Myth Rules America

America is a nation of believers. Americans may not always be right, but they are seldom in doubt. The current mood of the country is that experience is nothing; change is everything. If at first you don’t succeed, try something else. We are now like men on Christmas Eve, which today means pushing the various buttons on electronic toys until we get them to work. It is all trial and error. It is a wilderness to conquer, not a manual to study. The first time politicians displease us because they have had to make a tough decision, off with their heads.
Tolerance is a product of good times; impatience is a product of bad. Belief strengthens in the face of uncertainty; doubt subsides. We are a decisive people who take action, often before we have thought very hard. Intellectuals think hard, and that leads to nowhere otherwise known as complexity, like that bridge Sarah Palin referenced throughout her VP campaign. We don’t trust complexity, because it smacks of obfuscation. It is a brier patch that no lawn mower can make into a green carpet. We want our lawns spotless; we want our universe well-ordered.
Americans know what is right, and nothing Washington does is ever quite right. Instead, it is mostly or completely wrong. Everything congress puts out looks like a Trojan horse or Mark Twain’s definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee. A congressional “horse,” no matter what, is never a winner. It is mostly a construct that is disdained by the minority members and passed with held noses by the majority. The recent health care bill was a Trojan horse to both extremes: one group would not even look the gift horse in the mouth and the others were focused on how much the other end produced.
All of this is the product of mutually opposing myths: government can and should steer the American people; government can and should get out of the way of the American people. The libertarians think they have the answer by calling for as little government as possible. Liberals believe that government can serve the people well if only the lobbyists would go away.
As David Brooks pointed out on the News Hour Friday night (May 21, 2010), the centrists have no discernible platform; the moderates have no place. Compromise is corruption. Purity is all. If you’re in the middle, you are merely indecisive. Both sets of extremists insist you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem. A pragmatist, by definition, prostitutes principles.
America seems to default to principles, even if the principle of by the people, for the people turns out to be by the rich, for the rich. And our principles are faith based, not rooted in actual fact. Libertarians trust self-interest as the governing principle; liberals trust community. We’re either all batters at the plate, or we’re all rowers in a boat. Either the parts are greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
No one is right on this, except the folks somewhere in the middle, who see life as a balancing act between individual needs and the greater good. We would surely perish as a people if we all became Gandhi or the guy whose operating principle is: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Just as a good marriage depends on compromise, not do or die, so does a good society.
Let’s get back to the middle ground where the meeting of minds takes place, rather than trying to live on the wilderness edge of extremism where self-destruction lurks and people shout of freedom out of fear of losing what they have rather than striving for a greater goodness. That means electing and supporting people as our representatives who will do the next right thing, disdain personal gain, and serve the people, not the lobbyists and the corporate giants.