Opinion/Brown: Living on a political fault line – and waiting for the rumble to come
We live amid forces so large, that we are barely aware of them, but I’m trying.
Being a local columnist doesn’t require only writing about local things. It requires being responsive to our local readers in a far more personal way than national columnists are. Responding to letters prompted by a recent column required more than 4,000 words in reply. And I’m grateful because the letters were as civil as they were rigorous. They made me work hard, which is good for an old man. I learned a lot. Only by trying to see events through multiple points of view can we have a chance at a comprehensive understanding.
Often, people write as if I’m some kind of archetypal liberal as imagined by Sean Hannity. I’m not — and I want to be careful not to paint my correspondents in single colors either. I may be mistaken sometimes, but I want to share with you what I think I’ve learned … where fault lines potentially fatal to our democracy lie.
First, we’ve lost any common fund of factual understanding. Flooding the zone with toxic fabrications gradually leads to despair that we can really know anything for sure. In the absence of factual certainty, we choose narratives instead. Which storyline we accept and reject is more and more a test of tribal loyalty. This is our first dangerous fault line.
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Our second deepening fault line is global. It’s a divide between what has been called “liberal democracy” and what a new generation of leaders are calling “illiberal” Democracy.
Liberal democracies seek to balance the will of the majority with the rights of minorities. Liberals have historically devoted great effort to protecting and expanding the rights of the poor, of racial, religious, and, more recently, sexual minorities. In so doing, they have fallen into a demographic trap. In protecting the rights of minorities, it’s easy for liberals to lose patience with their country’s majority. And that’s electoral death in a democracy.
For liberals to win, they can never lose affection for the majority of ordinary people — and they must make living in a liberal democracy a point of pride and contentment for their fellow citizens. This they are failing to do.
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An illiberal democracy is still driven by the popular will. It just repudiates most of its obligations to advance or protect the interests of minority groups. This repudiation becomes infectious in times of financial hardship when people are frightened. The majority can be convinced that liberals want to protect minorities more than the mainstream.
With all the complex arguments for universal health care and living wages, one can get lost in the weeds of economics. Or one can play the racial/tribal card and argue that liberals want to take your hard-earned money and give it to them … people who, it can be argued, share neither your identity nor values.
Illiberal democracies like to codify what a properly majoritarian citizen looks like, thinks like, talks like, prays like and has sex with. Democracy is repurposed as defensive in nature, protecting the majority from liberals and others who are more and more portrayed as wicked and parasitic.
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This second seismic fault line has opened across much of the modern world, splitting electorates between these fundamentally antagonistic understandings of what democracy is for and whom it serves. More and more, losing an election is being experienced, not as a temporary adjustment of power between fellow citizens, but as defeat and occupation by an alien force. As the cracks turn into an abyss, we are becoming ungovernable.
Our third fault line runs the deepest. It’s the gulf between extreme wealth and everyone else. Throughout most of history, humanity has lived in a state of economic helplessness so abject as to make politics irrelevant.
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We may be seeing the last of a historic era wherein the government has served as a check on corporate power. It matters little to global corporations whether gays can marry, or abortion is legal or which genders use which toilets — yet our body politic is increasingly preoccupied with these things. If you’ve never seen the film "The Big Short," I recommend it. It reveals what happens when government fails to do its job. Meanwhile, the earth is warming; our numbers grow and corporate dominance proceeds apace.
I’ve become an old man. Perhaps I’ll be gone when the rumble rises from underground and the world I love comes undone. But our children will be here. Our grandchildren will be here, and we’re supposed to love them and protect the world they inherit. That’s supposed to matter most to us — or have we become too angry to remember?
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod opinion: Political fault lines and the death of democracy
