Wandering Orbit

Americans and Responsibility

Max Brooks fascinates me.  A best-selling author of works like World War Z, he also speaks to organizations about preparing for future crisis response actions and maintains dual fellowships at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Modern War Institute at West Point.  Basically, he’s who I want to be when I grow up.  Brooks recently did a podcast interview with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History, another favorite of mine.  In a discussion on asymmetrical warfare, Brooks said the following: “Americans have a lot of freedoms, but freedom from responsibility is not one of them.”

In one sentence, Brooks provided a unifying theme to my disparate thoughts on America’s current course.  That may be why he is the famous author/speaker/fellow while I pay someone else for the privilege of hosting a blog talking about Abraham Lincoln’s favorite lift.  Responsibility threads through our lives, and the amount of it depends on the context of our environment.  America, for all its flaws, is still a democracy.  Democracies require their citizens to shoulder a portion of the burden of governance.  I believe what we see today is the result of Americans abdicating that responsibility.

A note before we begin.  It is not my intent to turn this into a political roast.  I have taken a personal stance while serving in the military to remain apolitical—my oath is to the Constitution, and through that whoever happens to be giving legal orders from the White House.  While actions taken by the predominant political parties will factor into this argument, they are a symptom and not a cause.  I speak primarily about the average American citizen, and I stand as one of them.

The abdication of responsibility falls into three areas.  First, the failure of accountability (also broken down into three parts).  The great check of democracies is the voter.  Your elected leaders spent more time soaking in hot tubs than passing laws?  Send them packing in the next election, and good riddance.  But in practice, how often does that happen?  The issue is never my representative, it’s those other ones over there.  My guy or gal has their act together and deserves my continued support.  Yet if the country’s confidence in Congress hovers at a cool 10-20%, we can’t all be right about our representative’s competence.  This is accountability breakdown #1: I am never wrong.  The blame can always be shifted to an “other,” be it an opposing candidate, party, or just someone I don’t like. Accountability, however, starts with the self.  If I cannot police my own feelings and actions, how can I expect to do so externally?

Accountability breakdown #2 stems naturally from #1.  Just as we fail to police ourselves, we fail to hold the tribes we subscribe to accountable.  Political parties are the glaring example.  Left or Right, doesn’t matter—both sides are quite content to throw feces at each other in what passes for political discourse today.  Again, this is shifting blame instead of owning up to a responsibility to accountability.  Anytime a voter has checked a box because it had an R or a D next to it with no further thought on the matter, they have abdicated their responsibility to be an informed citizen.  If enough citizens do that for long enough, the entire system collapses. 

The third accountability breakdown is what happens when external accountability (e.g. the voter) vanishes.  Since the parties have entrenched themselves enough to have little need to hold themselves accountable to their voters, they have no need to hold themselves accountable to fair governance.  Thus we see practices like gerrymandering—conscious, data-driven efforts to subvert the will of the voters in favor of one party or another.  A party accountable to all of the people it purports to represent—not just those within its party—would never tolerate that practice.  They would instead find the humility to accept what informed voters decide and adjust their platform accordingly.  A party that has abandoned accountability in pursuit of power, however, will weaponize processes like gerrymandering.

Accountability is a core responsibility for American citizens, but accountable to what?  Answers like the Constitution or to each other are well and good, but I crave ill-defined, ethereal concepts.  Let’s go with vision.  It should shock no one that the American government operates on a two-to-four year cycle based around its elections.  It is almost impossible to think long term because the next election is never far away, and heaven forbid anything positive from your reign happen during your opponent’s time at the wheel.  This is the result of giving up a responsibility towards maintaining a unified vision of the future.

“Unified!” you scoff.  “There is nothing that those [insert pejorative slur about opposing tribe here] and I agree on!”  Of course not, fair reader.  Your hallowed halls are safe from the rampaging barbarians.  I am sure none of them believes in wanting a better world for their children, or that people dealing with starvation in the wealthiest nation in the world offends every moral sensibility, or that it is better to be led by honorable men and women than corrupt ones.  Ah, I see you lowering your pitchfork and torch.

This is where the abdication of vision leads—when we no longer focus on a common vision all would enjoy, it becomes far too easy for the aforementioned feces throwing.  Will all sides agree on the method by which to reach that future?  Not a chance.  Nor should they!  Evidence consistently points towards diversity in thought resulting in better outcomes.  I want bold new policies tempered by restraint, just as I want the stalwart practices of old periodically reviewed to see what is safe to jettison.  But having those targets helps us look up from the mud to see that mythical city on a hill.  It may always be just out of reach, but every step towards it is one taken away from the morass.

