Cassandra and the Horse
CASSANDRA AND THE HORSE
By Deborah Long
“You can’t reason people out of a stance they weren’t reasoned into in the first place.” - Robert Sapolsky
I rarely read far-right propaganda because it depicts a world gone mad, a belief system that is fundamentally immoral, a world where no contrapasso, no just punishment, can exist. It is the road to hell, paved with bad intentions – a road where greed and intellectual sloth are its lampposts and loss of moral principles and compromised ideals are its alleyways.
When I was 12, I was given a book entitled, “The Gods of Mount Olympus” for my birthday. I still have it to this day. It shaped my worldview in ways I only came to realize much later in life. I asked myself how contemporary religions differed from mythology. And I learned how morality is taught in the writings of other religions and exists in the cultural philosophies of people across the world. Not one of these mythologies celebrated greed or theft, but an awful lot of them rationalized it. I came to know that moral values are a product of millennia of social evolution. Chimpanzees get angry when they’ve been cheated; bonobos use sex to counter aggression. As human societies moved from hunter gatherer lifestyles to agrarian societies, social organizing principles emerged to permit groups of non-related humans to coexist. Morality is hardwired in modern Homo sapiens, but so is the tendency to game the system.
Writers can be a kind of sentinel species – canaries in the coal mine. And their stories can help shape one’s worldview. Point of view is everything. It can be a stencil that strips bare the bone to reveal the structure that lies beneath, or it can be a template that limits one’s perceptions of reality, preventing one from seeing the implications of ideas before they’re felt.
But now I feel like Cassandra of ancient Greek mythology. I see the destruction of our country at the hands of a political party that dresses in the stentorian robes of grievance and anger – a party that cultivates ignorance so that no opposition can survive – a party that has become a cultural retrovirus that disarms our political immune system. The Republican Party is now a cult, an Orwellian nightmare of newspeak, where reason is absent - where ideas are designed by the politburo at Fox News.
We have a Trojan Horse in our government. It’s not merely one man; it’s a movement that has been emerging since Richard Nixon. The Trojan Horse is American Conservatism and its handmaiden is Christian Fundamentalism. We see it in the mewling complicity of Mike Pence, and in the dogmatic absolutism of Antonin Scalia’s “originalism”. We see it in the “I alone can fix it” autocratic nonsense of Donald Trump and in the evil chainsaw hands of Steve Bannon as he promotes his “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Steepled fingers abound in American Conservatism, but not a soul seems to smell the sulfur.
How is it that nobody is shocked by a party that fights to deny healthcare to the country, presents no reasoned justification, and still gets to speak for half of American voters, many of whom have no access to quality healthcare? Why is no one astounded when the American Conservative Movement steals a trillion dollars from our national treasury for the sole purpose of greasing the palms of its oligarchs and no one demands that they explain that reasoning? And why is the Democratic Party not running against these abominable ideas instead of debating the virtues of socialism and marveling at the pluckiness of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
While this conservative celebration of greed and theft is spreading like wildfire across the world, where the Democracies that were built in the 90s are in retreat, we have bet the farm on a legal system that has been deconstructed through the GOP practice of naming toadies as federal judges while packing the Supreme Court with sycophants who leisurely stroll down the Republican road waving the Faustian bargains they signed.
It seems pretty obvious to me that any of the current Democratic candidates for president will work earnestly to enact much needed progressive legislation, but I fear that as we obsess about purity tests and policy nuance, we’re like the guy who fantasizes that he has won the lottery and fights with his wife over how to spend the money.
Nobody seems to be asking who among these Democratic candidates will be able to reason with the half of the country that believes that there are good Nazis and that greed is pretty damn awesome. Who will reason with the people who didn’t get there by reason in the first place? Progressive policies alone won’t get us to where we need to go because they can be reversed in the next election. So, who among our impressive group of presidential candidates will repudiate Republican ideas and reason with Republican voters so that American democracy can be made whole again? This is the moral imperative that the Democratic Party must address with confidence and clarity if it is to survive.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
