Programming

Several months ago, I wrote about how U.S.A.’s civic culture – for all its aspirations to social and intellectual progress – has not been able to escape our distant civilized ancestors’ predisposition to engaging in human sacrifice. There is another dynamic at work, though, one that manifests itself with both liberals and conservatives in this country and thus demands closer inspection. In fact, it is an issue with any body politic in any country at any time. For an illustration of this dynamic, consider this passage:

Most animals seem to have a set of rules they follow under certain circumstances, sort of a hard-wired stimulus/response system. For some animals, like humans, this set of hard-wired behaviors is very small, and generally plays little role in day-to-day existence. For others, the hard-wired stuff constitutes almost their entire behavioral repertoire. Ants are in the latter group. The “rules” that govern an ant’s actions don’t change when it’s in a group – the ants do not individually become any “smarter”– but these rules themselves tell the ants to do certain things differently based on stimuli they get only when they’re in a group. As a result of interactions between group members, then, the group as a whole will exhibit patterns of activity that isolated individuals normally don’t: an “emergent property.”

Human beings do not behave exactly like ants, of course. Though we do live in ‘colonies,’ we consciously consider ourselves not only individuals, but also independent moral agents. We like to think that each of us operates and makes decisions according to our own will, informed by our own chosen and acculturated values. Much like ants and other creatures that live in colonies and collectives, though, humans are also governed by external imperatives.

Though we may not be as “hard-wired” as are ants to the collective imperatives of their communities, there are other ways in which we receive stimuli from our larger social groups, stimuli to which we may hardly if ever give meaningful consideration. There are numerous U.S.A.-specific social phenomena through which we could examine this dynamic, but let us narrow our focus to electoral politics, specifically the election of Donald Trump.

Continuity by any other name…

The elevation of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency has had many notable effects on the country’s body politic, most of which are better measured qualitatively than quantitatively. One effect is that some liberals (defined within a simplified ‘liberals vs. conservatives’ frame; more on this below) seem to have come a bit unmoored politically, if not on occasion intellectually and emotionally. Trump’s personal behavior – chiefly his racist, chauvinistic bombast – has understandably engendered widespread disgust among liberals. The substance of many of his administration’s policies, however, arguably fails to attract a similarly coherent response. This is most notable where Trump’s policies – particularly his foreign engagements – often function as little more than continuations or accelerations of his predecessor’s.

Trump’s 2016 general election challenger – Hillary Clinton – was an architect and administrator of much of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and she presided over overt and covert acts of aggression against several sovereign countries. On one occasion, at the end of a nationally televised interview, Clinton laughingly gloated over her role in the ongoing destruction of Libya and the video-recorded lynching of its head of state. Libya, once the most prosperous and stable country in Northern Africa, was by the eve of the 2016 presidential primaries a chaotic, violence-riddled backwater thanks to the U.S.-led intervention. Despite that atrocity and the rest of her blood-soaked record, Clinton earned nearly 3 million more popular votes than Trump in the general election; that’s nearly 66 million U.S. citizens for whom glibly boasting over mass murder was not a deal-breaker.

Adding an element of concussive, self-parodying slapstick to this saga is the recent liberal embrace of former FBI director Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin. In a morally consistent universe, Mueller might have been vilified and hounded from public life for his post-9/11 policy of entrapping hapless Muslims in ginned up, headline-grabbing fake terror plots. Before becoming FBI chief, Mueller – as lead Justice Department investigator – oversaw a dutifully myopic probe of the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that steered clear of George H. W. Bush’s use of BCCI to illegally funnel money and arms to Saddam Hussein.

Given these glaring inconsistencies, I submit that Trump’s chief offense has been to violate the polite, distinguished veneer that most U.S. citizens have come to associate with the office of U.S. president. However threadbare and unkempt that veneer was as worn by any preceding administration, Trump has peeled it off with a lewdly gyrating flourish and carried himself according to the brutish nature of the country’s elemental self. In doing so, Trump has unwittingly revealed how little practical moral distance there is between the country’s self-identified liberals and conservatives. This revelation has inspired loyalty from the latter and rage in the former.

We’ve been doing this since forever

U.S. citizens, regardless of which political party we choose to support, are all in this predicament because we are indoctrinated to a political culture that assumes the inherent benevolence of the mythical Nation, even though our dubious cultural self-conception of ‘rugged individualism’ breeds at least a superficial distrust of Government and loathing of Politics. This idiosyncrasy is reproduced through formal education and popular culture, and it is a powerful if usually unarticulated factor in our electoral processes. Not many politicians run successful campaigns that soberly and frankly address the gratuitous systemic violence and inequality of U.S. society, not to mention the numerous, exhaustively documented (though studiously publicly ignored) atrocities that have shaped the country since long before its official establishment.

I originally began writing this essay on the eve of Thanksgiving, U.S.A.’s national civic holiday, wherein we celebrate an idealized characterization of the exploits of early European colonizers of what would become New England. Long-standing family traditions of gathering and feasting are thus tied to a whitewashing of genocide that – given what we know about the European conquest of North America – defies satire.

Thanksgiving is but another example of the savage cognitive dissonance and willful myopia that operate at the societal level regardless of party affiliation. Those qualities have been on full, parodic display since Donald Trump won the 2016 election: we have seen conservative evangelicals buying air time and billboard space to declare that bloodthirsty, sexually predatory, avaricious grifter as a deputy of Christ; we have seen liberals donning knitted pink vagina hats to publicly protest his boorishness or his figmental Russian fealty, but not the monstrous foreign policy which he adopted from his all-but-canonized predecessor.

I don’t know that ants ever indulge in critical thinking, individually or collectively. Human beings are capable of it, but we often fail miserably, especially when operating in large groups. The Donald Trump presidency, while being treated by some as an aberration, is the product of a societal vacuum of critical thinking and moral consistency.

We may fancy ourselves fiercely independent citizens, but as a nation we allow ourselves to be impelled like mindless automatons into committing one atrocity after another. Our occasional, feeble moral protestations belie the programming that few of us care to interrogate. Perhaps as the pain of where we’re force-marching ourselves continues to overwhelm our carefully curated senses, we’ll become more willing to claw at our cherished delusions and honestly grapple with what we all suspect lies just beneath.