truth and shadow
TO UNDERSTAND A LETHAL AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science
and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many
books and articles dealing with international politics. His
columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press). This essay first appeared in www.moderndiplomacy.eu
To
them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images.
Plato, The Republic
Though
derelictions of an unprecedented sort, even the most evident
shortcomings of Donald J. Trump’s presidency are essentially
just “shadows.” To more fully understand what has
brought the United States to such a once- unimaginable national
declension, we must first learn to look beyond these reflections.
As long as we remain focused on mere reflections of what is
important, we will ensure only persistent governmental debility.
What
then? Among other things, we would need to concede American
democracy to the perpetual sovereignty of unqualified persons.
In consequence of such plainly intolerable concessions, there
could emerge no meaningful solutions to what most imperils the
United States. What might then be said about American “greatness?”
“I’m
sorry?”
Exeunt
omnes?
For
the United States, such deeply ironic surrenders should never
need to be considered.
At
some point, this pathological sort of surrender or debility
could include not “just” nuances of national deformation,
but also de facto “blueprints” for a nation’s
collective disappearance.
There
are better ways for a country to proceed. Americans ought not
passively accept such immobilizing forms of bewilderment. This
era remains, after all, the Nuclear Age. It continues to be
a time for prudence and abundant caution, not visceral or reflexive
response.
To
better understand certain still-threatening American defilements
– an obviously primary obligation for all US citizens
– analysts must begin at the beginning. Recognizably,
this battered country’s authentic problems are not narrowly
partisan or exclusively political. No national government –
no President, no Congress, no hyper-adrenalized promises of
“change” from one side or another – can expect
to halt the insidious trajectories of our staggering decline.
Wherever
one looks, the Trump presidency has spawned a lethal assault
on an already-fragile nation – a dissembling presidency
that absolutely has to be removed by the country’s electorate
– but even this grotesque leadership assault represents
little more than a “shadow.”
Both
literally and metaphorically, the United States is now caught
up in a titanic struggle between life and death, between health
and disease. In order to suitably “cure” the nation,
not just of Covid19 but also of conspicuously corollary debilities
of unqualified national governance, Americans must first correctly
identify the pertinent “disease process.” Otherwise,
at best, we might manage to excise certain visible pathologies,
but still leave all underlying, systemic and metastasizing national
“malignancies” fully intact.
By
definition, that would represent a meaningless or “pyrrhic
victory” for a nation at existential risk.
Always,
as with identifying plausible solutions to the Corona Virus
assault, pertinent analyses must be appropriately (1) systematic
and (2) dialectical. Hard questions must be raised. For one,
how did Americans ever manage to get to this bitterly rancorous
and disjointed national place? In time, will the long-term anarchy
of inter-state relations be transformed into an even less sustainable
chaos?
Relevant
explanations – though not genuine long-term solutions
– are still substantially unhidden.
Somehow,
driven by egocentric considerations of taxation, commerce and
a barbarous presidential ethos of self promotion, our American
system of governance has managed to create a uniquely toxic
amalgam. From this palpably poisonous fusion of plutocracy and
mob rule, virtually any conceivable destructions could still
be born and multiplied. As we have so unhappily been witnessing,
this expanding wreckage has recently been enlarged.
Where
are we now? It is September 2020, and several alarming portents
ought not be too-casually disregarded or thoughtlessly shrugged
off. Currently, China, being diminished in increments by Donald
J. Trump’s gratuitous insults and threats, is beginning
to talk openly about selling off its approximately one trillion
dollars of American debt (US Treasuries). During this same early
September period, Trump has described US military veterans as
“losers” and “suckers” (a perverse recapitulation
of his prior disparaging references to American prisoner of
war Senator John McCain as “no hero”); appointed
a new postmaster-general in order to destroy mail-sorting equipment
and slow-down the mails; and imposed bizarre sanctions on the
International Criminal Court (a frontal attack upon international
law in general).
There
is still more. One again, this president has stood uncritically
on the side of Vladimir Putin, this time regarding the latest
Russian poisoning of dissidents. Trump also appointed a new
and manipulable Covid19 advisor to assure America’s further
subordination of science to politics, and has pushed ahead with
an utterly incoherent and treasury-busting military parody known
formally as “Space Force.” Similarly incomprehensible
was Trump’s previous withdrawal of the United States from
the World Health Organization in the midst of pandemic.
Credo
quia absurdum, said the ancient philosophers. “I
believe because it is absurd.”
If
these “crazy” infringements were not enough to satisfyingly
worsen life in the US and also throughout the world, Donald
J. Trump’s reliably obsequious attorney general stated
shamelessly during a major television interview that he “could
not really be sure” that voting twice is illegal. Said
William Barr, America’s senior legal officer, “It
depends upon the state.” Can this conceivably be a serious
official response?
