The United States of Leviathan

            Illustration by Michael Crawford for The New Yorker.

Starting in the late 1980s, I began to become disenchanted with the Great American Narrative, i.e., the story that we, as Americans (whether politically or socially Conservative or Liberal), tell ourselves about ourselves and others. Which is to say, I began to notice the disconnect between that narrative and (1) how our government actually treats its own citizens and (2) how it interacts with the rest of the world. Since we call our political system a "representative democracy," I felt (and still feel) that I had something at stake in these matters.

It was, for me, a "rude awakening." By the mid-1990s, I had become a trenchant critic of American politics and culture (I won't call it "civilization"). Having done my best to go with the flow of the prevailing Zeitgeist, I became, in addition, disenchanted with myself. Was I just another "ugly American"? In several respects, I could only answer that question in the affirmative. In part consciously and, in part, unconsciously, I began to look for alternatives to the snake oil served up by the news media, the entertainment industry, Christianity, the Warfare State.

Three decades later, I hear friends and acquaintances bemoan the present state of things: "This is not the country I grew up in!" they say. "Oh, but it is," I reply. "Where have you been?"

Where have they been? Drinking the Kool-Aid, sleepwalking through their lives. 

 

I wish I could believe that, now, with Donald Trump in the White House for the second time, my fellow subjects of Leviathan can recognize the disconnects that shocked me into consciousness and, finding their moral compass, will muster the courage it takes to follow its direction. 

But so long as they think of Donald Trump and his ilk as aberrations, I know that they are still drugged with food color and saccharine. 

For Trump and Trumpism are no aberrations, but the fulfillment of an American character rooted in the founding moments of the American "experiment": the rapacious capitalism that resulted in the Virginia plantation (Jamestown, 1607) and the sanctimoniousness of the Massachusetts Bay settlement (Plymouth, 1630). 

Donald Trump is, as the saying goes, as American as apple pie.

 

Just like the Gaza genocide the Biden Administration promoted and funded and that the Trump Administration continues to promote and fund. This is no aberration: it is the American Leviathan acting in the world.

 

And it will not stop without massive internal protest and/or outside intervention. Why not? Because, as Thomas Hobbes noted (1651):

To have done more hurt to a man, than he can, or is willing to expiate, enclineth the doer to hate the sufferer. For he must expect revenge, or forgivenesse; both which are hateful (Leviathan, Part I, Ch. XI). 

But there will be no massive protests here or in Israel, for many of the best among us lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

   And so it goes.