I talked to my brother last week. We don’t talk that often, but we stay in touch via text and the occasional phone call. This phone call was about plans for my mom’s next visit here, but we ended up briefly discussing the election. “It doesn’t matter who’s president,” my brother said. “They’re all the same. Two wings on the same bird. That’s why we have the eagle as the national symbol.”
My gosh, right? I restrained the urge to call him an idiot, because he’s not an idiot. He is a smart person who, like the rest of us, occasionally says idiotic things. This was one of the most idiotic things I’d ever heard.
I could tell by his tone that this was his final word on the subject, so I just told him that I think he’s wrong and then changed the subject back to the original reason for his call. I’m sure that he hung up shaking his head and thinking that his sister is an idiot. It would not be the first time.
*****
“‘Everything is shit.’ Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system.”
This is Timothy Snyder, in On Freedom. I wrote very briefly about this book in an earlier post, but I have a lot more to say about it. Snyder has the perfect word for my brother’s attitude, which many people share. The word is “notalitarianism.” While “totalitarianism claims to have the one truth that unites everything,” Snyder explains, “notalitarianism denies any truth or values…Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence.” Exactly. Every “it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, voting is the opiate of the masses” cynic I’ve ever met is convinced that they are just too smart to fall for anyone’s propaganda. These are the same people who use the word “sheeple,” who say things like “Open your eyes,” and “Are you awake yet?”
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Snyder understands that a reasonable standard of living is a prerequisite of freedom. People can’t be free if they don’t have a decent roof over their heads, nor any way to provide for their basic needs, nor any way to take care of themselves when they get sick. But that doesn’t mean that money necessarily confers freedom - it can only make it possible to eliminate the conditions that obstruct freedom. I thought about this as I watched “Black Doves” on Netflix, with its inconceivably rich villains who live in bunkers and spend all of their money and time and energy escaping justice, avoiding assassins, and protecting their ill-gotten wealth. I thought about it when I read yet another story about the crazy dude who spends $2 million a year and pretty much all of his time trying to live forever. Snyder argues, correctly, that immortality is the last thing a person should want, because it makes life meaningless: “Forever is the wrong time scale. Freedom requires a sense of time that extends into the future, through one life and into the next generation or two…” The world is full of rich people who are nowhere near free.
Maybe because they completely lack any understanding of freedom, many of these same rich people reject the very idea that people have a God-given right to a decent life, and that freedom is impossible without food and shelter and education and healthcare. They oppose social safety nets and welfare state programs because they claim to want to break the cycle of “dependency,” as if any one of us was not dependent on the entire rest of the human race. They perpetuate the lies of trickle-down economics, the unfettered free market (Timothy Snyder points out that only humans, not markets, can be free), deregulation, tax cuts – and our economic system grows more and more unfair, and the inequality becomes worse and more unsustainable all the time.
*****
Solidarity, as Snyder points out, is the key to real freedom, because a fair and just and decent and more equal economic system benefits all of us and makes us all equally free. Redistribution is good. But with such a vast divide between the very rich, who are growing more and more powerful; and the rest of us, solidarity becomes less and less possible. If you are a middle-class person - even upper middle class - then you have no solidarity with Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy or Mark Zuckerberg or any other greedy grasping billionaire, no matter what they tell you. Your solidarity is - or should be - with the people who pick up your trash, and harvest your produce, and generally do the work that makes life possible for the rest of us.
I don’t know, really, why this isn’t obvious, but it isn’t to a lot of people, who think that their natural alliance is with the rich and powerful. This is an aspirational delusion - if I align myself with the oligarchs, then they’ll see me as one of them, as part of their club, and then I’ll actually be part of their club. It’s shocking to me that working and middle class people still vote for and support deregulation and so-called “free market” policies that only benefit the richest and that have only ever benefited the richest. Snyder puts it best: “The notion that freedom is state inaction makes sense only for the tiny minority who can protect their families without a representative government.” Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be just fine no matter what happens, and they don’t care at all about the rest of us.
Actually, it’s more than that they don’t care. They absolutely want to restore early Industrial Revolution pre-Progressive Era conditions. They want a tiny handful of people to have all the power and all the money, and they want the rest of us to work 80 hours a week for as little as they can get away with paying us. And they’re not going to give us anything in return, other than the bare subsistence minimum. At least the early 20th century robber barons had a tiny bit of conscience. They used some of their ill-gotten wealth to build parks and universities and hospitals. Andrew Carnegie was a rapacious capitalist but at least he left us some nice museums and libraries and concert halls. The new ruling class billionaires want the noblesse but not the oblige. They want the Gilded Age without any of the gilding.
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It’s all pretty bleak, really. It’s December 20, and I should be in a holiday mood. Maybe tomorrow - my son comes home this weekend, and it’s also cookie weekend. I hate making cookies, but I like eating them, and I like watching the people I love eat them. But the only thing I’m thinking about now is that we are once again on the brink of a government shutdown and I once again have no idea if I’ll be working beyond today. I was going to take most of next week off anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that a bunch of billionaire cartoon villains are running the country, and half of my fellow Americans voted for them. Oh, I know that Trump voters think that they didn’t vote for Elon Musk but they did. And if the government does shut down, Elon and his assistant Donald Trump and all of their little Republican henchmen in the House of Representatives will look right at the TV cameras and blame the Democrats, and people will believe them even though all you have to do is look at Mike Johnson’s smarmy little insincere smile to know that he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his own mouth. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Snyder once again: “Let the liars lie and the truth perish…Let the world end with a smirk.”
*****
I love quoting “The Princess Bride.” What’s more fun than shaking your head at a kid who tells you “I’m starving,” and saying “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What’s more fun than showing up at an event and writing “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” on the little name labels, right below the word “HELLO.” But my favorite Princess Bride quote is this: “I’ll tell you the truth. It’s up to you to live with it.” Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richarson and Sherilynn Ifill and Robert Reich and Eddie Glaude Jr and lots of others are out here telling the truth. And we might have to live with it but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. We can’t stop the liars from lying, but we don’t have to let the truth perish.
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