In Praise of Living Uncomfortably

I watched an episode of the Rubin Report from a year ago in which Dave Rubin interviewed actor Richard Dreyfuss. The reason Dreyfuss appeared was to flog his book: One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know. From the Amazon precis:

We’ve let the meaning of America be reduced to guesswork. It might not be too late. Our democratic republic is failing, and it shouldn’t be a surprise. We can’t fly a plane without training; we can’t practice medicine without attending medical school. And yet we expect the American people to wield the full power of their citizenship, the product of the most revolutionary governmental thinking in human history, without any education. We no longer teach our children the Bill of Rights or Constitution. We don’t teach the Enlightenment values that underpin them. We don’t teach the critical thinking skills and mental agility necessary for our own sovereignty. We’ve stopped teaching civics, and now we can’t have a civil political discussion. The American experiment may fail if we don’t act.

Given the intensity of my current worries about the Republic, and my personal outrage at the insults to the Constitution, listening to Dreyfuss gave me pause. His own personal story is from the Left. His family and friends were avowed communists. But his version of American communism was decidedly inept and hypothetical and not at all the raging menace of the Comintern. He feels that traditional Americanism was strong enough to withstand the broad disagreements between Communism and Capitalism and to benefit from the push and pull. Dreyfuss felt that American communism arose quite understandably from the poverty of its adherents as a desire to make their lives better, to make the system work better for them.

His pitch is not for one political movement to win over another, it is that the system created by our Founders in America is a system where multiple political movements could coexist, and the debate between them would benefit everyone. Today, such coexistence is in question. And the fact that there is even a question of coexistence is worrisome.

Here I will depart from my recollection of what he said to extend his thoughts in a direction his comments took me: Our national motto -- E Pluribus Unum (From many, one) -- is a recognition of a stable plurality, not a goal of eliminating plurality. When you eliminate plurality you have a totalitarian state. That is the end point of "winner take all, forever" politics.

The very genesis of this website, Ricochet, is for civil discourse on politics. But our debates sometimes devolve to the level of the current "national conversation" -- that is to say, it is no conversation at all. It is easy to see factions develop on various issues. What animates each commenter is the belief that their thinking, analysis, or outlook is more correct than the alternative. And we lose sight, in so doing, that it is the conversation that will lead to outcomes that, if not ones with which we are entirely comfortable, are most likely to sustain and improve our society.

This is a hard thought to hold on to. It is particularly difficult if you believe that you are the one who must always compromise, your positions are the ones that routinely lose, and the outcomes are destructive of the society in which you and your children should live. For this reason, I struggle. I worry about America and its future. Dreyfuss is worried, too.

How do we differentiate between natural societal evolution and a drift into totalitarianism? It is the Bill of Rights. If we shout loudly and argue fiercely, but uphold our Bill of Rights, we'll be okay. If our governments and our courts will not respect and defend the rights of individuals set forth in the Bill of Rights, it does not matter what political theory is being pursued, it is totalitarian.

No matter our political views and preferred policies, the antecedent question is, do your views and preferences uphold the Bill of Rights? If they do, then the outcome is, at a minimum, livable and may actually be beneficial. A welfare state is constitutional -- we can decide as a people how much we will pay for government and its wealth redistribution. A communist/socialist state is not -- it commands the means of production. Debate -- even heated and hateful -- is constitutional; censorship -- even of bad ideas -- is not.

With the foregoing in mind let me also call your attention to recent comments by Candace Owens. Nellie Bowles in her TGIF column in The Free Press includes this item:

Candace Owens, a star conservative commentator now building her own media company, argues that it was a mistake for the U.S. to enter World War II. When a journalist asks to confirm this, saying: “So, you think that America shouldn’t have gone into that second world war?” Candace replies: “Yeah, and that is a radical statement. People don’t know how to deal with that because we’ve all been so brainwashed by the school system to believe that ‘Look how great things are. . . . ’ This whole idea of international liberalism—now it’s not just about your problems, it’s about solving the world’s problems. Let’s make sure that in Pakistan there’s a trans flag waving. No.” So, England should have fallen to the Nazis. Because otherwise we get The Trans Flag. This is where the new right is at. They believe World War II was a mistake; the Nazis would have been fine controlling Europe, which is none of our business anyway; and when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor we should have said, “Thank you! Hawaii always seemed gay to us too! Men wearing necklaces made of flowers?!” Thanks for bravely saying what no one else will dare to, Candace.

If you go to the linked video from the quote you can verify that Candace actually said that. But if you watched the interview you will see what Candace (IMO) is saying: "Things are such a mess now with global governance and endless war, shouldn't we reexamine the decisions made in the 20th century to understand how we might have prevented things evolving to where they are? I don't know the answer. I know that you have to fight wars. But could we have fought them differently, pursued different strategic objectives, picked different allies than we did?" Candace is married to George Farmer, son of Michael Farmer who sits in the British House of Lords. So I don't think Candace wanted Nazi Germany to win the war. And it is unclear how we could have avoided fighting the Axis Powers given the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war in response to our declaration of war against Japan.

But reconsidering the implications of Manifest Destiny policies and envisioning a different rollout of history is not the worst idea. It lives in the counterfactual. But thinking through how things might have been different is useful in examining which options we have in the here and now. This is an example of plurality.

If the ideas are bad they need both to be heard and demonstrated in debate to be bad. If our debates are rigged, we need to find a way to un-rig them, not substitute one rigging for another. In other words, we need to embrace being uncomfortable. The greatest tool in the totalitarian's toolbox is chaos -- chaos that makes men beg for normalcy even at the loss of autonomy. The greatest defense against giving into those feelings and empowering the totalitarian is to learn how to live with uncomfortable ideas and difficult people, to understand that that is the price of liberty.