MSNBC contributor Anand Giridharadas argued Americans are so obsessed with their freedom that it leaves them unguarded to other threats.
Giridharadas, the host of Vice’s Seat At The Table, appeared Wednesday on Morning Joe to discuss how the government’s relationship with U.S. citizens would change because of the coronavirus pandemic, specifically laying out three ways he views the future of that relationship.
“There is a primordial American tradition going back to the Founders of being freedom-obsessed, even though we are a country founded on slavery and genocide, being freedom-obsessed to the point that we’re always so afraid of the government coming for us that we’re blind to other types of threats, whether it’s a virus, whether it’s bank malfeasance, climate change, or what have you,” he said.
Giridharadas went on to note that a “more recent, kind of 40-year version” is the “Reagan war on government,” which he said is an idea that both Democrats and Republicans follow.
The third point he made claimed President Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the next step in a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which people complain about the government to such an extent that their fears become the reality.
“There’s the more recent Trump-era twist in this, which is the war on government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: You undermine government,” Giridharadas explained. “You put someone who can barely read a sentence in government, in the figure of Donald Trump, and it becomes true. The government sucks because you made it suck by telling everybody it sucks. I think the most important thing that could come out of this is realizing the government is not the biggest threat to our liberty.”
