There is a particular practice at the event of meeting another person that, once I became aware of it, and more importantly, found I had not a pleasing or simple reply, seems to me to be quite vulgar and petty. I’m talking of course of the question, “What do you do?” I suppose that this grew out of the industrialized middle-class of the post-war growth spurt that America underwent. I suppose also that it is a sign that we have nothing better to use a gauge of the position in society than that of occupation and industry. That doesn’t make me feel less able to embrace the practice, one that, I might add, I still find myself partaking in despite it’s objectionable nature.
There is a new version of this vulgar litmus test, I think, though perhaps it is just an older version making a comeback. The question of party affiliation is pushing itself into the early stages of casual meeting. I don’t have a good answer for that one either, yet it distresses me more than the question of industry and occupation. When one asks, “What do you do?” they are asking, “Which of many are you?” True, there are sharp divisions between the employed and the unemployed, between the wage slave and the salary-man, between the blue collar and white collar, and the hip and the square. But in the end, there are many possible answers and all are equally valid. The various ways of ascertaining one’s location on the political spectrum offer only two possibilities – Democrat or Republican. Yes there are other parties out there, but to claim allegiance to one of them is to accept exile into the wilderness of political kook-dom. There just isn’t any acceptable answer other than the party line of the left or the right. And that is, itself, unacceptable.
In the end, we are creating shibboleths for tribes within our nation based on the simplistic logic that one cannot hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind simultaneously. In today’s professional political arena it is unacceptable, for example to believe that the use of elective medical procedures as birth control is bad for the health of society, while also believing that no government can claim jurisdiction over the inner workings of our biology. Nor can one speak of the social justice of granting the full financial and property privileges extended in spousal relationships to anyone who issues a public, legal declaration of their fidelity to another while also believing that those who habitually engage in sodomy are sinning against God and cannot enter into Heaven without first demonstrating both remorse and repentance in life. These issues, abortion and gay marriage, are the bulkheads of the tribal shibboleth, but there are others. Gun control; social security and geriatric medicine; welfare and the size of government; fiscal and foreign policy; and the myopic opinion that security is exclusive of liberty are just a few more.
Worse yet, these tribes are artificial, the concoctions of some powerful groups – both in wealth and influence – that seek to subvert the democratic principles of the republic through the deliberate, systematic, and organized advancement of their own agenda of social morality, legal interpretation, and cultural landscaping to create an environment that secures their place in the power hierarchy and assures profitable operation of business while remaking the world in the image of their ideal. I reject the proposition that the State and its Officers of Honor, Trust and Profit – as the Constitution calls members of Congress, Justices of the Supreme Court, Secretaries and Ambassadors, and the President and Vice-President – should be viewed as resources, capital, labor, or capitalists to be mixed with the elements of the marketplace in general. The ramparts between Market and State should be no less imposing and well guarded than those between Church and State. Treason and Bribery are specifically named together among the gravest offenses against the Constitution for a reason, I suspect. Yet the financing of campaigns by those who seek political favors or influence in return is somehow not perceived by the press or the people as bribery. We would do well to consider why that is.
This artificial tribalism, whatever its source, isn’t merely annoying it’s dangerous. It is being advanced in the same manner as the advance of such wonderful gifts to humanity as Communism and National Socialism. By seeking out a sufficiently large group that is dissatisfied by the current reality, and making them promises of privilege, authority, and power to gain their support, and wrapping it all up in a packaged kit complete with philosophy, science, theology, vocabulary, and metaphor these fake tribes afford to those seeking power the illusion of democratic republicanism while providing willing troops to storm the institutions of the Constitution to strip from them the implements of power and clearing away the obstacles to the advance of the market and the various dogmas of the cloister leaving only the ornaments.
They are very good at what they do, no doubt, as the last 15 years have shown, bringing first the Democratic Party, and then the Republican Party to strong positions of power in Washington. But ultimately they are bad for America, and for Americans, as shown by the decline of society in general over the same time which has progressed unabated – growing, increasingly brutal prison populations; the chasm between rich and poor; the decline in the quality of education at all levels; the inability to deal with illicit drug sales and addiction; the existence of homelessness, poverty, and hunger in the wealthiest nation on the planet; the capitalization of health care to the point that those in the poorest health are least able to afford it; the unopposed evisceration of civil liberties since 11 September 2001; and the dramatic failure of government in September 2005 each are indications that government has failed to fulfill its most basic duty to the people, that of protecting the weak from the wicked as they are strengthened to provide for their own protection.
Government, and those human beings that make up the political class and the bureaucracy, has forgotten that it exists at the pleasure of the people, not in spite of them. We the people, on the other hand, have blessed these pirates of liberty with our tacit acquiescence to their schemes and our active embrace of the obsequious conceit that we, and the ideas we hold in great esteem, deserve to be represented by more than our one Congressman and two Senators in Washington in exchange for our consent that they ought to be courted by those whom they do not represent but who seek power for the sake of power or profit and use mercenary advocates to secure that additional representation.
It has been a long time since the people of this nation were challenged to think first of duty, and then of their market or religious or ideological affinities. Consequently, we have lost much in the last decades – of our innocence, of our dignity, of our soul; but we cannot accept the long, slow, gradual descent without markers or signs away from the city on the hill shining as a light to the world that comes from selfishness and decadence. We must once again face ourselves, our neighbors, our children, and our future with the humility and discipline that comes from self-knowledge and tend to our nation’s hearth. We must demand from our electees their highest, most noble efforts, and we must accept nothing less. We must discern in our own wants those that are proper and fit for delegation to the government, and reserve all others from them, especially those of ideology, theology, and the market. We must reject the either/or proposition of simple-minded, single-serving, inflammatory rhetoric and destroy the shibboleths of faux-tribes. We must be what many of us have never conceived, an American demos that takes ownership of all the estates of government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Duty requires nothing less.