By Jim Geraghty
Monday, March 14, 2016
After a depressing weekend of political violence, and
cries of “go back to Africa” and “go to f***ing Auschwitz”, it’s time to bury
that rallying cry of immature rage, “Burn it down!”
That call is popping up more frequently lately. Back in
October, during the fight over who should replace John Boehner as speaker of
the House, Erick Erickson wrote that, “given Washington these days, I think the
default should be to burn it to the ground (metaphorically speaking).” Joe
Miller, onetime GOP Senate candidate in Alaska, wrote, “I will endorse the
first 2016 candidate to make ‘burn it down’ their campaign theme.” He was in
luck. Mike Huckabee’s short-lived campaign ran an ad declaring, “Let’s burn
down the Washington political machine!” In New Hampshire Chris Christie said,
“I’m angry, too. I want to burn Washington down because it’s so ineffective.”
Of course, there is also Trump himself, whose supporters
are motivated by the same exact destructive impulse.
And destructive it is. If you’re ready to burn down the
world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places
on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the
Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never
anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest
of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere
else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for
renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population
relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.
You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to
this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build,
not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one —
it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather
Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.
Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing
“Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that
there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a
self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands
today.
Yes, of course, America has problems. We’ve got paranoid
zero-tolerance school administrators suspending kids for pretending their
lunchtime sandwich was a gun. We’ve got CEOs getting dismissed by their own
corporate boards for past opposition to gay marriage. We’ve got journalists
lecturing others about which pronoun to use for a former Olympic hero who
changes names and genders. We have 46 million families using food banks and
food-service programs, and half-a-million homeless, one quarter of them
children.
But let’s have some perspective. This morning, about 50
million American children took the bus to a public school, and for the vast
majority of them, nothing went wrong. About 121 million Americans went off to a
full-time job, worked hard, and thought about what they would do with their
paycheck at the end of the week. For
those out of work, there were 5.6 million job openings at the end of 2015, at
least 57,000 of them offering on-the-job training. About 60 million married men
and women across the country went to bed last night thinking about their spouse
— most of them still in love, and not worried about how he left the toilet seat
up. Last year, American families adopted about 135,000 children who needed
homes. And in the last year of complete statistics, we gave more to charity
than ever before.
The average American is not sitting in his basement,
typing on his keyboard with Cheeto dust on his fingers, watching anime porn and
leaving profane, hateful comments on a YouTube video. This is a country full of
kind, loving, hardworking, decent people who look out for their neighbors. They
haven’t gone away. They didn’t get into a fistfight in Chicago Friday night.
They were too busy doing their jobs, raising their families, and helping their
communities to get caught up in the hateful sideshow engulfing American
politics.
Burn it all down? Are you crazy?
Our problems aren’t primarily the fault of “the system”
or “Washington” as a whole. They stem from the particularly petty and arrogant
folks currently running the government, most of whom will be leaving in January
2017. The next president could undo all of those far-reaching Obama executive
orders that ran roughshod over the powers of Congress. He could get rid of
Obamacare’s giant disincentive for full-time workers, so fewer Americans have
to struggle balancing two part-time jobs. But he can’t and won’t do so without
the help of voters. No problem will be fixed unless enough of the public
actually tries to solve it. Throwing up your hands and yearning for an
explosion of cathartic violence to wipe the slate clean just won’t cut it.
“Burn it down” is the easy way out. It doesn’t require
you to build anything, to prioritize, to compromise, to show patience. It’s the
instant gratification of a temper tantrum, with no concern for any long-term
consequences. It must feel good to destroy some perceived institutional source
of discontent for daring not to follow your wishes. But in so doing, you ensure
that institution will cease to exist for whatever legitimate purpose it was
created in the first place. What will replace it? You haven’t though that far
ahead.
If you’re raging at everybody, it’s because you’re too
lazy to make distinctions. “Burn it all down” is a declaration that you can’t
be bothered figuring out who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad one, who
shares your values and who doesn’t.
The example of Bernie Madoff doesn’t mean that everybody
who works on Wall Street is a crook and a fraud. Barack Obama’s blatantly
broken promises don’t mean that every politician in Washington is a shameless
liar. Ted Cruz and Alan Grayson are not the same simply because they both wear
suits and serve in Congress. That false report in Rolling Stone doesn’t mean you should assume everything you read in
print is a lie, and instead put your faith in that forwarded-e-mail from Uncle
Leo or InfoWars. One nut-job professor at the University of Missouri doesn’t
mean that every professor is a worthless charlatan spouting nonsense.
Yes, there’s a reason it came to this. Those angry people
painting with a broad brush got so angry at least in part because other people
painted them with a broad brush first. Radical feminists depict all men as
sexual harassers, creeps, and irredeemable misogynists. Gun owners are accused
of being spree killers-in-waiting, while PTSD-stricken veterans are treated as
ticking time bombs. The rhetoric of Black Lives Matter makes all cops into
racist thugs. Those who subscribe to the Bible’s definition of marriage are
called hateful bigots, the worst of humanity, beyond the realm of decent
society. Millions of Americans feel like they’ve become suspects in their own
country, demonized and villainized.
But the “burn it down” crowd confirms all of the critics’
charges, and endorses the stereotype that so many conservatives and Republicans
spent decades trying to dispel: angry to the point of hateful, explosively
tempered, unthinking, unable to tolerate or respect dissenting views, a
fundamentally destructive force in American life.
And for what, exactly, are they fighting? Our
grandparents endured the Great Depression and World War II. Our parents ducked
under their school desks in the Cold War, enduring the threat of nuclear
Armageddon, and managed to come through mostly okay. The tumultuous 1960s, the
stagflation of the 1970s, Watergate, the L.A. riots, 9/11 . . . after all that,
this moment’s problems are what have
us calling for the system’s destruction? This
is what’s going to break us?
If you define the country by the very worst you encounter
every day, you come to conclusions such as, “this country is a hellhole, and
we’re going down fast.” Nobody cares if you burn down a hellhole, of course;
it’s already on fire. But our country is not a hellhole, and it’s high time we
stopped letting so many of our fellow citizens run around with matches and
gasoline.
No comments:
Post a Comment