The New Neo

From commenter “Nancy B”:

In my family it doesn’t make sense to call either my mother or sister “leftist” — they aren’t political in the sense that they have never really thought about politics philosophically or participated practically. But my 60ish sister listens to NPR during waking hours — I think as a status thing. And my 90 year old mother, in her third decade of retirement, is tuned into MSNBC all day. Therefore they loath and detest Trump and Trump supporters. When we meet, we don’t discuss politics — but it is simply weird to have had a major election and no one says a thing! And it is peculiar that my mother, raised during WWII, still watches sports on tv, with absolutely no issue at the kneeling, the “Black National Anthem” etc. *She* was raised with Civics classes — and she had not commented at all on statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being removed defaced or removed, not a word.

To me, the issue is how much people care about matters such as liberty, history, or truth. Many years ago I used to think that the vast majority of Americans cared deeply about such things, or at least one of those things. Why did I believe that? Probably because I cared about such things, and I wrongly assumed that my attitude was typical.

There was no single incident that disabused me of that notion. It was gradual. But for many years now it hasn’t surprised me to hear stories like the ones Nancy B tells, or to experience the equivalent in my own life. Part of the phenomenon has to do with the sources of information people use – in the case of Nancy B’s relatives, for example, we have a heavy dose of NPR and MSNBC. That’s an indoctrination that would take some time and effort to counter, and most people are not motivated to challenge their own assumptions.

Actually, many political change experiences are sparked almost by accident. In my case, for example, I started reading conservative media online about twenty years ago without even realizing it was conservative. I was merely following wherever links piqued my interest (the internet was relatively novel back then), and I ultimately found (to my surprise) that the sources that made most sense turned out to be sources on the right. Another friend I know who’s a political convert dates the beginning of his change from having had some workmen in the house for a project, and overhearing their radio that was tuned every day to Rush Limbaugh.

And both of us were at least relatively interested in politics and the abstract issues behind it, and were therefore willing to pay attention to what we were hearing and to think about it. I have come to think those traits are somewhat unusual, and even more unusual in the Democrats I know compared to the people on the right that I know. Of course, there are also highly political people on the left, but they tend to be the activists and/or people who, unlike the relatives Nancy B describes, talk incessantly about politis and have no hesitation to disrupt social occasions by doing so.

Every political revolution in the direction of tyranny is actually spearheaded by an engaged minority. Those in the frontlines of fighting against tyrannical political revolutions are an engaged minority as well. At some point, though, a majority of the public becomes aware that something big is happening. Often, though, that only happens when that majority finds its rights have been irrevocably altered for the worse. And even then, depending on how badly they’ve been altered versus how well that person still is doing in daily life (financially, for example), many people just shrug and continue to go about their business.

In this, as in so many other things, Czech expat author Milan Kundera has something to say (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Here’s what I noted in a 2005 post:

[Kundera’s] story of Karel’s elderly mother and the pears–that, I understood from the start. Here it is:

“One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighboring country came and occupied their country [a reference to the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia]. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were nearly ripe. The week before, Mother had invited the local pharmacist to come and pick them. He never came, never even apologized. The fact that Mother refused to forgive him drove Karel and Marketa crazy. Everybody’s thinking about tanks, and all you can think about is pears, they yelled. And when shortly afterwards they moved away, they took the memory of her pettiness with them.

“But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother’s perspective–a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.”

That’s an exaggerated version of what seemed to happen to me (and others) during those years [after Vietnam]: the tanks didn’t disappear, but they receded into the distant background; and the pears loomed, large and ripe, in the foreground. And who wouldn’t want that to happen? Who would choose to focus on tanks when they could think about pears instead? Most people seemed only too happy to throw themselves into life itself, and to leave the interminable political discussions to the politicians and the policy wonks.

This is always true, I think, and the left most definitely counts on it. If they control the means of information, they can count on the vast majority of people to accept passively what they’re saying, to not seek out other sources of information, and to tend their pears both actual and metaphorical.

[NOTE: I’ve written on this general topic before. Please see this and this.]