Our third abdication of responsibility is often the most difficult to address—listening.  People can be shamed into accountability or inspired to hold to a vision.  Unfortunately, no silver bullet exists for encouraging a society of individualists to listen to one another.  It is disheartening to see tribal statistics like parents’ unwillingness to have their children marry a member of the opposite political party skyrocket.  It signifies the deeper concern that those parents have a) decided the other side has no worth, and b) will do their best to pass along those beliefs to their close relations. 

“It’s not my fault!” I hear people cry out.  “If only they would just listen to me, we could fix this!”  What makes us so convinced that the amorphous “they” is always the one that needs to change?  Perhaps this goes back to our first abdication of responsibility, that of accountability.  Or perhaps it’s even simpler—everyone has issues, and no one has lived someone else’s life.

It’s easy for a struggling white person to think that affirmative action or reparations are ridiculous concepts.  After all, they are overwhelmed too.  Why should someone else get an additional boost, how is that fair?  But if that person listened to what some of those others are saying, they might hear stories about how people have to change their given names on resumes so they don’t get discarded based off that alone.  They might hear about the devastation of having an unarmed family member shot by the police during a routine traffic stop.  They might hear how terrifying it can be to turn on the news and see a mob of people with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us” in a country theoretically founded on freedom and justice for all.

That sword cuts both ways.  An urbanite might look at their fellow citizens living in rural America and raise their nose in disgust at such ignorant viewpoints.  But if they listened, they would hear the frustration and rage that comes from having a way of life stripped away bit by bit.  Jobs get sent overseas and generations of politicians promise to bring them back but never deliver.  Concepts of their self-image they hold dear like religion and family values are mocked on stage and in media.  Above all, they hear over and over from fellow citizens who should be on their side how uneducated they are and that they are to blame for all the country’s woes.  How else should they react, if not with anger?

A responsibility to listen is demanding.  It requires us to put ourselves aside for a moment and open our minds.  In a frantic world that demands every second of your attention, you must choose to pause on behalf of another.  How easy to step away from that, to focus on yourself instead.  How easy from there to turn your back.  How easy from there to point the finger in faux-righteousness.  And from there, we arrive here.

All of these abdicated responsibilities—accountability, vision, and listening—should be familiar.  They are the responsibilities of a functional adult, and isn’t that what democracy demands of us?  It is a government for those who wish to be treated as adults, capable individuals who desire to be a part of the system and have their voice heard.  Like it or not, that comes with responsibility.  And what label do we slap on someone who refuses their responsibilities?  The other side of the equation—acting like a child.

There is an option for those who prefer to live as a child.  Just as democracies require their citizens to behave as adults, authoritarian systems demand childlike obedience.  They remove those responsibilities from citizens in exchange for that obedience, and punish any aberration with the same authority a parent has over a child, unbound by any law save that which they apply to themselves.  This system has its temptations.  Responsibility is hard.  How many of us would love to have someone with all the answers tell us what to do?  Can I reasonably expect a single parent of three working two jobs to put in the time to research which candidates from local to federal best represent his or her interests? 

That is a question each of us must answer for ourselves.  I look to the modern examples of authoritarianism and see horror lurking behind a thin façade of order.  Ethnic concentration camps in China, assassination of Russian opposition members, brutal crackdowns of Iranian police on protestors.  And while we think these things to be distant threats with no bearing on our lives, it does not start at that level.  It starts with an abdication of responsibilities that seems too hard at the time.  Maybe we should militarize our police, even if that risks violent escalation against peaceful protests.  Maybe we should just listen to whatever our chosen political tribe says, even if that means supporting those who post videos depicting graphic violence against their political opponents.  Maybe we should ignore the socioeconomic forces dividing citizens, even if that drives everyone into us versus them camps.

Or maybe we can rise to the challenge.  Taking on a responsibility should not be easy, nor should it be done without care and thought.  But the wonderful thing about living in a community of people willing to take on those responsibilities is that they do so together.  They share that burden across many shoulders.  They hold each other accountable when an individual falters.  They remind each other of their common vision when someone looks down instead of up.  And above all, they make the hard decision to listen when all they want to do is talk.