Credo
quia absurdum.
There
is more. Americans face many interrelated obligations. One overarching
duty concerns this country’s distressingly proud culture
of American illiteracy. Lest such an indictment sound harsh
or even silly, one need only be reminded that this US president
rose to high office by exclaiming to cheering rally crowds:
“I love the poorly educated.”
This
2016 campaign refrain was not just an off-the-cuff spasm of
populist sentiment. Rather, it was a carefully fashioned echo
of Joseph Goebbels’ 1934 Nuremberg rally shriek: “Intellect
rots the brain.” It stands in starkly ironic contrast
with the earlier expressed viewpoint of Thomas Jefferson. Said
America’s third president: “To penetrate and dissipate
the clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened
by education.”
Over
the years, certain others have understood Jefferson’s
wisdom. “The mass man,” says 20th century Spanish
philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset, “learns only in
his own flesh.” This is precisely the aspiring demagogue
who now sits smugly in the American White House. With such inherently
distorted national leadership, the United States can never expect
to distinguish correctly between truth and shadows.
Never.
None
of this is mere hyperbole. After all, we continuously inhabit
a feverishly anti-intellectual country, a place of consistent
analytic decline, one where exemplary medical science is often
anathema, where truth is often given no quarter and where virtually
no one pauses to read a serious book. This worrisome demographic
includes Donald J. Trump, who not only eschews the instructive
written word – especially where it might sometime be elegantly
fashioned or science-based – but who also draws vast political
support because of his expressed loathing for literature, law
and philosophy.
In
the United States, this ironic loathing is not veneered or in
any manner denied or disguised. Here, instead, a disfiguring
American president’s consuming lack of intellectual and
historical interests has actually come to represent an enviable
political asset. Credo quia absurdum.
Core
citizen obligations obtain. Always, "We the people"
must remain determinedly analytic. Derivatively, we should promptly
inquire: Is there any graspable evidence to support genuinely
existential threats or concerns?
Incontestably,
all of us are now under persistent and still-growing microbial
assault from Covid19. Still worse, this biological “plague”
could sometime intersect with the more “normal”
geopolitical hazards of war, terrorism and/or genocide. In the
imaginably worst case scenarios, this intersection would also
be “synergistic;” that is, a fearful coming-together
wherein the injurious “whole” would be tangibly
greater than the calculable sum of injurious “parts.”
Significantly,
credible explanations are unhidden. At the head of America’s
government and society now sits a “mass man,” one
who openly abhors intellect and simultaneously extracts correlative
political benefits. This would not be the case (and also America’s
potentially existential curse) if the prevailing modalities
of U.S. culture and law were more closely aligned with proper
standards of evidence and truth. Now, on any given day, Donald
Trump (or his designated lapdog of the moment, e.g., Attorney
General William Barr on voting twice, or Vice President Mike
Pence, who fawns uncontrollably because he has no apparent license
to think) makes statements that are preposterous prima facie.
Back
home in Indiana, Mr. Pence could never even have imagined a
future in which he would ever be taken seriously.
Credo
quia absurdum.
There
is more. Although many Americans remain content with strangely
still-lingering hopes to grow personal wealth, even the richest
among us are deprived. Resigned to either a dreary future of
exhausting and unsatisfying work, or to a terminal prospect
of war and disease, even the financially most “successful”
must now live with variously intersecting kinds of death and
despair. Small wonder, then, that “no vacancy” signs
hang prominently outside America’s largest prisons and
that a progressively immobilizing Opiate Crisis is no longer
even news.
In
a nation of increasingly institutionalized unhappiness, it is
simply the “new normal.”
There
is more. For the most part, once flaunted American “truths”
are now discoverable only as myth. One prominent example can
be found in our massively beleaguered universities.
For
more than fifty years – the actual time I have lived in
several of our most distinguished national universities –
considerations of raw commerce have trumped considerations of
pure learning. What is surprising these days is that dishonorable
and illegal parental efforts to get their kids into college
should even be considered scandalous. What were these coddled
young people planning to learn?
No
one seems to know, not even the prospective students.
To
repair a broken country, candor and good taste – not just
presidential elections – will be indispensable. For a
time, "We the people" have no longer been motivated
by any proper considerations of enduring human value. For the
most part, we don’t actively seek any equanimity or “balance”
as a healing counterpoint to frenetic daily lives. Distressingly,
we still search anxiously for “opportunities” to
buy into a life of narrow imitation, an inherently unsatisfying
existence dedicated to leeringly empty pleasures and steadily-expanding
mountains of pain-dulling drugs.
