Sometimes, the truth isn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n
Thus says Batman to Jim Gordon in the concluding scene of Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Dark Knight.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n Americans disagree.\u00a0 To know anything at all about our public policies and discourse is to know that Americans hold that the truth is never <\/em>good enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n Plato long ago referred to \u201cconvenient fictions,\u201d untruths that every society needs in order to preserve itself.\u00a0 Surely, however tempted we are to think otherwise, there is no society in the annals of history that is as dependent upon convenient fictions as is contemporaryAmerica.\u00a0 Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that our political-cultural existence is nothing more than a house of such fictions.<\/p>\n Take fiction #1, what the early 20th<\/sup> century political theorist Joseph Schumpeter once called the \u201cclassical doctrine of democracy.\u201d\u00a0 Americans still speak as if they believed that there is something privileged, even sacred, about democracy, for it is only within a democracy that human beings are free to choose their elected representatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Or so goes the fiction.<\/p>\n As Schumpeter and others long ago noted, there is all of the difference in the world between the democratic ideal and the actual practices of voters under a democratically constituted government.\u00a0 In reality, voters don\u2019t choose their representatives as much as their representatives choose them.\u00a0 What we call \u201cthe will of the people\u201d is not \u201cthe motive power\u201d but \u201cthe product\u201d of \u201cthe political process,\u201d Schumpeter informs us.\u00a0<\/p>\n The average voter\u2019s will, far from being \u201cdeterminate\u201d and \u201crational,\u201d is actually \u201can indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions\u201d thrust upon him by \u201cpressure groups and propaganda[.]\u201d\u00a0 For the average voter, \u201cmere assertion, often repeated\u201d is much weightier than \u201crational argument\u201d could ever hope to be.<\/p>\n Gaetano Mosca wrote that voters don\u2019t choose their representatives but, rather, \u201cthe representative has himself elected by the voters [.]\u201d\u00a0 More exactly, \u201chis friends have him elected.\u201d\u00a0 However unbelievable we may find this, the truth is that life under so-called representative government or democracy is no different than life under any other form of government in that it is always an \u201corganized minority\u201d that runs the show by imposing \u201cits will on the disorganized majority.\u201d<\/p>\n If the truth was good enough, we would have to admit that the voter exists to be manipulated by politicians and their supporters in media.<\/p>\n Another fiction, never more loudly proclaimed than during a presidential election season, is that there are dramatic differences between our two national political parties.<\/p>\n The truth is that is that there are far more similarities between Republicans and Democrats than there are differences.\u00a0 Take any issue, domestic or foreign: if there are any differences at all between their positions, they are difference in detail, not in kind.\u00a0 Republicans are every bit as much in favor of a large, centralized national government as are Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the very least, the vision of government held byAmerica\u2019s founders and embodied in the Constitution is eons removed from the government that both Republicans and Democrats are fighting to maintain today.\u00a0 Jefferson and Madison would look aghast at George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike.<\/p>\n If the truth was good enough, we would admit that life under one party is not bound to be all that different from life under the other.<\/p>\n A third fiction is that America remains the freest country that has ever existed.\u00a0 In reality, America ceased to be a free country probably as early on as 1865.\u00a0 The liberty for which our founding fathers wagered their lives was not some abstract idea.\u00a0 It was inseparable from the federalized government guaranteed by and delineated in the Constitution.<\/p>\n More directly, American liberty, as our founders understood it, consisted in a wide dispersion of authority and power.\u00a0 And it consisted in a national government that, with respect to most matters, was required to defer to the individual states that produced it.<\/p>\n Beginning with the Union\u2019s victory over the Confederacy, this vision of liberty began its retreat toward the dustbin of history.\u00a0 Today, it is as much a relic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as are the musket ball and the horse-and-buggy carriage.<\/p>\n That life is more pleasant in America than in most of the world is neither here nor there. As students of the institution of slavery have long noted, some slaves lived far more pleasantly than others\u2014and far more pleasantly than many freeborn men.\u00a0 Those slaves who were closest to the Sultan all but ruled the Ottoman Empire, and even in the antebellum South, there were slaves whose masters allowed them to establish their own businesses (as blacksmiths, say) and residences miles away from the plantation.<\/p>\n But however pleasant their lives may have been, slaves were still slaves because, even if only legally, they were subject, not to law, but to the wills of their masters.<\/p>\n If the truth was good enough, we would admit that the size and scope of our national government has long ago divested us of our liberty.<\/p>\n Sadly, for Americans, the truth is never good enough.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes, the truth isn\u2019t good enough. Thus says Batman to Jim Gordon in the concluding scene of Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Dark Knight.\u00a0 \u00a0 Americans disagree.\u00a0 To know anything at all about our public policies and discourse is to know that Americans hold that the truth is never good enough.\u00a0 Plato long ago referred to \u201cconvenient…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n