By DOUG SHAVER
January 7,m 2021
I don’t dispute President Trump’s responsibility for what happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday. But the question we should be asking is not whether he was to blame for the riots, but who is to blame for his being in a position to instigate them in the first place. Yes, the riots were the president’s fault, but whose fault was it that he is the president?
A dominant faction of the nation’s intellectual class, including academicians and journalists, has been telling us for decades that demanding justice is a sufficient excuse for everything the rioters—presumably a representative sample of Trump’s core constituency—were doing. The rioters said they were demanding justice. The immediate response will be: But it wasn’t justice that the mob was demanding; what the rioters were demanding was the nullification of a legitimate election. Right. Why were they supposed to believe the election was legitimate? The president was telling them it was a fraud. Next immediate response: But the president was lying. OK, but why were the rioters supposed to believe that?
How about: Because the mainstream press said so? Well, the rioters obviously didn’t trust the mainstream press, but since when was it considered problematic to distrust the mainstream press? The rioters would have said, “Reporters only tell you what their corporate masters want you to know.” Is that something we hear only from fascists and racists? Not the last time I checked.
And it isn’t just the press. It’s the whole system—what my generation used to call The Establishment. If you think you’re being denied a piece of the American dream, it’s because the people in charge of everything don’t want you to have a piece. You’re being left out because nobody with any kind of power wants you in. Maybe you’re the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or the wrong something else, or maybe just because there is only so much power to go around, and whatever share you could get will have come from their share. If there is anything you want but don’t have—more money, a better job, whatever—then that is the reason: Somebody who could let you have it doesn’t want you to have it, regardless of how much you might deserve it.
And now someone will say: But that’s the way it really is, for some people. Fine. And how should I respond to someone who tells me that I’m one of those people? I have barely enough money to live on, I don’t have a good job, and at my age I shouldn’t even need a job. Even so, according to the prevailing political orthodoxy, I’m one of the nation’s privileged people. We are, according to that orthodoxy, a nation divided between the oppressor class and several victim classes, and I’m in the oppressor class, which makes me privileged. But I was in the military for six years, and I saw what real privilege looks like. I even had some privileges, but I lost all of them on the day I was discharged. At least it felt that way, and it has felt that day ever since, and so these days, when someone tells me, “The people who say you are privileged are lying to you,” I may feel some tendency to believe them. When they also say, “You’re not only not an oppressor, you’re actually one of the victims of this corrupt system,” I’ll be tempted to believe that as well.
Fortunately, notwithstanding any privileges I might or might not possess because of my demographic category, I’ve also had some good luck of the sort that no political system can make happen. (It didn’t entirely compensate for the bad luck that has also come my way, but I’m trying not to make a whinefest out of this essay.) Because of that good luck, I have gotten into the habit of asking, when told that certain people are to blame for whatever I don’t like about my life situation, “Why should I believe that?” I’ve also picked up some good ideas about how to critique whatever answers I might get.
I attribute these ideas to good luck because I cannot recall a time when they were routinely a part of mainstream political discourse. I picked them up because of chance encounters with some books that were largely ignored by the mainstream press, particularly including the political press. These books discussed the values of reason, science, and humanism, so that by the time I read Steven Pinker’s book about the Enlightenment two years ago, he wasn’t telling me much that I didn’t already know.
Our nation has been guilty of some grievous injustices. So has every other nation in the world’s history. But we are not as guilty as we used to be. That is because our founding was an attempt to end some earlier injustices and to provide a means of continuing to seek out and eradicate other injustices. Our founders were products of the Enlightenment, and as such they did not imagine that they had all the answers to how the ideal society could be built. What they imagined was that they knew a thing or two about the best way to look for those answers, and one of the things they knew was how dangerous it was to allow any political faction to permanently dominate the government. Not that we should believe it because the founders believed it. We should believe it for the same reason they did: because history has confirmed it without exception.
Those who won’t learn from history will not necessarily repeat it, but it is the way to bet. We keep hearing how the founders weren’t really all that keen on democracy, and they did have some reservations about it. But, as tempted as we might be to just say, “That’s a mistake they made, and it’s way past time that we amended the Constitution to fix it,” a better knowledge of history might show us why they had those reservations and, just possibly, might convince us that they were justified. What bothered them wasn’t majority rule. What bothered them was mob rule.
We saw some mob behavior erupt last summer in Portland, Ore., and several other cities. It’s still going on in some of those cities, and it’s often been nearly indistinguishable from what happened yesterday in Washington. And always, there are apologists saying something along the lines of, “These are American citizens who cannot make their voices heard any other way.” But their difficulty is not with being heard. Their difficulty is with getting their way. Not enough candidates representing their special interests are winning elections, and they have convinced themselves, or been convinced by others, that this could not be happening unless the system was rigged against them.
Trump made this claim explicit both times he ran for the presidency. On both occasions, before the voting even started, he said there was no way he could lose a fair election. This is not logically different from the progressives’ claim that if our system of elections were really fair, then roughly half of the candidates and half of the winners would be women. The progressives’ argument, no less than Trump’s, assumes facts not in evidence. But the progressives were making arguments of that sort for some decades prior to Trump’s arrival on the political scene, and the policies they were managing to implement had much to do with Trump’s being able to achieve what he did.
I mean the sort of argument that depends on appeals to emotion with only a pro forma regard, if any at all, for reason or scientific evidence. This was the sort that the Enlightenment thinkers tried to discredit. Trump and his minions wouldn’t know anything about the Enlightenment, of course, but why would they? Most of their adversaries don’t know anything about it, either. It was barely mentioned in the schools I grew up in, usually getting only a brief mention in a class on world history. These days, judging by much of what I read, if it’s mentioned at all it gets blamed for half of the modern world’s worst problems. In a democratic society that disparages the Enlightenment, people like Trump will win elections, and his followers will riot when they lose elections. But then, it will not long remain a democratic society.