Below the Surface.
Underlying beliefs that most of us share
“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”
— Alasdair Gray
This phase of the U.S. Civil War was not of our choosing. But we’ve been complicit. First, by accepting many indolent assumptions, then by ignoring history.
Take the lesson of the Greatest Generation. Our Roosevelt-era parents and grandparents overcame a mélange of would-be plutocrats, populist tyrants and communist commissars to craft a social contract that unleashed a confident, burgeoning middle class, spectacular universities and science, vast infrastructure and entrepreneurship — plus a too-slow but ponderously-growing momentum toward justice.
That social contract was so successful that we forget how rare and special it all was! Our parents were so successful at crafting a middle class society that we members of the Boomer Generation largely assumed (and still assume) that age-old cheater plagues like oligarchy and feudalism — dominant across nearly all of the last 6000 years — were banished for good. They weren’t. Today’s worldwide attempted oligarchic putsch — propelling America back into Civil War — is both lethally dangerous and boringly predictable.
As Hannah Arendt taught, evil can be oafish and banal, while also feral-canny. But one thing villains are…
