It is not “our” fault: Tom Nichols and confusions about “democracy”
Tom Nichols is an academic and a brilliant writer. I’m in the middle of his powerful new book, Our Own Worst Enemy, which argues forcefully that we ourselves are responsible for the mess that we find our nation within. But his recent essay in The Atlantic — Afghanistan Is Your Fault—was a trigger for me. Because that claim embeds a very confused idea about what America’s democracy should be—or at least, what it was supposed to be.
The nub of Nichols’ argument is that because our failed policy in Afghanistan was enthusiastically supported by voters on the left and right alike, the politicians who executed that policy are not to be blamed for its failures. That blame, he argues, is on us, because we demanded what they gave us.
This claim rests on an assumption about how our democracy is supposed to work. Call it the “fast food restaurant theory of democracy.” The politicians run the registers. We, the People, show up and give them our orders. The only question for the politician is whether they give us what we asked for. If they do, then they’re absolved, regardless of the poison they happen to serve.
But this theory of democracy has nothing to do with the system our Constitution was meant to embed. Ours was not to be a direct democracy. We were instead to be “a Republic.” Many conservatives take that distinction to mean that the framers didn’t intend the majority to win. That’s a plainly false understanding of what they meant. What they actually meant by “a Republic” was a representative democracy, where the decisions about what our government was to do were to be taken by representatives.
“Representatives,” however, were not meant to be just public opinion polls, personified. (Indeed, as Jill Lepore recounts, when polling first took off in the middle of the last century, some thought polls should be banned because of their inevitable effect on representative democracy.) Instead, though of course, a representative is responsible to the people who elect them, they are responsible in the sense that a doctor or lawyer is responsible to their patients or clients. Doctors and lawyers are to know the facts and what works or doesn’t work; their job is to explain what’s right or true or effective to a busy and distracted public. If the public is wrong, it’s the representative’s job to explain that — just as when a parent demands antibiotics to treat the common cold, it is the doctor’s job to explain why antibiotics are not appropriate in such a case. Maybe, if the people insist, the representative must eventually give in. But a representative has no excuse for the wrong decision being taken unless they have first done everything they can to convince the public that the public is indeed wrong.
We on the Left get this when we look to the embarrassment of the modern Trumpicans. The idea that most Republican representatives pander to the plainly false and destructive claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is, we believe, outrageous. If the people don’t get it, we insist, explain it to them. Ignorance is no justification for blinking reality. That was Mitt Romney’s argument on the floor of the Senate on January 6, when he was scolding Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz for pandering to what they both knew was false. “No congressional audit,” Romney sensibly observed, “is ever going to convince these voters, particularly when the president will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth.” It is literally terrifying to see a whole party now orient itself against an obvious truth, and insist, as the former president does, that the election was “stolen.”
But we on the Left need to acknowledge the pandering on our own side too. Because the willingness to support the wars of the last 20 years was simple cowardice, not principle. Yes, after the attack of 9/11, the United States was justified in hunting down its perpetrator, bin Laden. But it was complete folly to launch unwinnable wars — indeed wars that clear-eyed senators such as John McCain only defended because they believed them “perpetual wars”—in Afghanistan and then Iraq in response to that terrorist attack. And indeed, that folly will likely prove far more costly, in lives and treasure, than the fantasy that we have just had a “stolen election.” We spent anywhere from $2 trillion to $6 trillion on wars that we should not have been fighting — money we could have used to fight climate change or fund affordable health care or rebuild infrastructure. Those wars killed hundreds of thousands, and only hardened the anti-American resolve of most within the region. There was only one winner in those wars — the “military-industrial-congressional complex” (call it MICC)—because the only profit that came from those wars was the profit to MICC.
There were, of course, politicians who opposed those wars. A very few, but a few. Most simply read the writing on the wall, and parroted back to us what Gallup told them we wanted to hear. Like the Republicans facing Trump today, many of those politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, knew the absurdity of these wars. Practically all of them believed that their staying in power justified their defending an absurdity. This is our own Big Lie, and Democrats were as committed to it as Republicans are committed to their Big Lie today.
If you perpetuate a lie, you are a liar. If you’re not willing to say what you believe is true, you are complicit in the ignorance that your cowardice feeds. And if you are a representative — the putative “leaders” within our Republic—and you have failed to stay what’s true for almost 20 years, then it is you who are responsible for the consequences of that lie — not those you lied to.
So, Tom Nichols, Afghanistan is not our fault. It is their fault — because it was their job to know better and to work their damndest to convince us of the truth. They knew better, or at least a majority of them did. Yet they did practically nothing to convince us of that truth.
It is of course hard for those within the commercial media (which Nichols is not — he’s an academic at the U.S. Naval War College) to adopt such an understanding of the politicians’ responsibility because a similar argument can be made against the press. The job of the press is not to pander to our ignorance. It is to provide at least balance, and ideally, a critical take on “what everyone knows is true.” But of course, the American press did a god-awful job of doing that over the past 20 years. Rather than bringing to America a constant stream of information that would have helped us to recognize what everyone now says they always understood, the press worked hard to stay loved. The cost in ratings from criticizing a war was not worth the integrity that such criticism would have earned them. Instead, the justification for that cowardice is just like Tom Nichols’ excuse for the politicians: We (the press) were just giving Americans what they want.
Yet it is just as clearly a betrayal of the duty of a free press to pander to what “everyone knows” as it is a betrayal of the role of a representative. In both cases, they use our ignorance as an excuse for their own cowardice. In both cases, though we have hired them to tell us what we need to know, they have failed in that job epically.
The source of these failures is ultimately the same. We have become convinced that “We, the People” know something. Or more precisely, that you can do no wrong if you give us what we say we want.
Yet this is an obvious delusion. We don’t know squat diddly — not because we’re stupid, but because we’re ignorant. Not because we couldn’t understand an issue — if given both sides and a chance to deliberate — but because we’re not given both sides and we have no good space to deliberate. We don’t understand even the most important issues. Maybe eventually we understand them—after spending trillions and wasting the lives of hundreds of thousands—but not soon enough. The idea that policy should be driven by a Gallup poll is the end of the end of democracy. It is us represented in our worst possible light — and them, our representatives and the press, shielded by the fact of our ignorance.
I am not so naive as to believe that we could fix this easily or overnight. The second half of my book, They Don’t Represent Us, diagnoses this problem, yet acknowledges that the solution to this destructive collective ideal is not obvious. It makes sense for the politicians to pander, because those that don’t are defeated. It makes sense for the media to pander, because those that don’t lose viewers. Our pathologies make sense — which makes fixing them all the more difficult.
Yet we must begin by at least identifying the pathology properly. The pathology is not that we are ignorant. Ignorance is the natural state, against which we must build institutions of understanding — like the press, like honest representatives, and like effective education. Instead, rather than ignorance, our pathology is the failure of those institutions, and our collective failure to call them out. If they could muster the courage to tell us what we don’t want to hear — or even better, if we could be brought to see that we should be rewarding those who tell us the truth and not just what we want to hear — then these failed institutions might well be made better.
I don’t know whether that is possible. But it will only begin when we in the chattarati stop pretending that “We, the People,” on our own, could do better.
We, the People, in a democracy, are king. I get that. But the king is wearing no clothes. And what she needs most desperately now, given that undeniable truth, is institutions that help her see more accurately. Blaming her for her blindness is just cursing the night for being dark.
