22 November 2024
Since the Trump election, the zeitgeist in my media-sphere* — call it the liberal media if you have to – is all about taking-a-long-hard-look-at-ourselves-as-a-nation. There is the very real dread and the democratic soul-searching and the data-mining and poll-questioning, and the finger-pointing and the circular firing squads and the group therapy sessions, and the punditry, and the oligarchs and kleptocrats scrambling for power and the vulnerable and politically exposed scrambling for cover. And then there is the need to look beyond the election cycle or the last four years, to identify some historical context. Timothy Snyder, a crucial voice in this moment, writes, “There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction.” So, I’m home on a rainy November evening clutching a little cherry-red hardcover book with words elegantly embossed in gold on its spine: Resistance, Rebellion and Death, a set of essays published posthumously in 1960 by one Albert Camus.
It’s the first essay in the collection that draws my attention: Letters to a German Friend. The first of the four letters that make up Camus’ essay is dated July 1943 – shortly after the allies overthrew Mussolini, a turning point in the war. The last letter is dated a year later, July 1944, when allied troops were fighting their way from Normandy to Paris. The letters are a philosophical repudiation of fascism; the tone suggests that Camus sees on the horizon the end of the Nazi Reich and imagines a time when he might soon confront again his pre-war German friend.
Camus writes, “You said to me, ‘in a world where everything has lost its meaning, those, who like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find a meaning in the destiny of our nation must sacrifice everything else.’” What follows is Camus’ vehement “No” – a poetic argument against the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Nazis and in favor of the greater cause, not only of French liberation from the Nazis, but of human liberation from tyranny.
“There are means that cannot be excused,” Camus begins. “And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for my country, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep my country alive by keeping justice alive.”
Last winter, as an antidote to anxiety and depression, my wife urged me to get in touch with an old childhood friend. We’ll call him Daniel. I reached out, and it was indeed good to hear the voice of an old friend. He was wrapping up a long career as an IT security consultant and trying his hand at raising sheep and vegetables on a little homestead in north Georgia. We’d had adolescent adventures together, been at each others’ weddings, and now, years later we found we shared a passion for permaculture gardening. We scheduled weekly calls.
It was comforting at first. But after a few weeks, strange fissures appeared, small hints that our worldviews had somehow diverged. I’ve devoted much of my life to working for climate justice and human rights. Daniel lauded my commitment, but…climate change was a hoax, he said – a conspiracy of the world’s scientists to profit from some global techno-fix. Then: the COVID vaccine was a bioweapon, he said, designed, along with Fauci and the Biden administration’s COVID mask mandate, to subdue and control the population. The sensitive subject of gender came up: kids are going trans and nonbinary, he said, at the hands of pharmaceutical companies and the corrupted public education system. I could not agree.
I was rattled. This all rang to me as Fox News and Q-anon propaganda. I suggested he look at different news sources – the New York Times, CNN, Naomi Klein. No go. He trusted Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan more than the Times and the lamestream media. The Times, he argued, is beholden to its liberal audience and its corporate sponsors; Tucker Carlson may not have all the answers, but at least he’s independent, he said. As for Naomi Klein, he said, she’s elitist, arrogant and condescending, and – deploying that most misogynist term for women with strong opinions – shrill. Finally, he told me, he was going to vote for Trump, and if I knew what was good for the country, so would I.
It felt, to use Naomi Klein’s own term, as if my oldest friend had been replaced by a dopplegänger. My friend was attempting to drag me into the mirror world where truth is relative and facts are slippery, where scientific consensus is conspiracy, where education confers only arrogance and difference is a threat.
My dopplegänger Daniel is Jewish, as am I, by birth if not by faith. When the already difficult conversation turned to Israel’s war on Gaza – just a few months and a few thousand deaths in at that point – we reached the end of our friendship.
My sickness over Gaza was not about the Israeli hostages or Hamas’ massacre of innocent Israelis, though that was part of it. My sickness over Gaza was the unfolding genocide of Palestinians with the material support of the Biden administration.
“Trump will finish the war in Gaza,” Daniel said.
“Yeah, by obliterating Gaza,” I said, aghast at the thought.
“If that’s what it takes.”
We agreed not to talk further. “Regardless of our differences,” I said at last, “I love you.” He said the same.
So, back to Camus: two old friends part ways along ideological lines. One, the German, to become a Nazi and the other, the Frenchman, to resist the Nazis. Camus interrogates the philosophical parting of ways: “Where lay the difference?” he asks. “Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man [sic] must exalt justice in order to fight against injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness.”
Today as the Trump regime builds a cabinet of serial rapists, grifters, bigots and liars, a machine with which to destroy hope and trample human rights, decency and justice, I would turn to my old dopplegänger friend and I would no longer offer him my love. Not remotely. “You disgust me,” I would like to tell him. “You make me sick.”
