A governor sending out virulently racist messages. A Congressman threatening ethnic bans in places of employment. And a noted intellectual suggesting that the way to end the camps is to give an authoritarian his wall.

It’s bizarre and gruesome. And yet that’s just one regular everyday morning in America now. Just one. What does it teach us, that a nation’s way of thinking, its mental processes, its way of seeing the world, has sunk this low? I think it teaches us this. I’ll be blunt, because mincing words helps no one in these times.

America is a nation now governed by bullies — because bullying has become its last organizing principle (we’ll get to that part). Sorry. Think about it. What else do you call all the above? Yet I wonder. Have you, too acquiesced, without knowing it, to this way of thinking a little bit — that capitulating to bullies is the right and correct way for a society to organize itself? Now, whenever you try to show people the flaws in their own thinking, their hackles rise. They get defensive. So I’m not condemning you or judging you. And you can be the judge if anything that I have to say is accurate.

Let’s start with Andrew Sullivan’s essay. What is it really saying? Let’s leave aside the obvious — he is telling us to appease fascists, which is laughable, a strategy that history teaches us is such a fatal mistake that it has its own name, to Neville Chamberlain a Hitler. That is because authoritarians, obviously, are not negotiating in good faith — so to appease them is to license them, not satisfy them. That much tells us he has not read a history book lately, maybe ever — and that is what I mean by “fools”. But there is more to this story.

What Sullivan is really telling you is to capitulate to bullies. His logic is very simple. It’s better for you to cower and be intimidated than it is to live with dignity, self-respect, inherent worth, basic rights, and self-directedness. But it’s hard to see how a democracy can survive as a cowed, frightened thing, always intimidated by the littlest threat. That is why appeasing tyrants has never once worked in modern history. Yet it is the moral logic is what I want you to see, not the political history: he is telling you that bullying is a perfectly good and nice way to organize a society, and that the right choice for a person to make is to…capitulate to bullies.

Doesn’t that strike you as sad? Funny? Strange? But Sullivan is hardly alone in this laughable folly.

What is American thought? It is basically, by now, one long series of justifications, rationales, and intellectualizations for capitulating to bullies. Bullying all the way down. It boils down to this: your moral duty is to capitulate to the bully higher up in the social hierarchy than you, and bully the next person in the social hierarchy lower down than you, whose job it is to capitulate, and then bully the next person down, and so on. This has become, somehow, the sole organizing principle of American life. Capitulating upwards, bullying downwards.

I’m sure that you think I overstate it, so let me make my case, and you judge if it carries any water.

What is the core of American economics? It is that people must never, ever make any kind of social or collective investments, like in healthcare, education, media, finance, or transport. Those things are best left to markets — but it’s trivial to say that markets can’t provide these things, for reasons of scale, information, bias, and monopoly. American economics knows this, yet it goes right on preaching to Americans that it is OK for them to suffer — as long as the economy is “growing”. No matter if their life expectancy begins to fall — the worst indicator a society can have — the economy is “strong” as long as profits are rising. In other words, the core belief of American economics is that people should capitulate to bullies. Isn’t that we are saying when we suggest it’s ok for people to live shorter lives, as long as others get richer? What is the difference between that and bullying people by teaching them their duty is to capitulate, instead of stand up for themselves?

Now. What is the core of American politics, the political thought justifying all that? It’s very simple. It’s that people do not have a shared interest. They cannot, in fact. They can only have a self-interest. But these self-interests can never converge. It can never be the case that my self interest is having public healthcare — but yours is, too. We are only ever adversaries, whose job is to live right at each others’ throats, competing our whole lives long, for everything that people in more sensible societies choose to endow one another with: retirements, pensions, homes, incomes, savings, safety nets.

But that is a result of the core thought at work here: not just that people are self-interested, but that their self-interest can never converge, and become a shared interest, a public interest, a common good. Such a thing is not possible given the first principles of American political thought — to whom people can only ever be predators, hoping to consume and wreck and destroy one another. That’s why no party believes in any kind of public goods, social investment, or working social contract — even while the republic collapses into authoritarianism.

Yet all that is precisely the definition of bullying, isn’t it? The bully convinces the coward that his self-interest cannot ever be anyone’s else’s. So no one stands up for anyone else, and the bully soon rules over the tribe of fools who do not see that if they looked, their self-interests would be the same: to take care of each other, and depose the bully. But Americans don’t see any of this yet — that they are being bullied, because they have been taught to capitulate.

Now. What is the core of American social thought, the social thought justifying that political belief — that self-interest can never converge to be shared interest? It is that people are not ends in themselves. They are just means. After all, if people are ends, then surely they are capable of judging their own interests, and deciding when those interests converge. Only if they are means can that choice be ruled out for them. But what are they means to? We have already discussed it. They are means to “growth”, which is to say, increasing profits, even if it means that every single aspect of their lives fall apart, from longevity to happiness to health to trust to social bonds. But “profit” is only a way to say the “greater good.” And the problem in American social thought is that the greater good is the one which does not consider people’s lives at all, only the currency they are denominated in, and in that way, people are means, not ends.

But that is the essence of bullying, too. For the bully, everyone is a means, and no one is an end. A means to what? To domination, to power, to coercion, to control. Those are the only ends in life. Even he is a means to these ends. You are right to say that my description of all this resembles patriarchy and supremacism. Still, I want you to see the moral logic at the heart of American collapse.

Americans, I think, have been taught that bullying is good. Good to receive, and good to give, too. Their primary moral duty is to always capitulate — and bully the next person down in the social hierarchy just the same way. All that is what makes a person “good”, not standing up for what is right, true, just, and fair. What else explains a people who are against their own healthcare, retirement, pensions, unions, safety nets, who shrug as their kids shoot each other in schools? Only a society in which a democracy has become something more like a bully-ocracy can really tolerate all this happily.

The problem, if you haven’t already seen it, though, is this. In a bully-ocracy, the most violent and abusive soon rise to the top. The ones who can bully the bullies all the way to the top of the pack of predators.

And that is how we get to racist governors, authoritarian presidents, bonkers Congressmen, intellectuals who don’t know the most basic lessons of history, and, maybe, just maybe, a people who don’t understand how the fatally mistaken way of thinking they have been taught is leaving them helpless. After all, when the bully has managed to persuade you that you must not just capitulate to him for your own good, but also bully the next person down, too — he has defeated you without lifting a finger. Because the social hierarchy is now incapable of ever changing — and democracy is an impossibility.

Umair

June 2018