How could this happen? What do I tell my kids? Fair questions. It’s fair to feel anything right now, especially fear. But, if it helps...
Fair questions. It’s fair to feel
anything right now, especially fear. But, if it helps, consider that the Trump
victory isn’t entirely surprising.
America has changed very quickly in
the last 20 years or so. We’ve become much more multicultural — and have
officially said that that’s a good thing. (Since Trump supporters don’t think
it is, but are forced to conform to social expectations, they call this
“political correctness.”) Our entire lives have been transformed by information
technology, and the self-important “innovators” of the tech world seem fixated
on transforming it more and more. We’ve become less sexist and far less
homophobic. And globalization has permanently altered the ways in which
Americans can make a living.
Do we really think that all these
changes are embraced by everyone? Let’s not be naĂ¯ve.
Most white Americans over the age of
40 grew up in a world in which white supremacy was taken for granted. White,
Christian men ruled the government, cultural institutions — pretty much
everything. You didn’t have to think about it, or join the KKK; it was just the
water we all swam in.
And now? Robert Jones’s new book,
“The End of White Christian America,” says it all.
This is human nature. Some humans welcome change,
diversity and experimentation — and some fear all those things. As a group of anthropologists
at MIT have explored, this variation in human nature seems to be
evolutionarily adaptive. To have a successful population of primates, you want
some apes to go explore that hill over there, and others to guard the fire and
stay home.
America has always oscillated between
these two tendencies. The libertinism of the 1960s and 1970s led to the
conservatism of Ronald Reagan. And now the multiculturalism of the President
Obama years has led to the nativism of Donald Trump. The black president is
followed by the racist one. It’s tragic, but it’s not new. Or even surprising.
Or even unique. The same thing is
happening in Europe, where influxes of immigrants have changed what it feels
and looks like to be French or British or Hungarian. Marine Le Pen, Brexit and
the Jobbik party are the backlash to those trends.
I don’t mean to sound relativistic
here. It is morally deficient for men to treat women as less than fully equal,
or for ignorance to determine people’s judgments of others. America has always
been a nation of immigrants, and diversity is a moral and economic good. The
newfound precarity of Muslims, Mexicans and people of color must trouble all of
us who take ethics seriously.
But it’s obvious that around the
world, the zeitgeist is
shifting. We’ve had a period of globalization, cosmopolitanism and
liberalism — and now we’re entering a dark period of contraction, nationalism
and nativism. It’s like the breathing of an organism, in and out. And it’s
happening everywhere, from Paris to the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa to the
American South.
In the near future, this will mean dark times ahead.
Already, the economic aftershocks of Trump’s win are profound and far-reaching.
We will now try it their way — the way of those Trump voters who bought into
this charade of
charlatanism and misinformation —
and we will all pay the price, the marginalized most of all. Hopefully the
Trump voters will see what their choices have wrought. But probably not.
Personally, as a queer Jewish journalist, I am thrice targeted by Trump’s
know-nothing, anti-intellectual, anti-elitist and thus
anti-Semitic ideology.
His goons hound me on Twitter, and his policies will soon void my marriage
(under federal law), cause a chilling effect in my profession and unleash a
wave of Jew hatred such as I’ve not seen in my lifetime.
And I have it easy. I’m not Muslim,
or undocumented, or an African American threatened by militarized policing. I
have health insurance. I am even well-off enough to benefit from Trump’s tax
cuts.
But it’s not like all this is
inexplicable. There are many proximate causes: the endless rage of Fox News and
further-right media outlets that have long disregarded truth in favor of
conservative rabble rousing; the degradation of truth, science, education and
culture in favor of commercialized vulgarity; the siloing of America. But
beyond all those proximate causes lies human nature, and our opposing
tendencies toward opening and closing.
The arc of the universe does not bend
smoothly toward justice — it bends back and forth as populations waver between
inclusion and exclusion, cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Humans are not only
compassionate; they are also mean, and treat their kin more favorably than
strangers, or those they
perceive to be weak. I don’t know of any ethical anthropology,
Jewish or otherwise, that doesn’t have equal space for the ennobling and
degrading sides of human nature.
How could this happen? Because we are
wired this way.
And what to tell our children? That
we can rise above our wiring, that part of us still feels free, and that every
moment, in the violent, tawdry years that are to come, we have an opportunity
to go high when others go low. All of us are in the gutter, Oscar Wilde said,
but some of us are looking at the stars.
This does not mean that love will win
out. As we have just seen, hate wins sometimes. But winning is not the only
thing.
Source; http://forward.com
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