A lot of people in this country don’t wanna hear the truth, and I sympathize with them on a certain level, because the truth, as it stands right now, is fucking unbearable.
Our love-hate relationship with the truth is real, but I think we need to focus more on how it affects our politics than our emotions. We have today a unique opportunity to ask “Do Americans care about America”? How would one test the hypothesis that we do or don’t care about the “American Experiment”? One way would be to allow those who oppose Americanism to do their best to undermine our commitment to it and see how many minds they can capture.
My conclusion is that a sizable majority of American minds are “in play.” On the “Right,” — a loose colloquialism that I use because others understand it as I am using it, not because I approve of the usage — is Donald Trump. Something like 40% of Americans actually believe he is qualified to be President of the United States. These people do not care about the country as a functioning polity. No one who takes “Americanism” seriously can still take Trump seriously, if they ever could. Thus, Trump creates a real opportunity to see at least one group of people who actually don’t care about the very difficult problems that our Constitution solved.
Meanwhile, the Left is no better, and, perhaps, because it claims the moral high ground, is even more dangerous. Anyone who understands leftist politics knows that it is vulnerable to hijacking. Bad people use good people’s good intentions as a smokescreen for their own purposes. Thus, the Left does best when it can find an issue that good people care about. In Marx’s day, economic oppression was the issue. Capitalists were getting too rich while workers lived in squalor. We still have inequality today, and it is getting worse, so the economic Left is gaining some traction. But the really big issue this time around is race.
Their grievance is real. Racism is America’s most intractable problem, and we should all do our part (whatever that means) to address it. But Black Lives Matter is an avowedly Marxist organization. So, it’s no surprise that, in their effort to “dismantle” racism, they are attacking the Founders of the republic. The real lives of the real Founders are the truth that we need to fear, not because it is emotionally “unbearable,” but because it is politically unstable. Point to anything in the Bill of Rights, and some Leftist asshole will tell you how it’s part of a Constitution written by slavers for slavers, so fuck it. How can we defend free speech if its greatest defenders were slave owners? Even the Electoral College, which was created in part to protect agrarian interests (which in 1789 included legal slavery) is dismissed because it protected slavery.
Everything Americans regard as “American” is enshrined in documents created by slave holders and White supremacists. So how good can those documents be? How good can America be? The 40% on the Right who think Trump should be President are joined by an ample supply of self-righteous sputniks on the Left who don’t understand what makes America tick any better than their Trumpist counterparts. The truth may be that America’s Founders were flawed, but the bigger truth is that America needs its myths to survive. So, the truth damn well better be “bearable,” because, truth be told, we need to bear it.