The past year or so I’ve received a number of criticisms challenging my point of view on current politics, my recounting of history or my sense of disbelief or outrage over a particular event. I’ve always taken these comments seriously, thinking that maybe the reader just might be right. I have tried to learn from them and understand the reasons for their point of view. It is more than interesting to me that these arguments are predictably repetitious, complaining about the threat of a socialist takeover brought on by a conspiracy of forces on the left.
These angry critics rail against the socialist Democrats, the Neo-Marxists, biased social media (Facebook etc.), television and print media, google, the elitists, universities and power brokers in all sorts of industries. Accordingly, all these forces share the same goal of moving the United States to the left, destroying capitalism and installing an authoritarian, if not totalitarian, government in Washington, D.C. It is a remarkable picture of all these disparate groups coming together for the same purpose, to undermine the Constitution and destroy over two hundred years of American individualism. Somehow we’ve learned how to “herd cats.”
The truth is that the United States has never been a model for textbook capitalism or laissez-faire economics any more than it has been a democratic country beholden exclusively to the votes of its citizens. America is and continues to be “a leap of imagination”* pragmatically tinkering with its politics, economics and social relationships to meet changing conditions and new challenges. And it has always worked. What’s puzzling, perhaps, is that it mirrors what each of us wants to see when we take a look.
But what about these charges that the critics are so enthusiastically putting forth about the destruction of their beloved country? What I find most interesting is that they almost never address the most obvious, glaring issues such as the atrocities of the Trump administration, the storming of the Capitol on January 6 or the refusal of the former president and his supporters to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. On the rare occasions when they do, they downplay the events as being over hyped by the media or not that serious. Or they sometimes suggest that the Black Lives Matter riots in the cities were worse than what happened on January 6, 2021.
I must ask whether Republican representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and other critics of the Capitol assault are fellow travelers for the Neo Marxists? Are George Will, members of the Lincoln Project, the ten Republican House members who voted for impeachment etc. all carrying water for the vast leftist conspiracy to destroy the America that never was? Did Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman and others give false testimony about what they saw happen during the Trump administration? Are they all in cahoots?
This all played out on television, day by day, as the actual events unfolded. We saw it!
* Quote from Ian Frazier, On the Rez, 2000.