At
almost every level, therefore, Americans “freely”
choose (like the oft-flaunted “American freedom”
not to wear a mask) a life of diaphanous shadows over one of
tangible truth.
Not
much mystery here. The relevant numbers are easily available
and “beyond any reasonable doubt.” To wit, at each
and every moment of the day, millions of America’s more-or-less
exhausted citizens consume enough alcohol and drugs to suffocate
any still-lingering residues of human wisdom. By itself, and
long before Covid19, the Opiate Crisis cost the country several
trillion dollars (to apply the narrowly quantifiable metric
of money), and still represents wholly unfathomable levels of
grievous human suffering.
Americans
need to be candid. These are not superficial infirmities. Instead,
what we are describing here are deep, irremediable and inconsolable
levels of collective despair.
Truth,
not shadow, is exculpatory. Whatever is now being decided in
our politics or in our universities, Americans are presently
carried forth not by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “high
thinking and plain living,” but by profoundly sorrowful
eruptions of fear and agitation. At times, "we the people"
may wish to slow down a bit and “smell the roses,”
but America’s battered and battering ambience continues
to impose upon its residents the ruthlessly merciless rhythms
of a self-propelled machine. Left unchecked, the predictable
end of all this delirium will be atrophied governance, advancing
disease plagues and international war.
Donald
J. Trump was not foisted upon the United States ex nihilo,
out of nothing. He is, in fact, the predictable outcome of a
society frequently indifferent or refractory to verifiable truth.
Americans
inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once,
we likely even possessed a potential to nurture individuals
to become more than unthinking cogs of a compliant crowd, herd
or mass. Emerson, after all, had described Americans as a people
guided by industry and “self-reliance.” Now, however,
we dutifully prepare to accept almost any conceivable personal
infringements in order to avoid thought and cheerlessly “fit
in.”
In
the end, credulity remains America’s worst enemy. Our
still too-willing inclination to believe that personal and societal
redemption can lie in politics and elections describes a potentially
fatal disorder. Of course, many critical social and economic
issues do need to be addressed further by America’s government,
but so too must our deeper problems be solved at the individual
human level.
In
the end, this is the only proper level for undertaking real
change and transformation, the only stage that is not merely
a reflection or shadow (what the philosophers would call “epiphenomenal”).
Already back in the fourth century BCE, Plato set out to explain
politics as a reflective and unstable realm of sense and matter,
a second-order arena of human action formed by inconsequential
half-thoughts and distorted perceptions.
For
Plato, in stark contrast to the stable or primary realm of immaterial
“Forms” – from which all authentic truth must
ultimately be drawn – the political world must be dominated
by wizardry, falsehood and “anti-reason.”
Going
forward, whatever our personal political preferences, history
and intellect must be given a renewed pride of place. Too often,
we ought to finally know by now, a threatened civilization compromises
with its afflictions, cheerlessly, and even while the “herds”
(Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud) or “crowds”
(Soren Kierkegaard) or “mass” (Carl G. Jung and
Jose Ortega y’ Gasset) chant rhythmic nonsense in a fevered
unison. To meaningfully restore us as a nation to long-term
health and potential (these two objectives must always proceed
together), "we the people" must learn to look behind
and even beyond the upcoming November elections.
For
now, the shadows are poisons in their own right, but the tangible
sources of these poisons must be targeted as well.
Donald
J. Trump – despite the obvious perniciousness of his catastrophic
presidency – was never this country’s core “disease.”
Rather, he has been a pathological reflection, a darkening shadow,
or what Plato would have predicted was the inevitable symptom
of any society that mistakes transient half-thoughts for genuine
understanding. Though the ancient Greek philosopher’s
most ambitious remedy – “to make the souls of the
citizens better” – is hardly a realistic goal these
days, it must remain a manifestly overriding objective of decent
human governance.
There
is one last but still primary point. In certain all-too-frequent
cases, a portion of society does not “mistake transient
half-truths for genuine understanding” – that is,
confuse shadow for truth – but instead, makes such dire
substitutions willfully and knowingly. In these always-ominous
cases, ones where certain citizens declare themselves to be
“conscientiously ignorant,” there can be no calculable
benefit to offering mindful clarifications or elucidations of
what is real. Here, the only residually rational path to “remediation”
is both conspicuous and immutable.
It
is to blunt political influence of the self-deluding societal
portion as much as practicable, and, simultaneously, to sharpen
this influence among those who would still favor Reason over
Anti-Reason.
In
today’s Trump-defiled United States, this path offers
a difficult but navigable route, an indispensable journey from
shadows to truth. America can choose to take this correct path,
but the decision time still available is not unlimited. Too
long conned by a willfully self-serving president, citizens
can either rise above the Trump-applauding “mass,”
or feebly accept a continuous display of terminal retrogression.
