Samain Thanksgiving Moon
We have experienced something dark, disturbing and powerful, an election in which the id drove our common choice. Kate said, “Hate has won.” Yes. But not only hate. Fear. And, even worse, hate dominated by fear.
The most prescient article I read, and I read hundreds, cautioned American liberals and leftists not to take the polls too seriously. I tried to find the article, but couldn’t. It was written by a Brit, an opponent of the Brexit decision and a man who awoke to a decision by his countryfolk that defied polls and pundits. He reminded us of the European turn toward nativism, French, Austrian and German movements in particular. And, he said, it could easily happen in the U.S. It has.
As I wrote earlier, I’m not a man given to despair and I don’t feel it this morning, this terrible wakin’ up mornin’ when the American dream has ghosts and rapists and Confederate flag waving, gun toting white men ranging uninhibited in it. This election is, I believe, a result of that dream dissipating like puffy cumulus clouds pounded by hurricane force winds. A dream denied, hopes crushed. What happens to the heart when the future dims?
Of course, you can ask any woman, any African-American or Latino, any member of the LGBT community. Ask any of the native Americans on the ground in North Dakota today. Ask any group that has existed on the fringe of the American experiment. They know what happens to the heart when the future dims.
Today that same disillusion among white working class men and women has pounded on the door of our destiny. Yes, the irony is thick, but the political dilemma of persons shunted to the side of history contains the seeds of revolution.
In part I do not despair because I have read history. The United States is not the first great power to be brought low by economic dislocation of a former privileged class. Paul Kennedy’s, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, proposed a mechanism for great power collapse. Military overreach strains domestic budgets and can create misallocation of economic resources. The resulting economic woes, Kennedy suggested, create the conditions for dissent at home, dissent that can wreck political unity.
It remains to be seen whether the toxic stew cooked up by the Donald’s political base will poison our common life and prove fatal to this long experiment in democracy. I doubt that it will. I believe we are, still, stronger than the darker angels of our nature.
Lincoln, that stalwart of the old GOP, said it best:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
