The election post mortem has been conducted by hundreds of pundits, each certain of who to blame for what went wrong. Despite their differences, one thing connects them. They exhibit the human tendency to avoid accountability while accusing others of avoiding theirs. There is something in our human nature that wants to lay the ills that beset us on to a scapegoat that can be blamed and punished with the expectation that shifting the blame will somehow restore harmony and social order to society. It is nothing new.
Holy scripture tells the story of Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the serpent for all their problems. Never intended to be taken literally, the story illustrates our human tendency to blame others and deny our own faults when things go wrong. Maybe it isn’t so surprising that we have elected a man of lifelong corruption who has made an art out of avoiding accountability.
The current scapegoats are said to be educated urban professionals who use condescending language about working class people. They used to be called the coastal elite, until it was discovered that the majority of people living on the coast were not elite. The field has now been narrowed to educated urban professionals. There is one essential requirement for an effective scapegoat: it must be a minority that cannot easily defend itself. Urban professionals fit the bill nicely. It’s a generic label easy to slap on many who are said to be of the progressive leftish sort. So much the better if they can be accused of “Wokeness.”
Apparently they have caused us to fall into the pit of tribalism that did not exist in better times of national unity. We have been told that the growing cancer of tribalism eroded the unity that once symbolized the American way. That sense of national unity was based on postwar social norms of a mythical white middle class setting the standard for what it meant to be American. However well intended, marginalized people fought for their right to be recognized as full Americans without surrendering their culture or heritage. In other words we have always been a tribal nation. The American democratic promise of “unalienable rights” can be realized only with cooperative tribal commitment to create cohesion, not unanimity.
Fomenting intertribal conflict rather than cooperation seemed like a good idea to some influential public figures. It’s something I understand only partly. Public commentators, academics, columnists, and right wing radio hosts promoted intertribal conflict. They generated and provoked conflict with great success for several decades. The problem, and indeed it is a problem, is made worse by internet algorithms that confine us to bubbles of like-minded people where we enforce each others prejudices to the exclusion of civil exchanges with anyone else.
I believe a great deal of inter tribal conflict has been intentionally engineered. Electoral politics has always been about how best to appeal to different kinds of voters who self identify as members of discernible groups, usually more than one. There is nothing new in that. What is new is the network of deliberately provocative, media outlets and internet algorithms that have deliberately stoked the fires of tribalism for nefarious purposes and personal gain.
There is no scapegoat to blame or punish that will restore social equilibrium. We’ve done it to ourselves. We allowed voices of malevolent dissension to seduce us into making irreconcilable enemies of one another. We could have chosen a better way, but we didn’t. If it is a lesson we needed to learn, we have not learned it yet. Perhaps our period of purgation will last for years before we see the futility of being angrily condescending about the others whom we accuse of being condescending toward us. In the meantime it looks like we have four years of an administration unlikely to act for the greater good of the nation. The majority of voters appear to think otherwise. We shall see what happens.
May it please God that we emerge as a chastised nation, less arrogant, more committed to democracy, more fully aware that we are all made in the image of God, and accountable to each other. May we have learned to listen when others speak, especially if they are not like us. There will always be those who are smugly, comfortable, and complacent. May they not be obstacles to our collective effort in making the nation a better place for all.
I have been carrying on a lively exchange with Steve about the “meaning” of the depth of the pervasive Trump victory.
“Scapegoating” is not my interest.
I am interested in judging the extent to which this election has announced a major political and cultural realignment to which the Democratic Party blinded itself.
For what was presented as a “close election” was not close at all. What, then, rooted the depth of this misreading?
In his last major interview at age 95, Henry Kissinger commented on the 2016 version of Trump as, perhaps, the kind of accidental figure that emerges in a transition time when a collective set of “old assumptions” have exhausted themselves.
Such a figure is reactive, and, as Kissinger noted specifically about the 2016 Trump, does not necessarily have a “new vision” for the future.
We now have the 2024 Trump, still no doubt reactive, but now, so to speak, the tip of the spear for a detailed vision of the future of the country that is more diverse in both ethnicity and class than the Democrats have been, thus far, willing to admit and, as noted, decidedly misread.
So what will it take to stop insisting that nothing has called the “old assumptions” into question? How many electoral disasters will need to accumulate?
We’ll have the chance to find out beginning with the 2026 mid-terms.
Thank you for this fine prayer at the end. I’d use it as a collect at the beginning of my prayers.