Many of us have our dopplegängers now. This is not a personal story about me and my friend Daniel, but about how a safe place within myself – a trusted childhood friend and all that implies – is no longer safe. Not because Daniel himself has done anything inexcusable – but because he has accepted something inexcusable.
Is it a tribal hatred? Each to our own corner to maintain our views? Or, should we try to find common ground? In the soul searching among progressives, and democrats (an important distinction), we frequently hear that we need to build bridges with the disenfranchised Trumpers; we need to meet them where they’re at. Okay – I, too, have always distrusted the government. I too, have been disenfranchised from financial and political power. I know that elites maintain power by controlling media narratives. I am no fan of big pharma. The system does not work for me.
Should I find sympathy?
To quote Camus: No. I don’t think so, not a shred more sympathy than Camus chooses to find with the Nazis who plunged all of Europe into darkness.
I turn here to the well-known saying of James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
There is today a growing disavowal of “identitarian” politics, where society is not seen as a sum of individuals, but as a conglomeration of racial, gender, and class identities. (So David Brooks suggests in last week’s New York Times – an institution that, like all institutions, merits robust and constant critique, but also, in this “post-truth” age, needs defending.) It could well be, as Brooks argues, (and Naomi Klein does as well) that identity politics has contributed to our deep divisions. But I believe it goes beyond that, and that the very opposite is true. I believe there is on the part of the Trumpers an avid disavowal of human rights in favor of supremacy and me-first-ism, the violent narcissism that has always haunted the American experiment – and that this in turn leads to a hatred of difference. The big danger here is that this violent narcissism, like a virus, spreads into even the remaining bastions of liberalism. (Democratic party, take note.) Those of us who believe that racism, sexism, able-ism are institutional problems that requires institutional solutions – what has become known as identity politics – are essentially affirming that human rights are universal, and foundational to a healthy society.
As a cis-gendered able bodied white man, my dopplegänger’s views are not rooted directly in my oppression, or denial of my humanity. But by accepting that anyone is disposable, they negate many of those I love who are trans, and queer, and disabled, and women, and immigrants from the “shit-hole countries,” so-called – and so, they negate me. My resistance to the growing hatred of difference is to affirm human rights; to declare, vive le difference! – let difference thrive! Said differently, my resistance to tyranny is to queer myself, queer my consciousness and queer my actions – and if you are anti-queer you are my oppressor, and I resist.
Camus writes from a nation filled with “humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and, above, all with humiliation of our human dignity.” He writes from a Europe gripped by fear, where “death strikes everywhere and at random.” To his German friend, he writes, “You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes… You turned your despair into intoxication, and along the way you considered it more convenient for another to do your thinking for you and for millions of Germans.”
Camus’ letters emphasize a core fact: the French resistance was slow to respond to German fascism, perhaps because of a certain moral confusion: “We were defeated in the beginning because we were so concerned, while you were falling upon us, to determine in our hearts whether right was on our side.”
This is the moment we find ourselves in: to find a way forward as a nation we need to find the compassion and understanding required to depolarize our relationships and our communities – but at the same time we need to develop the moral clarity to reject what is inexcusable.
Camus roots his resistance in moral clarity but also in a love of his nation. As a lifelong critic of US imperialism and as a pacifist (naïve, I know) this is difficult for me – but I push myself to embrace a necessary pragmatism. Timothy Snyder again:
Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments – Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard – are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.
I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform. But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement. That is simply not what is happening here. We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.
It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.
My friend, we have seen MAGA marching with torches on the streets of Charlottesville, where they killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others. We have seen MAGA in the white supremacist murders committed by Dylann Roof and many, many others. We have seen MAGA’s paramilitary fetish of guns, and greed, and violence. We have seen MAGA in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers – who you insisted to me are not anti-semitic, are not racist, are merely “citizen action groups.” Just last week men in brown shirts with swastika flags and guns marched on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. This week Trump put Sebastian Gorka, a known Nazi sympathizer, on the National Security Council, and nominated an alt right crusader to head the Defense Department. Your citizen action groups will soon be pardoned by Trump and sent to rampage on the streets again, and this time, with your blessing or your ignorance, they will rampage against my trans friends, my immigrant friends, and, I’m afraid, against you, my Jewish friend. And then you will see the monster that your acceptance of the inexcusable has set loose.
*It seems critical to refer only to “my media-sphere” and not “the media” because there is no “the media,” but rather the Fox News-o-sphere, the podcasts, and whatever you’ve trained your algorithm to show you. My media-sphere currently includes the Guardian, NYTimes, some CNN, the New Republic, the Atlantic, the Intercept, and… whatever I’ve trained my algorithm to show me, which includes Rebecca Solnit, Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, adrienne maree brown, Drew Dellinger and other very progressive very critical voices.
The Watering Hole :: Jeff Conant 