My Political Last Will and Testament

We launched our international job search almost exactly one year ago. When Lee and I were first drawing up a “pros and cons” list for going overseas, one thing that I put on the “pro” list was that we would miss the presidential elections.

I was being only mildly sarcastic. I have paid only superficial attention to the campaigns. I have read analysis and commentary, but I am blissfully unaware of the debates, the advertisements, and the overall daily news grind. I was a history and government teacher for over a decade before coming here, and I’ve been a serious follower of current events my entire adult life… until now. It feels good, and it has been a substantial relief.

In fact, I even dropped the ball on being able to vote at all this year. We did the initial prep-work on getting absentee ballots, but the follow-through was one more casualty of the “hunter-gatherer” existence of daily survival that defined our first two months in China.

This blog has really been about life in China, and I haven’t had any interest in writing about politics. The elections have prompted me to write this one time, but it may not happen again. If my political interest gets resurrected, I’ll start a new blog to that purpose. That is why I titled this entry My Political Last Will and Testament.

I’m not even going to start out mentioning political parties, because that prejudices people to choose up sides right from the beginning. So I will tell you the one thing that has always mattered to me in life, which is Truth. In one sense, the age of absolute truth died in the modern era, and good riddance. Unfortunately, as humans are prone to do, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We now live in an age of relative truth, and it is killing us.

I’m an absolutist, I suppose. The term is typically used as a pejorative, to describe the intolerant and the inflexible, but I think it needs a rehabilitated definition. I don’t mean that I think I always know what is absolutely true, only that, independent of and above human opinion and prejudice, a final truth always exists. Wise people spend their whole lives not only trying to find as much of it as they can, and they know that the rest of it is out there somewhere. Even if we can’t always find all of the truth, we can get enough of it to live wisely and be free. Somewhere, deep in their minds, I think everyone knows this, but it is terrifying how deeply it has become buried. What has replaced it is a widespread certainty, among people of all political and cultural stripes, that everyone else’s truth is relative, but their own truth never is.

Recently I had yet another run-in with a full-blown conspiracy theorist. Friends have teased me about being obsessed with conspiracy theories. I’m not, except in the sense that in their increasing proliferation in the Internet Age, they have become especially egregious examples of the war on truth.

I won’t address which specific conspiracy theory it was; it doesn’t matter, and my experience has been that those who believe one conspiracy theory believe them all. What struck me most was that this individual kept insisting that “we can’t really know for sure, it is just a matter of opinion”.

Just a matter of opinion… except that he and I both knew that it wasn’t. He was in no way actually giving equal weight to other “opinions”, but only trying to thwart anyone who might try to counter his. In his mind, he clearly spoke the truth, and it was only labeled an opinion for tactical purposes. It was an “opinion” that had no reason to exist other than to legitimize his contempt for “the establishment”, and since it was "just" an opinion, he felt free of the burden of contradicting, or even knowing, all of the facts, logic, evidence, and overwhelming expert consensus that stood against him.

And that effectively summarizes what I fear is becoming of our culture and our politics, in the United States and elsewhere. Truth is opinion, and opinion is truth. Politically speaking, we are becoming a nation of conspiracy theorists. We have given ourselves licence to make up our own truths, and it will bring us to ruin. Just this week, I read a profound statement (from a book I may get back to writing about later).

“A society in which no one is prepared to tell the truth, whether about historical events, small or large, or commercial transactions, individual or corporate, cannot prosper”

Surprisingly little of my political dismay is tied up in traditional “issues”. I’ve always felt that a citizen of a democracy has two core responsibilities, to vote his or her informed conscience, and to accept the will of the majority even when they don’t like it. Both political parties have much in their traditional platforms that I can get on board with, but both are now being run by their angry activists. While good and caring people in both parties go on thinking that our elections are about government policies, programs, and issues, the real fight is over truth. Sadly, both see extremists of the other side as mortal threats to our society, but they excuse their own side's extremists as harmless eccentrics.

I get most angry at the Left. That doesn't inherently include Democrats, and the only political party I was ever actually registered in was the Democratic Party. However, it is the Left that has the philosophical affinity with the historical sources of modern “relative truth”. Marxism asserted that all accepted truth is really just the self-justifying propaganda of the ruling elite. Deconstructionism, which similarly holds that all truth is relative, takes it so far that a person can’t even own their own thoughts, since their own words can be twisted and reinterpreted to any new meaning. These ideas, and their cousins, have trickled into every corner of our culture. They have given opportunistic people the opening to make all truth into mere ideology.

If any Democrats out there are now feeling offended, let me point out that there was no foreordained necessity for them to ever become so closely allied to the Radical Left. However, the Reactionary Right, instead of standing against this trend, has been infected by it. They may oppose the Left’s politics, but they have copied their methods. There was a time before either party had succumbed to the temptations of their own political fringe. The Democrats drank first and drank deepest, but the Republicans are at the well with them. The labels of “radical” and “reactionary” are tragically appropriate, as they are now permanently bound to each other. Both sides excuse the most outrageous lies, as long as they come from their own side’s propagandists.

In America, truth is very close to being wholly politicized. The Left seems intent on breaking down every single standard, value, tradition, hero, and common purpose we have ever had as a nation. Yet they offer little to replace them, and the very real possiblity that any new standards will fall to the same fate. This moral entropy is creating an absolutely toxic environment in which to raise our children, and may eliminate any hope of healthy national unity. The Right pretends that they stand against this, but mostly they have turned to the comfort of wishful thinking, clichés and jingoism. They don’t think through their ideas, they just make sure they oppose the Left.

If I were voting this year, I would vote for John McCain. However, assuming that Barack Obama wins the Presidency, I'll accept it. I don’t like his inexperience, or his ties to the Radical Left, but I’ve seen modest signs in his campaign that he is a pragmatic man. That is different that being a moderate, as the media has assured us he is, but I'll take what I can get. Perhaps he will be moderate in practice, although I doubt it. Even if he is not, he hopefully will have limited power to advance Leftist ideology. The panicking Republicans who think he is going to usher in a Socialist state need to have more confidence in the structure of our our entire government, which demands consensus at every turn. I'm hoping that there are still enough Democrats in Congress who are not radical Leftists to prevent anything too reckless. Our political system is less susceptible to great policy shifts, for better or for worse, that any other (by the same token, angry Democrats need to remember that Bush pursued the Iraq War only with the willing and informed vote of a majority of Democratic congressmen, and quit acting like he is some sort of rogue dictator).

Republicans were never going to support Obama anyway, which means that his biggest political challenge may well be facing the rage of the Radical Left if he doesn’t do what they tell him to. Of course, if we do enter a new Great Depression, all bets are off on what changes could be in store.

I’m choosing to look on the small bright side of his election, which is proving to the rest of the world what we Americans have known all along: that we are the world’s most open and tolerant society, where anyone can grow up to be President.