America’s Century Of Making The World Safe For Democracy

Part 3 – Another Other Hand….

… Domestic policy

Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader. — Woodrow Wilson

Wilson’s quote stands in contrast with what American leaders usually write into our national story: “All men are created equal.” “Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Along with the photo of American schoolchildren, the purpose was not to go Godwin and accuse anyone of being a Nazi. Rather, it is to illustrate our cultural evolution into a top-down driven, non-adaptive mode of problem-solving, both at war abroad and here at home. The struggle with authoritarian governance, both with the Nazis and with the Soviets during the Cold War, should have made the authoritarian approach an anathema, should give the same shivery creeps you get looking at the Nazi-salute kids. America’s buttress of separation of powers mitigated complete centralized state empowerment, which Wilson wanted, which seemed scientific to nearly every culture at the time. But a buttress can not counterattack. And so the power of the State, needed to solve the problems of World War and the Cold War, never receded. Quite the opposite, it became entrepreneurial in the problems it wars on: Diseases (drug addiction); Social conditions (poverty, fatherlessness, drug addiction); Proper Nouns (terrorism); Eternal dark sides of the human condition (crime itself). And now we have wars requiring the novel tools of motivational mind-reading and ESP (terrorism and racism).

Where do we stand after a century of clay molding here in America? We incarcerate more people than all of Wilson’s European pupils of COMBINED (throw in the Asia school too). We incarcerate more people than Russia and China. To impose and keep order we need 80% of the world’s lawyers This is the inevitable result of warring, making, molding, rather than growing, evolving, allowing.

There are two possible explanations of why we are the world-leading incarcerator/litigator: either Americans are too savage to govern their own affairs (and in that case, how to explain the unprecedented American advancement that came before?), or we incarcerate and litigate against people for things nobody else does (seemingly with no ill effect to them). Answering the latter is reflex for libertarians. Imagine the answer of Americans of a century ago if you think libertarian philosophy a fringe. This is a cultural way of being, largely caused by the rare triumph of redemptive war, which warps our adaptability to solve complex problems to this day.

The main driver behind our unique incarceration preference is the War on Drugs. We pounded the round peg of the problems of intertwined mental illness, poverty, fatherlessness, and drug addiction into the square hole of war with mass incarceration, which perfectly overlays our historical subjugation of African Americans. Just when the African American community was poised to claim their place in the American dream, our war-hand then smote them with welfare policies all but designed to bring family disintegration, all but designed to create an inescapable cycle of poverty and dependence. Look at the outcome of Bill Clinton’s War on Crime. See how we were reducing poverty faster before we made war on it.

We extend our litigation wars into things like the rarified faux-controversy of who can refuse to bake a wedding cake for gay couples (I lose track, is it because you are a member of an “official and sincere religion?” Or is that the birth control mandate? In this nation founded on the premise that there is no such thing as an official religion?). The result is that the nation is culturally divided to a degree not seen since the Civil War. And over what? Cite the great issue, and most Americans will say something about “culture.” Just so, but slavery was culture too. The divide between the great issue of slavery and the faux-issue of gay wedding cakes, and other such rarities, is the result of cramming what should be an evolutionary approach of non-violent adaptation into wars on abstractions. This is because all a State can do is war, its only power is coercion. The war concepts may be abstractions, but the people ruined by jail and legal bills are real. Since this approach is now woven into the intimate fabric of the legal system, uprooting it does not respond to a democratic approach; the legalistic opacity of the issues gives us this feeling that we are coming apart over nothing real. Our current Secretary of Defense believes our divisions could constitute a national security threat. The nation’s fraught division is also partly cultural schizophrenia between the idea that we are a nation of limited government, and the reality that it can ruin you in court over your motivations in baking a cake.

Again, nobody else in the world does this near to our degree, and they do just fine.

All of these wars have been pursued with breathtaking expense and stagnant results for a half century, the stagnation all the more shocking when contrasted with America’s historic marching progress. Why? The thing about wars, making, clay-molding, is that they make it possible to vault over increments, to leap over feedback loops that would better reflect the damage and cost, which creates spaces for distortions, distorted by the leaping. The more force, the greater the separation from feedback, the greater the distortion from an evolutionarily stable system. How can you tell a system is out of control from evolutionary correction? It costs more and more to do less and less, which describes the America of the last quarter century quite well.

Most human endeavors do not respond positively to war. A management of mental illness and drug addiction cannot be warred, a person cannot be molded as if from clay out of poverty. How would you like it if someone tried to mold you?

• About the Author

About Eugene Darden Nicholas

Eugene Darden (Ed) Nicholas is from Flushing Queens, where he grew up sheltered from the hard world, learning the true things after graduating college and becoming a paramedic in Harlem. School continues to inform and entertain in all its true, Shakespearean glory. It's a lot of fun, really. In that career, dozens of people walk the earth now who would not be otherwise. (The number depends on how literally or figuratively you choose to add). He added a beloved wife to his little family, which is healthy. He is also well blessed in friends and colleagues.