Divided We Fall

What might "great" mean?

Whatever happens today, we all should be shaking our heads as we tug up yard signs, What in blazes went wrong?

Not since the Civil War have Americans divided so bitterly about the meaning of America – and then the difference arose from identifiable interests. The ruling class of the South could not envision prosperity without slavery, so they made slavery virtuous. The ruling class of the North, seeking advantage, made slavery vicious. Game on.

What interests divide us today? Those Trump voters aren’t all vicious or Harris voters all virtuous. What have we been fighting about?

I know what I’ve been fighting about: stopping Trump. He and his goons fundamentally violate my ideals. Everything they advocate will make America – and civilization – worse, maybe unsustainable, as I see it. No doubt they think the same about me.

But what are each of us fighting for? We all want America to be “great”. But what might “great” mean?

Permission is the deficiency of liberalism. Allow all and you favor none. If “anything goes,” how do I navigate my way through time? “Art, like morality,” said that most quotable conservative, G.K. Chesterton, “consists in drawing the line somewhere.” My generation – nicknamed the Woodstock – railed against restrictions. But without signposts and guardrails, how do you find your road?

Right and wrong are neither obvious nor inevitable. They’re choices. Humans arrive at their convictions from a mix of motives they may only dimly discern. Moral systems develop in opposition to what came before. My moral system is a response to my father’s – part endorsement, part critique. Morally as well as biologically, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

A permissive morality, while it allows the superior to excel, may leave the mediocre in the dust. That’s what’s been happening in America during my lifetime. The sky’s the limit – if you can jump that high. Many did. But many were left behind.

Trump’s rabid rally-goers inveigh against “elites”. By elites, they mean winners. They do not feel like winners. They feel bypassed, despised, ignored, bested – by all those Ivy-Leaguers – and females – and degenerates – and immigrants – and now they’re wreaking their revenge. The rich have aggravated these divisions by seizing all the increase in wealth over the last several decades. It’s not that these whiners are poor – they just feel poor by comparison. “Fuck ‘em,” they roar.

Clueless what they stand for, these bile-billowing haters know what they stand against: modernity. Transport them back to some mythical good old days when everybody in the community was valued and nobody was left behind – nobody white, male, heterosexual, married, mute, and church-going, that is.

How to fix America? With some soul-stirring reason to exist. Convince us we all matter – and have a giant job to do saving the world. Never has humanity been more threatened:

·      by tyrants, suppressing their multitudes at home and conniving to undermine democracy in America;

·      by the spoliation of our planet, which may make it uninhabitable;

·      by doomsday weapons, which proliferate;

·      by new diseases, which incubate;

·      by technology, which surpasses human intelligence and risks mass bewilderment.

We’ve plenty to dread, more than ever, alas, and we should unite to save ourselves. Make America great again not by reverting to a pastel paradise that never was but by rallying around a great big dream that kindles our imagination and demands our all. Purpose, not pennies at the pump, exalts the soul. “Morality,” said Kant, “is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.” “Aim above morality,” said Thoreau. “Be not simply good, be good for something.”