I: The Problem and Solution: Ethics in Politics
To a great extent, our inability to behave like moral actors and moral decisionmakers is the final and truest cause of our nation’s failure and decline.
Make even a marginal effort to humanize the subjects of today’s key news items, and you might begin to understand just how perversely immoral our political thinking has become:
We refuse to pay workers higher wages, because we do not believe that they are worthy of their own work.
We refuse to shelter the homeless, despite having more vacant homes than homeless people, because we think houses will “spoil them”, as if they are children who must first survive homelessness in order to become functional adults. When homeless people pitch tents in our parks, we decide that these tents are ugly, so our city councils physically destroy them in the middle of winter, knowing that these poor humans have nowhere else to go.
We refuse to provide healthcare for our fellow citizens, because if they do not have a full-time employer who pays for their healthcare, then they are not a good enough human to have healthcare at all. If they die because of this, then they deserved to die. It was their fault for not having a wealthy full-time employer who pays for their healthcare.
We refuse to take in desperate refugees, and instead we deliberately separate young refugee children from their mothers — not because we need to or because there’s any practical reason, but simply because we believe that doing this will terrorize other refugees around the world, and then they will eventually stop seeking asylum in the United States altogether. In this case, we have actually gone out of our way specifically to commit an act of premeditated evil.
Finally, today in 2020, there is no greater or more transparent symbol for our national moral failure than this: We refuse to put on a simple face mask just for a few minutes, even though we know that doing so might save a neighbor’s life.
This is the perfect final picture of America’s fatal moral collapse.
There is no difficulty in the actual policy solutions to these different problems. It is easy enough to place one homeless human inside of a completely vacant and unused home right next to where the person sleeps, for example — or to build a single dormitory-style housing complex which could house the entire homeless population of most American towns. It is not logistically difficult. Surprisingly, it would be easy, if people cared. It’s just that people don’t want to do the right thing, even when it’s not a very hard thing to do. We just don’t want to, because we do not care. And because you cannot make us care. We do not want to care.
Nor is it difficult to raise wages, expand healthcare, provide for the common welfare, or to refrain from deliberately separating young children from their parents. That is, it’s not logistically difficult, when you look at the policy details on any of these issues. And it is certainly not difficult to wear a damn mask. The only thing which makes these problems daunting is the fact that people don’t care about other people. We do not want to commit to making our country a better place for all of its citizens, because we do not even recognize each other as co-equal citizens in the first place. We do not even see each other as fellow citizens of the same national group.
Fundamentally, this moral apathy is a threat to the very notion of democratic or republican government, because it divides citizens into warring groups who will not a lift one finger to help each other out — even if helping someone out literally just requires you to raise one finger. Our situation truly is that bad, as this surreal picture of the anti-masker has proven. No democracy or representative government can function in this kind of hostile political climate.
It’s a terrifying thing to have to realize, and to confront this on a national scale: Our country is failing because the moral character of our people has already failed, and it is now beginning to break.
But that is the way it is. In the heart of truth, these are not separate issues at all. They are all one issue: Americans do not care about each other.
Solving this fundamental crisis entails only one all-encompassing solution: Americans must commit themselves to become better people. Each of us must acknowledge that we have been an inferior version of ourselves — and that we are capable of being a much better person tomorrow.
Americans must evolve to become more ethical, more caring, more thoughtful, more loving of each other, and more loving of the stranger on the street. We must learn to rewire our own brains, so that our basic daily interactions with each other improve.
We must minimize the negative assumptions that we make about each other in our daily interactions with people, both in-person and online. Instead of jumping immediately from one hyper-cynical assumption to the next (as has become the prevailing norm in American culture, in business, in politics, and even in personal relationships), we must learn to stay patient and understand more about the people we are speaking with before passing judgement.
We must learn to genuinely care about each other’s health, rights, housing, wages, happiness, culture, community, triumphs, traumas, dreams and ambitions. We must learn to speak past the issues, in order to understand more fundamental differences in values and worldviews. There really is no easier way to say this: We must become better people.
It may sound absurd to look at a problem and say “Well, to solve this, three hundred and fifty million people are going to need to become better humans.”
Unfortunately, that is exactly what we all need to do.
II: Why We Can’t Blame Just One Side
By now, I am sure some of you have thought: “Why do you keep saying ‘we’? I’m a Democrat! I never wanted any of this to happen in the first place!”
