Can Americans See Only the Yin and Not the Yang?
The Yin and Yang of our ideological realities
(c) Can Stock Photo / arkela
Light and Dark. Good and Evil. What you are For and What you are Against. Yang and Yin. Today I read a very disturbing essay on the American Interest website that strongly suggests most of today’s Americans know far better what they are against than what they are for. Entitled The Stages of Negative Self-Definition by David Green, the essay begins with a quote from a 1949 Atlantic Monthly article by Archibald MacLeish.
A people who have been real to themselves because they were for something cannot continue to be real to themselves when they find they are merely against something.
Green then goes on to note that a people who have reduced their political will to “the dry negation of the will of others” leave themselves
reactive and rudderless, with nothing positive to offer. Second, and even more dangerous, the point at which millions of people surrender to negative self-definition is the point at which politics, economics, indeed the entire substance of national life, becomes imbued with a profound sense of unreality. That is the point at which the national discourse becomes dominated by negative, fearful fantasies, and power falls into the hands of whoever is most skilled at manipulating those fantasies.
Green then claims that our just-concluded presidential election demonstrates the American people have defined themselves negatively in this fashion. They know what they are against, but not what they would be willing to support.
Can this possibly be true?
The Current Confused State of the American Psyche
Green is absolutely correct about the implications of knowing only what you are against and not at all about what you are for. A condition like that reflects a fearful uncertainty about what is real and what is not. But is his claim about the American people being in this state truly accurate? Have the American people lost the Yang of the world for all the Yin staring them in the face?
There is a lot of evidence that this is in fact the case. The first piece of evidence is from exit polls indicating people cast their votes for Donald Trump not so much as support for him, but as a repudiation of Hillary Clinton in particular and of America’s political, economic, media, and academic elites in general. Below is a video of an IntelligenceSquared debate on the culpability of the elites. This debate took place sometime in September of this year, prior to the election.
Yet another piece of evidence comes from the way in which the American electorate has lurched back and forth between the political parties over the last four election cycles. It began with the rejection of the results of the George W. Bush administration causing the election of Barack Obama in 2008, which also saw control of both the House and the Senate by Democrats. Then followed the repudiation of Democratic policies with the election of a GOP House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. These events were then succeeded in 2012 by Obama’s reelection with the Republicans losing eight seats in the House and two seats in the Senate. The electorate reversed course yet again in the 2014 midterms with the GOP capturing the Senate and retaining the House with a pickup of 13 seats. Finally, in 2016 the American electorate showed a little bit of consistency by retaining Republican control of House and Senate, albeit with Donald Trump winning the presidency with a minority of the popular vote; Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by an almost three million vote margin. This electoral history since 2008 bespeaks a very confused American electorate.
All that most of the electorate is sure about is they do not at all like what is happening to their country. Evidence for this can be found in any of a number of right track/wrong track polls, like the RealClearPolitics poll below.
Image Credit: Real Clear Politics
The Search for What Is Actually Real
Of course, not all Americans are so confused about the nature of reality. Both neoliberal (also erroneously known as conservatives) and progressive intellectuals are willing to express their pictures of reality to anyone willing to pay attention. Will either side ever become doubtful about some fundamental part of their ideology? Particularly interesting are the progressive convictions of most academics in the universities and of most of the news media, as they are the backbone of the elites, not just of the United States but of the West in general, that have ruled for most of the time. Politicians tend to be the implementors and facilitators of the academics’ ideas, while the news media are the sales force.
Even in times of Republican rule in the U.S., institutions of progressive technocratic governance (executive departments, the Federal Reserve, the ICC, the FCC, etc.) that have accreted over almost a century have held sway. Will progressives ever begin to suspect the bad economic results of the West in general might have something to do with their dirigiste policies?
Yet, the general public remain confused about what the underlying causes of their misery might be, as demonstrated by their lurches back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. In the past most of them did not have either the time or the inclination or both to seriously study what is causing what. They depended on news media (or others) to inform them, and those sources usually gave short, biased summaries of the facts. Until relatively recently historically, it was not easy to get sources of detailed information without great expenditures of time. Hence the public’s dependence on intellectuals to discover the nature of reality and on the media to publicize it.
The total dependence of the public on elites to explain what is happening may be changing, thanks to technology. Members of the public will still have to possess the motivation to search for relevant information and think about what they discover. Hopefully that motivation will be provided by their very misery, if not their curiosity. However, because of the internet, they will no longer require large investments of time to travel back and forth to a library or a bookstore to obtain and filter through detailed information. Instead, as long as they have a computer with an internet connection, they have immediate access to a copious wealth of information and data. Not only is the internet a seemingly infinite source of information, but it also has built-in filters such as search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Detailed sources of economic data can be found at the websites for the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED) or for the World Bank. Other websites providing information on politics, economics, foreign affairs, and national defense can be found on my Favorite Websites page. The amount, variety, depth, and availability to the common man or woman of free information and data far exceeds what was ever available to any scholar in all history.
Human beings being what they are, not everyone will avail themselves of this magnificent resource, but many people will. Perhaps then they will discover what they are for, as well as what they are against.
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