Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

The dominant discourse right now is “Calm down, this is just the normal game of democracy”. Actually, “this” is not the normal course of democracy. Everyone has experienced the disappointment of a favored candidate losing. The result of Tuesday is something else, not seen before in our lifetime: the triumph of indecency and the rout of decency.

There is in the world a general category of decent people, who as one of their characteristics seek out the company of other decent people. (“Elective affinities”.) They have been massively and perhaps decisively defeated.

What makes people decent is not that they never do bad things (although they perhaps strive not to do more of them than necessary), but that as much as possible they prefer certain things over their obverses. For example, they prefer:

• Telling  the truth over lying.
• Elegance over vulgarity.
• Education over arrogant ignorance.
• Arguments over insults.
• Beauty over ugliness.
• Joy over gloom.
• Progress over regress.
• Health over disease.
• Financial well-being over widespread poverty.
• Reason over mania.
• Science over fables.
• Helping others over hurting them.
• Encouraging others over denigrating them.
• Peace over war.
• Respect over contempt.
• Calm over violence.
• Tolerance over intolerance.
• Honesty over dishonesty.
• Democracy over totalitarianism.
• Freedom over slavery.
• As an example of the last pair, women’s freedom over their submission to hateful men.
• Kindness over cruelty.
• Fairness over injustice.
• Sanity over insanity.

(Again) those preferences do not mean that decent people never indulge in any of the second terms of these pairs, but that given a choice they will lean towards the first terms,  that they prefer the world to evolve in the direction of these first terms, and that they naturally associate with other people with similar preferences. The first terms all go well with each other (after all, what is science if not the dogged pursuit of truth? What is democracy if not the reign of tolerance?), and all the second terms go well with each other too, but until now it was exceedingly rare to see a  widely popular leader in a civilized country, and his zealots, deliberately embrace everything indecent and reject everything decent. At worst they would on the sly adopt a few indecencies here and there.

The pair elected yesterday is unique in the history of the United States by having deliberately, ostensibly and proudly chosen every second term.Every single one, many times, in the public’s full view, and under the cheers of their supporters.

That is why all decent people are desperate today. The desperation has nothing to do with matters of left versus right, or democrat versus republican, or higher taxes versus tax cuts, or the price of eggs, or any other political issue of substance.  It has everything to do with decency over indecency.

And particularly with truth over falsehood. The first of the above pairs largely subsumes the others: when society starts tolerating constant, blatant, enormous lies as if they were part of expected discourse, everything else falls out. Dictators understand this process well.

We hear that “no one knows what is going to happen”. Not so. We know something with certainty: catastrophes are coming our way. The only unknown is how many of them will hit us. For one thing the fight against climate change is doomed: all experts tell us that the change is not linear and that we have (we had) at best a few years to avoid the worst. As the US, the biggest  source of warming and emissions (although by no means the only large one), turns away from climate action, everyone else, beginning with China, will have an excellent excuse to do nothing. The consequences are horrendous to contemplate, and will be with us soon.  Another certain catastrophe is chaos in the US, merrily encouraged by its enemies. The part of the country that voted for sanity is defeated and despondent but not gone; come the first round of anti-constitutional measures, we may expect no end to clashes. Tens of millions of Americans are almost certainly going to lose their health insurance, going back to a situation unique in developed countries.  Women, denied abortion and resorting to back-alley substitutes, will die by the thousands. It is better not to think too much of what will happen to Ukraine now (and through a possible ricochet effect to Poland and the Baltic states).  Or of what would ensue in the case of a new health crisis, with loony anti-vaccine, anti-mask activists at the helm. Of what will take place at all levels of governments, with none of the “adults in the room” around: the cool-headed conservative professionals who saved us from some disasters the first time around (and this time exhorted the country to vote for the sane candidate). We are back to the dark years of 2016 to 2020, when we would wake up almost every morning to the news of the latest crazy initiative, except that now there will be a rock-solid majority (presidency, Senate, Supreme Court, with the House still not decided as of this writing) and the entire party’s total subservience to the whims, however extreme, of one man.

The founders of the Republic had warned against exactly the kind of outrageous demagogues that will now assume power, but they could never imagine such a combination of circumstances as has now overwhelmed the country; if they had they would surely have put in more checks and balances. (For one thing, convicted felons cannot vote; why in the world can they be elected?)

The USA is, or was until now, the world’s oldest continuously functioning democracy. Does it have enough resilience to continue as a democracy? Do not hold your breath. For one thing, there is no democracy without civilized debate. Yet another certain and unprecedented catastrophe is the debasement of public discourse, step by step until destruction, in the past few years. Everyone now seems to have accepted that it is OK for a major party candidate, a past and now future president, to resort again and again and again to personal insults, to mocking disabled persons for their disability, war heroes for having been heroes, soldiers for having been soldiers, and opponents for being supposedly stupid. The press calls these insults “schoolyard bullying”, but a 12-year-old who says any of these things in  a school’s yard promptly gets a dressing-down from the principal and a suspension.

We in the West have been living, whether we realized or not, a wonderful 80 years. We have suffered traumas (the repeated Paris attacks, 9/11, October 7, February 2022) but we have also enjoyed peace and prosperity. We are at the end of an era. Particularly those among us who aspire to decency.