I have been using “we” to describe all of these American behaviors in order to emphasize our shared national identity, but of course any American observer will note that one party, in particular, has embodied this far more dramatically than the other. At some point, we do need to call them out by name.
Republicans have not just abandoned morality. They have pioneered and trademarked an explicitly anti-moral political worldview. Donald Trump, the god-king of the new Republican party, attacks morality as weak, and says that those who make moral choices are weak people. He seeks to remove moral thinking from policy choices, as if ethics are a cancer which should be taken out of our national body. This is the culmination of concurrent decades of anti-ethical thinking from the Republican Party, on every issue from healthcare to welfare to economics to immigration. Theirs is an ideology which rejects moral thinking entirely, and which argues that human ethics have no place in government policy.
It is the kind of ideology which, if allowed to grow, may lead to crimes against humanity the sort of which a more innocent America could never imagine. Those crimes only become possible once policy decisionmakers have eliminated or perverted their own ethical frameworks.
For Republicans, that process began a long time ago. It has become perfectly ordinary by now for Republicans to oppose healthcare, welfare, education, living wages, affordable housing, and virtually any other issue which any objective observer would say is “good” on the ethical spectrum. They have become the anti-moral party.
Donald Trump is the darkest manifestation of this anti-moral ideology to date — but that does not mean he will be its last, or its worst. The ideology itself is the beast. This man is just its avatar. Another avatar will come, unless this ideology is defeated.
While it is vitally important to call out this problem, the purpose of this article is not to add more criticism. We do not have time to bombard Republicans with criticism, because our country is rapidly falling apart at its many different seams, and because such criticisms, beyond a certain point, actually make the situation worse.
That is why we cannot afford to blame only one side. For the sake of national reconciliation, and to maintain national unity, we must accept a shared responsibility for this problem, regardless of whose fault it is. We must behave like a united country, and we must deal with our problems as one United States — not fifty States and two Parties. Fifty States and two Parties cannot solve this crisis. The United States of America can.
Right now, America is in a death spiral. Two political sides are dehumanizing and demonizing each other at an unprecedented rate, paving the way towards an armed civil conflict further down the road. We the citizens of this country, if we wish to avoid a second civil war, cannot perpetuate these patterns of mutual demonization, and we must make an effort to resist that impulse whenever we start to feel it.
This article is intended as a wake-up call to all Americans, who must collectively protest the direction of this death spiral. Americans must do this across the entire political spectrum — and across the entire ethical spectrum, which is even more difficult.
In other words, it does not matter who made the mess. It is an enormous mess, and now we all must clean it up together, or else it might not get cleaned up at all. That’s just the way it is.
Americans must affirm their own humanity, but they must also affirm the humanity of their Other, regardless of what side they are on or where they fall on some political spectrum.
Why do we need to do this, when we clearly have one side that we could blame?
A nation is an imagined community. It exists only for as long as the citizens continue to believe that it exists.
A nation functionally ceases to exist after the community has divided into warring tribes which are incapable of cooperating as a single national group.
At that time, conflicting groups begin to imagine new communities which exclude the people who disagree with them, or who are unlike them in other critical ways.
This is how old nations fall apart, and how new nations are born.
This is a matter of national life or death.
We cannot say that the resolution to our conflict is as easy as signing an act of legislation. That’s because the problem is not on paper. The problem is with us. We are the problem. We, the people. The laws do need to change. The system does need to change. We also need to change. We wrote those laws and systems in the first place, after all. We cannot design the next generation of laws and political systems until we have morally evolved into the next generation of Americans— and that is what we need to do in this moment.
If we are to pursue any vision of future for our country, we must call it our country, and we must make the effort to include each other in that statement. America only exists as a union, and the union is far more fragile than most Americans will understand. Our unique imaginary all-inclusive community ceases to exist almost as soon we stop believing that it can exist at all.
So be kind, and love each other. In life, and in everything that you do, but most importantly in politics, when you are casually discussing issues which meaningfully impact the lives and deaths of millions of other humans who you will not ever meet and who you have no right to judge. Assume that these strangers are worthy of your compassion, your goodwill, your taxes, and your trust. If you cannot do this — are you worthy of theirs?
If Americans cannot do this — if we cannot summon compassion and morality into the words that we speak, the opinions that we hold, the laws that we write, and the global systems that we build — then we might find there is no opportunity left for us to maintain our current union.