But What If We're Wrong? (20 page)

I realize there's a natural response to the previous statement,
and it's the same response I would have given fifteen years ago: “This is a conscious misreading of the message. Jefferson is not claiming that all men are
literally
equal. He's arguing that all men deserve equal protection under the law, and that they are to be treated
as if
they are equal.” Which, of course, I agree with (because who wouldn't). But this technical application is not the way the principle is considered. It's mostly considered symbolically, which means it's illusionary. That's the problem. I sometimes wonder if the pillars of American political culture are really just a collection of shared illusions that will either (a) eventually be disbelieved or (b) collapse beneath the weight of their own unreality. And that would certainly be the end of everything (or at least something that will
feel
like everything to those who live through the collapse).

The men and women who forged this nation were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything. This is understandable, as they were breaking away from a monarchy. But it's also a little bonkers, since one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious
enough
and that they needed the freedom to live by non-secular laws that were more restrictive than that of any government, including provisions for the burning of suspected witches. The founding fathers saw themselves as old hedgehogs, and the one big thing they knew was that nothing mattered more than liberty. They were of the opinion that a man cannot be happy if he is not wholly free from tyranny, a sentiment that is still believed by almost every American citizen.

But how, exactly, do we know this?

It wasn't always this way. For a long time, many smart people—Plato, most famously in
The Republic
—did not automatically think like this.

“During the wars between Athens and Sparta, there were a lot of people questioning if the idea of democracy in Athens made much sense,” says Carlin. “These were guys who came in right after the Roman Republic fell who were basically wiping their brow and saying, ‘Thank god that whole experiment with people running things is over, look where that took us.' These are thoughts conditioned by what we remember. When we talk about one-man rule—some kind of dictatorship or empire or whatever—look at the examples recent history has given us. They're not exactly shining examples of how it might work out well, whether it's a Hitler or a Stalin or whoever, so we don't have any good examples [of how this could successfully operate]. But in the ancient world, they often had bad examples of democracy. Some of those guys looked at democracies the way we look at failed dictatorships. And yet, had we had, in the 1930s or 1940s, some dictatorship that was run by a real benevolent, benign person who did a really good job and things were great—and let's throw out the obvious problem of succession, of potentially getting a bad guy after the good guy—we might have a different view of all that.”

This notion, I must concede, is a weird thing to think about, and an even weirder thing to type. It almost feels like I'm arguing, “Democracy is imperfect, so let's experiment with a little light fascism.” But I also realize my discomfort with such thoughts is a translucent sign of
deep
potential wrongness—so deep that I can't even think about it without my unconscious trying to convince me otherwise. The Western world (and the US in particular) has
invested so much of its identity into the conception of democracy that we're expected to unconditionally support anything that comes with it. Voting, for example. Everyone who wants to vote should absolutely do so, and I would never instruct anyone to do otherwise. But it's bizarre how angry voters get at non-voters. “It's your civic responsibility,” they will say. Although the purpose of voting is to uphold a free society, so one might respond that a free society would not demand people to participate in an optional civic activity. “But your vote matters,” they argue. Well, it is counted, usually. That's true (usually). But believing your one vote makes a meaningful difference reflects unfathomable egotism. Even if you'd illegally voted twenty times in the single tightest Florida county during that aforementioned 2000 presidential election, the outcome would have been unchanged. “But what if everybody thought that way,” they inevitably counter. This is the stupidest of arguments—if the nation's political behavior were based on the actions of one random person,
of course
that person would vote, in the same way that random person would never jaywalk if his or her personal actions dictated the behavior of society as a whole. But that is not how the world works. “Okay, fine. But if you don't vote, you can't complain.” Actually, the opposite is true—if you participate in democracy, you're validating the democratic process (and therefore the outcome). You can't complain
if
you vote. “People in other countries risk their life for the right to vote.” Well, what can I say? That's a noble act, but not necessarily a good decision.

What's so strange about these non-persuasive techniques is that—were they somehow successful—they would dilute the overall value of voting, including the ballot of the person making the
argument. If you want to amplify the value of your vote, the key is convincing other voters to stay home. But nobody does this, unless they're actively trying to fix an election. For any lone individual, voting is a symbolic act that retains its illusionary power from everyone else agreeing that it's indispensable. This is why voters want other people to vote, even if those other people are uninformed and lazy and completely unengaged with politics. This is also why, when my son watches his first election on TV, I'll tell him that voting is a crucial, profound extension of the American experience, for all the bad reasons he'll be socially conditioned to accept (until, of course, he doesn't).

[
5
]
I am of the opinion that Barack Obama has been the greatest president of my lifetime, and by a relatively wide margin. This, I realize, is not a universally held position, and not just among the people who still think he was born in Kenya. With a year remaining in Obama's tenure,
New York
magazine polled fifty-three historians about his legacy, most of whom gave him lukewarm reviews. Several pointed to his inability to unite the country. Others lauded ObamaCare while criticizing his expansion of the Oval Office itself. But those critiques remind me of someone looking at the career of Hank Aaron and focusing on his throwing arm and base running. It's not merely that Obama was the first black president. It's that he broke this barrier with such deftness and sagacity that it instantaneously seemed insane no black person had ever been elected president before. In fact, he broke the barrier so fluidly that a few of the polled historians suggested his blackness will eventually be a footnote to his presidency,
in the same way that John F. Kennedy's Catholicism has become a factoid referenced only by Catholics. That seems like a questionable analogy to me (and I say that as someone who's built a career on questionable analogies). The finer points of Obama's administration will wash away, but his central achievement—his straightforward aptitude at overcoming the systematic racism that previously made his existence impossible—will loom over everything else. To me, this seems obvious.

