The panel consisted of a cosmologist (not to be confused with a cosmetician), a New York City civil libertarian, a Los Angeles filmmaker, and a science writer and community organizer(me). The cosmologist/astronomer’s groundbreaking theories on the expansion of the universe had been verified by the exceptionally stirring images returned by the Hubble space telescope. But this discovery, he was told by the observatory’s p.r. guy, would not compete well with Lady Gaga and so was not released to the media.
The filmmaker had worked a decade or so ago on a successful hagiographic film about the life of Ronald Reagan, financed by a hedge fund manager who could have not been more diametrically opposed to her political background. But the filmmaker had been hired based on her skills and they could reach an agreement on what a truthful portrayal of Reagan would look like. Such collaborations she said are no longer possible today in Hollywood where partisans trust only those who agree with their politics. The civil libertarian came fresh from the front line of culture war ignited over the location of the Islamic Community Center two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, that had been “outed” by radio talk show hosts, a full year after the developer had announced the plans, but timed for the beginning of the political season, when fear could be counted on to stir up an instantaneous hornet’s nest in the endlessly reverberating echo chamber of what passes for the media these days.
I was invited to speak about abrupt climate change, based on a book I am collaborating on with a group of scientists who accompanied Gary Comer, an Island Institute member, on voyages to Greenland. Anywhere north of 60 degrees latitude (or 60 degrees south latitude in the southern hemisphere), global warming is not a convenient punching bag used to score points about how Washington politicians want to tax us into changing our cherished way of life. In every one of the scores of small villages along thousands of miles of Greenland’s coastline we visited, abrupt warming is an accepted fact among “uneducated” Greenlanders, who scoff at the notion that the alarming rate of melting glaciers, disappearing sea ice and the retreat of an immense ice cap is “natural” and has nothing to do with human activities.
While listening to my fellow panelists worry over the lack of fact and truth in our current national discourse, I kept thinking back to a college course taught by an eminent political sociologist who assigned us Richard Hofstadter’s perceptive book, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, first published in 1964, following Barry Goldwater’s nomination. Hofstadter’s opening line was “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” The course readings in American political history went back for over a century and covered the rise of the “Know Nothing” Party (they were actually proud of the name), the rise of the KKK after Reconstruction, the rebirth of the Klan during the 19-teens and 20s following waves of immigration and then the radical temperance movement that culminated in Prohibition. It took World War II to imbue us with the notion that we might be all in this thing together.
Most of these nativist, anti-intellectual, anti immigrant movements which repeatedly swept across the country coincided with some kind of financial panic that ruined masses of ordinary people’s lives. In searching for the culprits who had destroyed whatever bits of economic security they had scraped into their family’s lives, masses of ordinary Americans have repeatedly blamed those who are something “other” than the white Puritans, Baptists, Calvinists, and the other sons and daughters of our founders. Whether those others are blacks, Irish or Italian Catholics, immigrant Jews (most especially Jewish bankers), or more recently Hispanics or Muslims or the intellectuals who coddle them; all of these groups have been and for some remain targets for reprisal because they are trying to take something away from the rest of “us.” And woe unto those who stand in the way of American notions of frontier justice, for those who want to get back what has been lost.
I suppose the only point to add to this bleak view of American history is that all of these movements disappeared, only to be reignited when economic insecurity caused our fears to run wild again and when we turn simple explanations for answers. The media, searching for a face to frame a complex story looks for an individual in whom the zeitgeist lives and breathes — a guy like Joe the Plumber, an everyman, who speaks the simple unvarnished truth. We might do well to recall Mark Twain’s famous quip, “For every complex problem, there is always a simple answer and it is always wrong.” And anyway, where is Joe the Plumber today?
It is, however, our particular genius as Americans to be able to turn on a dime. That has been true at least since Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America published in 1835 when he wrote, “In American politics, men go from the impossible to the inevitable without ever pausing at the probable.”
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.