To believe in democracy, you must believe that, given enough accurate information, the majority of the people will in the long run do the right thing.
Now there are a few moving parts in that statement. First, if you can't get accurate information, if there exists no common agreed-upon reservoir of facts available to the people, the whole thing falls apart. If you can believe whatever you want to believe, if we achieve the relativist Utopia where all notions must be equally (which is to say not very) respected, then you might as well retreat into a solipsistic cocoon with your Netflix subscription until the lights blink out. Not even Orwell imagined the locution "alternative facts," but when backed into a corner on a Sunday news show, paid propagandists will say what they have to in the hope that someone will nod along.
Some always will, because it's easier than risking the cognitive dissonance that can come with challenging your own assumptions. As weird as it may seem, I actually encountered some people defending the concept of alternative facts Sunday morning. "Alternative facts are what you believe," a correspondent wrote to me, in all apparent seriousness. And it goes without saying you believe whatever services your worldview, regardless of the evidence before your lying eyes.
Yes, it's sometime hard to contemplate the possibility that maybe you've got a little homework to do and you can't just crib your philosophy from people wearing make-up on your favorite cable shout show. That's what's brought us to this point, and that's what might have us, a few months from now, huddling around tire fires waiting for King Clovis' largesse.
And then there's "in the long run," which implies that all the people can get fooled some of the time, and that it takes a while for corrections to be made. Well-intentioned people can make mistakes, especially when dealing with actors willing to subvert their trust. Chances are we will get fooled again, even as we pretend to cynicism. The important thing is to face up to our errors and misjudgments, to bank the experience and learn from them. But again, it's on us to keep this republic if we can.
And finally, there's the question of determining exactly what's the right thing to do. For that you're going to need a developed conscience, a moral center, the intuition that there's something larger than yourself. You have to be able to imagine that other people have a full complement of feelings, that they exist even when you are not considering them and that they have as much capacity for happiness and are as subject to just as much pain and disappointment as you are. The right thing is rarely the thing that maximizes your personal benefit.
To believe in democracy, you have to believe that sacrifice is not only inevitable, but that it is a necessary and important civic service. You need to take a little joy in voting yourself a higher tax rate if you understand it means someone else's kids will have health care or a better education. It doesn't work if everyone pursues a Randian program of self-interest above all.
So I have a difficult time believing our president is really a democrat. Or really a republican. In the best case, I think he's a pragmatist who probably has some genuine interest in his country. But I believe he believes the convenient (for him) fiction that whatever is best for him is automatically best for America. I believe he lacks the instinct to sacrifice any perceived advantage for the greater good, precisely because what he recognizes as the greater good perfectly conforms to what benefits him. (L'etat c'est moi, he might say, were he given to using fancy foreign phrases.)
In this I don't think our president is so different than a lot of us; we act selfishly most of the time while telling ourselves that this is simply the way the world works, that everybody pursues their own interest and the tensions of competition help bring about a reasonable outcome for most. Most of us give grudgingly most of the time, and only in exchange for some perceived benefit (even if it's only to feel good about dropping a few quarters in a Salvation Army kettle or to get the homeless guy to walk away). This doesn't make us bad people. It makes us human. Most of our affairs are transactional, and it's only smart to make whatever bargains we can.
Whatever you might think of the president's business acumen, it's clear he understands how deals are made and power is leveraged. But there's a difference between running a for-profit operation and a big country. Regardless of how much we pay in taxes--regardless of how much we give to political candidates and causes--we all own the same stake in the country and our president is charged with doing his best for all or us. What Donald Trump needs to understand is that a citizen's worth is not proportionate to a financial footprint, but that in this sense at least we are all equal, deserving of the same full complement of rights.
And if I am optimistic about anything, it's that our president does not seem dogmatic or ideological or even much interested in any philosophy. Which means that he might be diverted from the early course his handlers and advisers seemed to have staked out. If we the people demonstrate to the president that the rolling back of civil rights is a losing proposition I don't think he'll have much trouble abandoning the alt-right opportunists with whom he's made common cause.
Which is why there is some utility in demonstrations now, in pushing back against the rhetoric and the intimations of authoritarianism apparent in the first days of this administration. We cannot accept lies presented as truth, or a president who holds himself above the law. Last week Trump squandered a chance to reach out to those made anxious and fearful by his election, but it will not be his last chance to do the right thing. We should give him every opportunity to learn his civics lessons.
And we should never forget who we are. We should never tip our hat to a king or credit his delusions.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/24/2017