What It Is by Clifford Thompson

Author:Clifford Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

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Let’s look for a minute at that “big political divide.” In March 2016, in the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for a seat on the US Supreme Court. Garland has been called a centrist and is, in any case, no flaming liberal, and Obama’s decision to nominate him can be seen as a preemptive compromise with congressional Republicans, made in the hope of getting a nominee approved. It is tempting to say that Obama miscalculated, except that that term does not apply to a situation in which success is simply not possible. The Republican-controlled Senate, in an unprecedented move, refused to vote on the nomination, ostensibly because Obama was a lame-duck president and as such, according to logic I confess is beyond me, did not represent the will of the American people—never mind that Obama, lame duck or not, was seeking to fulfill one of the most important duties the American people had elected him to perform. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said, “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.” We all know who that next president turned out to be: a man who received less than half of the popular vote and yet got his Supreme Court nominee approved. So much for letting the American people decide.

This was not a case of “the two sides simply not talking to each other”; this was a case of one side talking and the other covering its ears and saying, “La la la, not listening.” Why assign equal blame in a situation in which one side is so clearly in the wrong?

That is one question. I posed another question earlier: “Bob displayed here a very human tendency—one that is certainly not limited to Trump voters — to look past what you don’t want to think about in order to believe what you want, or need, to believe. The question then becomes: What is behind the need to believe it?” I believe the two questions have the same answer.

And that answer comes back, once again, to the concept of rootedness. What both Bob and Jack are rooted in, it seems to me, is the belief that America is essentially a land of freedom and fairness. Bob’s self-concept, in particular, is rooted in the notion — let’s call it the American Dream — that in America you get out of life what you put into it, period. If people have problems in a land where the principles of freedom and fairness prevail, then those problems surely reflect on the people themselves; if it is a given that the system is not flawed, that this essentially fair and free system would simply not allow itself to be hijacked by one political party, that the system is

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