief Justice Hughes and the administration's Congressional opponents.
So, before making that ultimate deal with the devil, in which you give yourself permission to endorse and promote the same kinds of atrocities you see your enemies’ committing, be aware that revolutions hurt everyone — and, while they may feed the heroic ego, they very rarely are necessary to speed justice and liberty.
For example, without getting into a debate over the essential differences between the actions of John Brown and Nat Turner, the consensus among today’s historians is that the majority of northerners increasingly saw emancipation as a threat — up until the Fugitive Slave Law was passed (a huge overreach by southern factions, with an assist from the north), which gave birth to a historically righteous collaborative quest for freedom known as the Underground Railroad.
Only then did the majority of northern whites start to regain their moral shame, for they finally saw with their own eyes that the propaganda long spread by southerners (who claimed slaves didn’t really desire freedom) was just a big-ass lie.
The plague will end one of these days. We don’t yet know what the precipitating moment will be. In the meantime, let’s not allow the feverish Right to bully us into abandoning the values and principles we cherish. It’s now fallen to us to preserve them.