During my Fall 1962 semester of MBA studies at the University of Michigan, I took a course in international business and economics, and I recall the professor's first recommendation to the class, that we immediately and permanently subscribe to what he called The London Economist and described as the world's most competent publication on economics, business, politics, and related social issues. The masthead of The Economist reading "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress".
The professor's recommendation was wise, although in that period of my lifetime from mid-twenties to mid-eighties, I have found ignorance, especially on the political scene, seldom timid, seldom timid indeed; in fact, almost always arrogantly outspoken. An observation that has been in my mind as I try to understand whether the insanity consuming the nation is being advanced as a political ruse, which I pray; or is truly believed, a prospect that is most extremely frightening and threatening. In that regard, reading The Economist, which these days I receive online, helps me with yesterday's weekly column by the editor; helps me see, perceive, realize, understand; but far from putting my mind at ease, leaves me in great alarm. His article, scroll down.
T
Checks and Balance | The best of our coverage of American politics, delivered to your inbox every Friday |
|
|
While the president declines to concede an election that he lost two weeks ago, a debate is going on about what to call what he is doing. Is it a coup? If not, what is it? The Economist, being an internationally minded sort of place with an erudite readership, went for “low-energy autogolpe” in our story this week—an autogolpe being what happens when a president comes to power through a legitimate election and then undermines the democratic norms and institutions he relied on to win, so that he may cling on to power. The derivation is Latin American: autogolpe describes what Hugo Chávez did in Venezuela, for example. The Trump autogolpe is low-energy, because it is unlikely to succeed.
Despite his death in 2013 the late, unlamented Chávez has been placed at the centre of a giant conspiracy by the Trump campaign’s legal team. Sidney Powell, a prominent member of the crackpot legal squad led by Rudy Giuliani, alleges that voting machines designed for the benefit of Chávez changed millions of votes that would otherwise have gone for Donald Trump. It is a tortuous theory (George Soros is involved too, naturally), and not one that has been made in court, since that would require actual evidence. In fact it is so weird that it invites a question: can the people saying these things possibly believe them?
A version of this question has been posed to me again and again over the past few weeks, by people trying to understand whether elected Republicans really believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate (as 88% of Trump voters in our YouGov poll now say); or whether they are just being cynical when they dangle the possibility of a Trump win once all the court cases are settled. I am generally allergic to arguments made from one side of the political divide that people on the other side are acting cynically and, deep down, know what they are doing is wrong. If you believe that the other side does not really believe the arguments it is making, you need make no effort to understand them. No compromise is required.
While this has all been going on, I have been reading Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land”. Lexington, who reads faster than me, sat down and devoured all 768 pages in two days and then wrote a column on the book. I’m still near the beginning, where the future president, after a failed run for Congress, decides to run for the Senate. Mr Obama writes about wanting to run for a statewide office so he could try to bridge the mutual suspicion between Chicagoans and small-town Illinoisians. Both groups wanted to elect a champion, one of their own, to protect them from the other lot. Yet Mr Obama was convinced that if the two camps could somehow be introduced to each other, they would be less fearful, and find something in common.
It doesn’t end well: once in the White House this moderate consensus-seeker was slandered as a foreign-born socialist Muslim. Yet Mr Obama’s instinct, which can easily be dismissed as naive, is right. It is the separateness, the fear of the other side, that makes people want to believe that he was a threatening alien, or swallow the fantasies peddled by Ms Powell and Mr Giuliani. The former president may not have found a solution, but there is no alternative other than to keep trying.
How might it be done? Looking at how America has overcome past suspicions, the role of the army is striking. Until the Korean war, African-American soldiers tended to serve in separate units from whites. Losses inflicted by the North Korean People’s Army were so heavy that it became expedient to draft black soldiers into white units. And so the army was integrated, making it one of the first big American institutions to reject organisation along racial lines (and giving Kim Il Sung a walk-on part in the story of America’s racial progress).
The army is also one of the few places where men from Chicago’s South Side mix with men from Marion or Carbondale, in the south of Illinois. In the absence of any huge expansion of military service, which would be of questionable utility in an era of missiles in space, America may need to invent some new form of national service that mixes its tribes in a common endeavour. Otherwise they will drift farther apart, and believe madder and madder things about each other.
As ever, you can reach me at jprideaux@economist.com.
copy and paste with full credit |
|
|
