Blame for the populist irruptions which have beset many democracies in recent years has been widely distributed: bewildered observers have blamed bankers, politicians, academics, journalists, social media platforms – apologies to anyone omitted. Most, however, have been reluctant to blame one fairly obvious cohort of culprits: voters.
Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College and contributor to the Atlantic, USA Today and others, suffers no such squeamishness. Nichols is an old-school American conservative who believes that the responsibilities of a citizen are at least as important as their rights. His previous book, 2017’s tremendous The Death of Expertise, was an indictment of the widespread abandonment of established knowledge in favour of quackery. His hugely entertaining (and vastly popular) Twitter feed often concerns itself with more prosaic manifestations of poor citizenship, notably slovenly deportment among aeroplane passengers.
Our Own Worst Enemy makes a persuasive case that all such symptoms have essentially the same cause: the wilful retreat, by a great many adult inhabitants of wealthy, safe and free countries, into a state of toddler-like fury at anything that contradicts, thwarts or upsets them. Trump’s victory in 2016 was the most obvious manifestation of this. A transcendentally ignorant, risibly unqualified blowhard and buffoon – and arguably America’s worst unimprisoned citizen – Trump presided over an administration of astonishing corruption and ineptitude. Last November, 74 million Americans declared that they wanted four more years of it. (Nichols, who was among those American conservatives who commendably denounced Trump, now believes that the entire Republican Party for which he once worked and voted requires urgent ushering into history’s dustbin.)
The men who wrote the US constitution had a keen understanding of power’s corrosive effects, and therefore devised a means of distributing it so that nobody could have too much. But they also appreciated that institutions, however solid, will not maintain themselves. James Madison, who helped draft the constitution and later served as president, warned that “No theoretical checks – no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” John Adams, the second president, cautioned that “public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue”.
Nichols, it should be stressed, is not altogether a curmudgeonly Jeremiah, clad in a sandwich board, pronouncing imminent doom at irritated commuters. It’s unlikely that he would agree entirely with H. L. Mencken’s assessment of Americans as “the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages”. Nor is he one of those tiresome posturing Spartans advocating the scouring moral benefits of warfare or other hardship. But Our Own Worst Enemy does argue that the United States’ prosperity – unrivalled in human history – has made a hefty and noisy sector of Americans if not soft, then soft in the head.
The opening chapter, “A Hunger For Apocalypse”, is an especially astute diagnosis of what currently ails America – and given the contagion of American manias, much of the west. People burdened with troubles and obstacles relatively tiny when compared to most of today’s world, and certainly almost all of history, are determined to perceive themselves as brutally oppressed and perched on the edge of disaster. Variations on such fantasies substantially drove the votes for Trump, Brexit and other populist causes, and were certainly a catalyst for the rabble without a clue who ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
There is a temptation to assume that Trump’s failure to win re-election in 2020 signified a breaking of this lunatic fever. It did not. Whether or not Trump seeks, or wins, re-election in 2024 – and neither eventuality is unlikely – the self-indulgent rage he both emboldened and exemplified is still at large, and is all the more hazardous for its unmooring from reality. “The diminishing of threats and the elevation of expectations,” writes Nichols, “coupled with the dullness of daily life in a society gorged on more forms of leisure than it can comprehend, is both the triumph of liberal democracy and a danger to it.” The great service performed by Our Own Worst Enemy is to remind us just how clear, and how present, that danger remains.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe today.