I'm very much a One Big Thing kind of guy, though, and especially with presidents. If I'm arguing about the greatest president of all time, it always comes down to Washington vs. Lincoln, and those in the Lincoln camp inevitably point to his freeing of the slaves—which, I will grant, is the definition of a One Big Thing move. But I would traditionally counter that Washington's One Big Thing mattered more, and it actually involved something he
didn't
do: He declined the opportunity to become king, thus making the office of president more important than any person who would ever hold it. This, as it turns out, never really happened. There is no evidence that Washington was ever given the chance to become king, and—considering how much he and his peers despised the mere possibility of tyranny—it's hard to imagine this offer was ever on the table. It is, I suppose, the kind of act that
seems
like something Washington would have done, in the same way he seems like the kind of fellow who wouldn't deny that he iced a cherry tree for no reason. Washington's kingship denial falls into the category of a “utility myth”—a story that supports whatever political position the storyteller happens to hold, since no one disagrees with the myth's core message (i.e., that there are no problems with the
design
of our government, even if that design
allows certain people to miss the point). You see the application of other utility myths during any moment of national controversy. Someone will say or do something that offends a group of people, so the offended group will argue that the act was unpatriotic and harmful to democracy. In response, the offending individual will say, “Actually, I'm doing this
because
I'm patriotic and
because
I'm upholding democracy. You're unpatriotic for trying to stop me.” Round and round this goes, with both sides claiming to occupy the spiritual center of the same philosophy, never considering the possibility that the (potentially real) value of their viewpoint hinges on the prospect that patriotism is not absurd and democracy is not simply the system some wig-wearing eighteenth-century freedom junkies happened to select.

Here again, I must reiterate that
I am like this, too
. When I claim that Obama is the finest president of my lifetime, I'm using criteria I've absorbed without trying, all of which are defined by my unconscious assumption that the purest manifestation of representative democracy would be the best scenario for the country and the world. This is, in fact, what I believe. But I don't know why I believe this, outside of the realization that I can't really control my own thoughts and feelings. When I see a quote from Plato that condescendingly classifies democracy as “charming” and suggests democracy dispenses “a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike,” my knee-jerk reaction is to see this as troubling and unenlightened. But Plato is merely arguing that democracy is a nice idea that tries to impose the fantasy of fairness upon an organically unfair social order. I'm not sure how anyone could disagree with that, myself included. But if you're really into the idea of democracy, this is something you reject out of hand.

On those rare occasions when the Constitution is criticized in a non-academic setting, the criticisms are pointed. It's often argued, for example, that the Second Amendment is antiquated
65
and has no logical relationship to the original need to own a musket in order to form a militia, or that the Fourteenth Amendment's extension of personhood to corporations has been manipulated for oppressive purposes.
66
The complaints suggest we tweak the existing document with the intent of reinforcing the document's sovereignty within the present moment (because the present is where we are, and no one would ever suggest starting over from scratch). But sometimes I think about America from a different vantage point. I imagine America as a chapter in a book, centuries after the country has collapsed, encapsulated by the casual language we use when describing the foreboding failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588. And what I imagine is a description like this: The invention of a country is described. This country was based on a document, and the document was unassailable. The document could be altered, but alterations were so difficult that it happened only seventeen times in two hundred years (and one of those changes merely retracted a previous alteration). The document was less than five thousand words but applied unilaterally, even as the country dramatically increased its size and population and even though urban citizens in rarefied parts of the country had nothing in common with rural citizens living thousands of miles away. The document's prime directives were liberty and representation, even when 5 percent of the country's population legally controlled
65 percent of the wealth. But everyone loved this document, because it was concise and well composed and presented a possible utopia where everyone was the same. It was so beloved that the citizens of this country decided they would stick with it no matter what happened or what changed, and the premise of discounting (or even questioning) its greatness became so verboten that any political candidate who did so would have no chance to be elected to any office above city alderman. The populace decided to use this same document forever, inflexibly and without apprehension, even if the country lasted for two thousand years.

Viewed retrospectively, it would not seem stunning that this did not work out.

Now, do I have a better alternative here? I do not. If George Washington truly had been offered the chance to be king, I am not of the opinion that life would be better had we handed him the crown, since that would mean we'd currently be governed by some rich guy in Virginia who happens to be his distant nephew. It often seems like a genteel oligarchy would make the most theoretical sense, but the fact that this never works in practice (and the fact that they never remain genteel) contradicts that notion. Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can't think of one person who'd qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson. I'm not looking to overthrow anybody. The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously. I'm not Mr. Robot. And I'm not saying we're “wrong” for caring about the Constitution or separating the powers of government or enforcing an illusion of equality through the untrue story of how democracy
works. I'm just working through my central hedgehog thought, which is this: The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.