Liberty: How Much Do We Want It?
This end-of-year post finds me more dismal than Scrooge before he met Marley’s ghost and his three little helpers. Our country and our democracy have had a very bad year, and I don’t know what awaits us in 2018.
Part of this is brought on by a warning from Joe Scarborough (MSNBC’s Morning Joe), but it was also the concluding message from Prof. J. Rufus Fears on a lecture on Gilgamesh, from his online course, Life Lessons from the Great Myths. “Freedom is not a universal value,” he said, and in particular, it is not valued in the Middle East. “…The universal longing of the human soul is for security, plenty to eat, and the absence of the responsibility of self-government….The Middle East will always choose a Gilgamesh,” the strong ruler that can get things done.
How could this be? And then I remembered that this is the point I used to argue against with Mom when we debated the Iraq War. We were both against it, of course, but my beef was that George Bush shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place on highly suspect intel, and being in, he shouldn’t have screwed it up so badly. Mom’s objection was with Bush’s stated goal–to spread democracy. She said the Middle Eastern mindset does not want democracy.
I did not want to believe it. I still don’t. I could not see how an entire people could be painted by a single brush stroke. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than an angry denunciation from an Iraqi for such cultural chauvinism. But then I remember how it all fell apart in Iraq. The U.S. won the war but lost the peace because it could not give the people security. Saddam’s Sunni army melted away only to return as guerrillas fighting a civil war. The Shi’ite lovefest with the U.S. invasion soon turned into hate. They had political freedom, but not freedom from fear.
Switching back to America, how much do we love our freedom? How strong is the Constitution that ensures it? I’m not sure anymore. Alabama just barely beat back a candidate who looked longingly on the days when blacks were held in bondage, and the vote was guaranteed only to white males, and in some states, only if they owned property. Our president has a terrifying contempt for and ignorance of the pillars of our democracy, which include the separation of powers, freedom of speech, a free press, and an informed and participating public. If that’s not bad enough, he loves and possibly envies the autocrats of other nations, who are able to put down their enemies, like opposing parties and pesky reporters.
There is something far more worrisome. As mentioned above, our democracy needs an informed and participating public, but national participation in presidential elections has been less than 60 percent for decades–meaning that our fate is decided by a third of the populace. As far as being informed, recent polls show that two-thirds of the voting public do not believe professional journalists who must verify their sources before they publish, but a third of them do buy in to incredibly baffling and totally unsupported conspiracy theories such as the one that the Sandy Hooky school massacre never happened.
So where do people get the information upon which they are to make an informed decision about the future of our nation? Apparently it’s no longer the press. It’s this thing called social media, stuff posted on Facebook or sent around the world on Twitter. Let me emphasize the difference here. A journalist, who is professionally trained, has a duty to be accurate, to double-check what his sources tell him, to make judgment calls on the trustworthiness of both the source and the data. If the reporter gets it wrong, he or she is at the least publicly embarrassed by the retraction that must follow, could lose the coveted beat and end up covering garden festivals instead, might even lose a paycheck. That is the news source that people don’t trust.
Then there’s social media, where all you have to do is open an account, write anything you care to pull out your ass, and post it for all the world to see. There is no editor questioning where you got the information and how you know it’s true. There is no libel lawyer reviewing the copy to make sure the company won’t face a punishing lawsuit. There are no consequences for getting it wrong. And, as is too painfully obvious, there is not even a copy editor to clean up the egregious spelling and grammar errors. That is what will now inform the American voter.
So yes, things are looking bleak for the future of our democracy. Whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, they didn’t have to. All they had to do is be the beneficiaries of a misinformation campaign spread out via social media. Will it happen again? Of course. Look how much the Russians benefited from the last campaign. Our nation’s standing in the world has plummeted, and by the time we get a competent leader at the helm, those nations that were our allies may have made other arrangements that don’t include us.
Our only hope is to educate the public on the difference between facts and fantasy, and to get them involved again in electing and monitoring our leaders. Which, according to the aptly named Prof. Fears, is something they would prefer to avoid. Should be an interesting new year.