It was the lie told in a thousand forms, uttered by a thousand voices, by generals, politicians, journalists, and activists. The Taliban was some alien thing, an aberration. True Afghanis shared our Western values, especially around women’s rights. We could win the war by defeating the Taliban.
How did that work out?
While it is true that our “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia played (and continue to play) a key role in supporting fundamentalist Islamist terrorists in the region, the dirty secret was always that the Taliban reflected the actual values of many if not most Afghanis, especially in the vast majority of the nation that is rural and under-developed.
The misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance is who they are. Of course these things are not in their own best interest, socially or economically. But sometimes, you can’t stop people (or a people) from choosing the path of self-destruction. Poland has fallen to an intolerant autocratic patriarchy. As has Texas and Florida.
America’s social, economic, and political progressives have been telling the same lie in a thousand forms for the last half decade. Trump and the movement that brought him to power does not reflect who we are.
It is exactly who we are. And who we have always been.
The “freedom” narrative in our founding myth is grossly exaggerated. The nation was founded on self-interest, built on land theft, genocide, and slavery. It was founded by angry white men to insure the power of angry white men. For all of our claims to liberty, to being a Christian nation, there has never been a moment when all people were treated equally in this nation, never a moment when we aligned ourselves with the gospel demand that we love one another and care for our most vulnerable.
The “Greatest Generation” defeated fascism for a time, but when they got home, they lynched their neighbors with brown skin, and reported their neighbors with Jewish or foreign-sounding names as “communists.”
Liberty has become “libertarian,” sociopathy by another name. Again and again we have celebrated greed and the bully. We are the people that celebrates real life crooks like Bonnie and Clyde and fictional crooks like Tony Soprano. Donald Trump was not elected despite being a racist and a sociopath He was elected because he is a racist and a sociopath.
Hard work and talent to do not always produce wealth, and wealth is only rarely the result of hard work and talent. The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer, and that is just the way the rules are written. Yet progressives keep telling the lie of merit and worth.
Our task, as progressives who believe in the promise of America, is not to restore what never was. It is to dream of what might be. A nation where we are not judged by the color of our skin, as the Rev. King famously said, nor by the way we pursue (or not) the holy, the way we identify and express our gender, the way we love. A nation where greed is a sin, not a virtue, where self-interest and selfishness are not the same thing because self-interest is common-interest.
Our house is on fire. Too late for smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. Let’s stop speaking of restoring or preserving a constitutional order that was bad from the start. Let’s stop dickering about the minutia of a system designed to insure disproportionate power for a conservative rural minority.
It is time for something new, a new constitutional order, a new set of values. It is time for revolution. Let’s call it what it is.