A few days ago, I wrote about cynicism. Now it seems like it’s running rampant on left-leaning social media. When I try to comment on the ongoing litigation and investigations into Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, people (in droves) assure me that the criminal justice system is “broken,” and rich people escape justice.
One person told me this:
Then she said she’ll never serve again, because the system is hopelessly broken. Her words. Basically she didn’t get the outcome she thought was fair, so she wanted nothing more to do with any of it.
My first thought was, “Wait. I thought everyone was discouraged because Trump was president and it looked like he’d never leave.” Trump is out and the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, so apparently the problem runs deeper.
Previously, I talked about how progressives see history as an upward slope, and regressives see history as a downward slope.
Now I’m going to talk about people who see history as a straight line: The cynics and nihilists.
First, some definitions. A cynic is a person who believes that all people are motivated purely by self-interest and never act for honorable or unselfish reasons. They think showing virtue is “virtue signaling” and done for political gain.
I’ve also talked about fairness people v. hierarchy people. If you’re a fairness person, by definition, you’re not a cynic, because you believe fairness is possible, but you run the risk of disillusionment when you realize there’s a lot of injustice and unfairness out there.
Democratic institutions are run by mere human beings and not all people are good people, so institutions will never work perfectly.
A nihilist is a person who rejects principles because they don’t believe they exist. This is also a person who rejects democratic institutions because they can’t be perfect.
Recall that one goal of active measures is to undermine confidence in democratic institutions, because when that happens, they fail. Nihilist and cynic and people who are hopelessly disillusioned go around saying things like, “The system is broken. It’s hopeless.”
Nihilism, cynicism, and disillusionment happen on the left side of the spectrum as well as the right.
If you believe the system is broken and can’t be fixed, you have two alternatives: One, like the woman disillusioned by her experience on a jury: tune it all out. That’s one alternative. But if enough people do that, democracy fails because democracy, remember, relies on citizen involvement. So if enough people go around saying, “The system is hopelessly broken,” it becomes self-fulfilling because if you keep saying it, and you persuade enough people to give up and tune out, you have created a situation where democracy fails.
If you think the system is hopelessly broken, the only other alternative I see is to burn the whole thing down and start over, or fall in line behind a charismatic leader who promises you that he alone can fix it. That puts you in line with Roger Stone, so we don’t want to go there.
Obviously burn it all down is not a good way to save democracy. At least it seems to me it’s not a good way to save democracy.
Also, remember, one way to save democracy, from Yale prof. Timothy Snyder, is to defend institutions, which you can’t do if you’re going around saying it’s all hopeless and we need to burn it all down.
Lately on social media I’ve been feeling like the Lone Ranger defending institutions.
Some of this is the same binary thinking you get in the authoritarian personality, which goes like this: There are flaws, therefore it’s all broken.
Another form of binary thinking, which a lot of people throw at me on social media, is the “if-then” statement, that goes like this: “If Trump doesn’t go to prison, there is no rule of law.”
If-then works in science. If I drop something, it will fall. But doesn’t work in politics, particularly with sweeping conditional statements. I have every expectation that the law will catch up to Trump, but we will still have a democracy if it doesn’t —provided enough citizens remain engaged to make it happen.
If a person commits a crime and doesn’t get punished, that doesn’t mean that there is no rule of law. Rule of law is a form of government that holds law as the highest authority instead of, say, a king. Expecting every lawbreaker to get punished is not a reasonable expectation unless you want to live in a police state.
Nuance says, there are flaws and we work to fix them. Nuance says perfection is an ideal that we strive toward but never reach.
Another way to respond to injustice and imperfection is to say, “What can I do?” Look at how the Parkland students reacted to injustice and laws that were wrong.
Yesterday people on Twitter told me that the system was broken when it was created, and it remains broken. They also told me that a single bad apple spoils the entire barrel.
Such people see history as a straight line. It was broken, it is broken. Because there will always be bad apples, it will always be broken.
Nihilism.
Now, what is the criminal justice system that’s broken? An independent judiciary. Independent prosecutors. A jury of your peers. The right to counsel. And a lot of bad apples.
Trust me on this: People who reject the system because it is flawed would actually miss the system if it disappeared because there is only one alternative to democratic institutions, and it’s worse.
Change is brought about by people with ideals.
All we can do, as individuals, is try to leave the world a little better than we found it. Each generation must try to make improvements.
So if you care about democracy, hold on to your ideals. If we give up, autocracy wins.
This blog post is #10 in my You Tube Video Series. Yes, I’ve continued recording them. As I mentioned, I found that it’s helpful to go back and summarize the things I’ve been writing about over the past few years. Recording them is easy, as long as I don’t watch it after I record it because then I’ll start thinking that I hate how I look and sound so why the heck am I doing these?
