Fear, Dread And How America Got To This Point

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearWire,

A week before Charlie Kirk’s murder, some friends and I were trying to identify the seminal events that have shaped this American century. We all lead happy lives, but the incidents we listed told a story of fear and dread.

We immediately mentioned 9/11 and the economic collapse of 2008, both of which galvanized an aching sense of vulnerability. If JFK’s assassination marked the loss of American innocence, those events symbolized the withering sense of safety and security.

We agreed that the Iraq War and COVID-19 intensified the growing belief that our government was not only incompetent but dishonest.

The BLM riots of 2020 and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol suggested that the center was no longer holding, that passionate intensity was overwhelming reason.

“Don’t forget Trump,” I said. Although most of my friends support the president, they believe that our politics would not have taken such an ugly turn if he had never stepped onto that escalator. The hatred Trump inspires in his opponents, and his relish at fighting fire with fire, have amped up the discord. Acknowledging that he has helped bring out the worst in his adversaries – and, too often, in his supporters – is not to blame him for our circumstances but to recognize that he is a singularly polarizing figure.

A friend said the rise of social media may be an even more important factor, noting how it has helped create political echo chambers in a strange space of connected loneliness that makes it harder for us to relate to others. It may still be true that “no man is an island,” but we seem to be trying. Our growing mental health crisis, especially among younger Americans, is hard to explain without reference to this phenomenon.

The fear, mistrust, anger, division, and violence – it was all there. Still, it struck us that these events were more flashpoints than triggering events, which did not adequately capture how and why our nation appears to have gone off the rails. Individuals and countries can respond to what life throws at them in any number of ways – with courage or cowardice, love or hate. The question became: Why have these and many other events unleashed darkness instead of light?

We would have needed a lot more time, and wine, to begin to answer that one. But it struck me, later, that important roots of our current crisis can be found in the unsettling ideas that have taken hold in our culture for the past few decades. Although much of this thinking has come from the progressive left – developed in academia and advanced by elite media – it has been absorbed by people of all political stripes as well as those alienated from politics.

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detailed in their indispensable book, “Cynical Theories,” the fall of communism in the early 1990s created a crisis for the innumerable scholars influenced by Marxism. In response to the discrediting of their worldview, they set out to “problematize” – i.e., find the fault – in other ideologies. This is not hard, because every system of human thought and action is deeply flawed, filled with tensions and inconsistencies. We don’t live in a perfect world. The observation made famous by Churchill, that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried,” can be applied to most of the assumptions and structures we rely on.

Emboldened by the postmodern idea that there is no truth, just versions of reality, these scholars set out to undermine every pillar of society. Pluckrose and Lindsay observed: “They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact – even when they aren’t obvious or real. This is a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality; and many others.”

In fairness, there is much to say and debate about their targets, which included religion, capitalism, American history, the nuclear family, gender roles, race, and our legal system.

But the thrust of their critiques was not aimed at building a better nation but razing the one we have – of sowing doubt without offering an alternative beyond empty slogans. We live in a world of fear in large part because they have worked to strip us of certainty about everything. It is hard to calculate, for example, the irreparable harm they have done to children through the confusion they unleashed by telling them that gender is assigned at birth. Similarly, their efforts to cast America as a despicable nation with a shameful history have made it increasingly hard for many people to harbor the love of country that is essential to building a national community.

No matter how much disruption, human beings inherently crave certainty and stability; these are the bedrocks that justify our actions. This is why the left, incoherently but necessarily, still claims it is the guardian of its chief target: truth. But if there is no truth, then there is only power. If reality is just a social construct, facts and language are merely tools that can be twisted in any way to prevail.

The further down this path we have traveled, the harder it has become to sustain a functioning democracy, which hinges on the ability of disparate people to come to common understandings to forge compromises. As we have retreated into our own versions of reality, misinformation and disinformation have run rampant in part because people (and major media outlets) feel freer to assert their own results-oriented versions of truth, and in part because each side’s truth strikes the other as deceit.

The inability of half the people to talk to, much less convince, the other half foments frustration, anger, and resentment. Lacking the tools of dialogue and persuasion, ramping up rhetoric seems the only recourse. Hence, Democrats label their opponents as Nazis and fascists as they cast every issue as an existential threat. President Trump calls his adversaries scum and insists we are ever on the verge of losing our country.

Principle bows to opportunity as each side becomes enraged when the other mimics its own egregious conduct – as we are seeing right now as conservatives embrace the cancel culture they once abhorred.

If war is the failure of diplomacy – of the ability to solve problems civilly – the political violence that is engulfing our culture is no surprise. Recent polls show that young, often university-educated students in particular, accept violence as a proper response to unwelcome speech, which reflects the spread of poisonous ideas. If Charlie Kirk’s assassination is to be a wake-up call rather than a harbinger, we must reject the nihilistic thinking advanced by reckless elites.

This is a monumental task. No single atrocity is going to flip a switch. The evidence following Kirk’s murder suggests we are more likely to embrace conflict. That said, we have one towering strength that can help us keep our Republic: the truth about our country. We are lucky beyond measure to be spending our one chance at life in the freest and most prosperous land in human history. Even as we confront our problems, we must acknowledge our many blessings that were bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Reflecting on these gifts might inspire the gratitude that can once again give flight to the better angles of our nature. If we don’t, lord help us.

J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.