We live in a surveillance culture. I am not referring to state surveillance, with its ramifications of tyranny. I’m thinking, rather, of the fact that each of us carries a video camera, and we post thousands of culturally revealing incidents online every day. One cannot miss them.
One consequence is that we are all witnesses to a deluge of crime. We watch malefactors robbing stores, rioting, vandalizing property, and beating passersby. I suspect this will lift law and order higher among voters’ concerns at election time, benefiting Republicans and damaging ever-softer-on-crime Democrats. But that, too, is a subject for another day.
What I find especially notable now is that so many videos reveal a new and strange species of aggressive timidity infecting our society. It is turning multitudes into angry cowards. This may seem a contradiction in terms and is decidedly odd, but it is also glaringly true.
Huge swaths of Americans are flipping out at strangers, excoriating them, arrogantly asserting their own moral superiority. And they are doing so not, I think, because they have acquired unprecedented confidence but, quite the opposite, because they are in a deranged state of panicked terror.
Two such videos — there is a wide array to choose from — serve as examples. In one, two middle-aged white women in an elevator
assail a black man
with denunciations and physical blows because he is not wearing a face mask. They order him out of the elevator even though he was in it before they were. While assaulting him, they intone, “Black lives matter,” as though this absolves them of blame for their repugnant behavior. One even pulls down her mask to amplify her attack, uncovering her nose and mouth and doubtless spraying him with germs.
Not to be outdone in the derangement department, a woman in the other video
gets out of her van
in downtown Washington, D.C., to scream imprecations at protesters in a “Defeat the Mandates” rally. She throws a tantrum like a 4-year-old, petulantly stamping her foot but also mixing in some strong, unchildlike epithets.
It’s possible that people are behaving no worse than in the past and that these ubiquitous cameras merely make egregious conduct more apparent. But I doubt it. Whatever is the case, the behavior revealed is (despite being peremptory and highly aggressive) nevertheless redolent of fright, alarm, even despair. It is this that is new and dangerously corrosive. Americans have historically
distinguished themselves
with courage, strength, and optimism. But these admirable qualities are now notable as often for their absence as for their resolute presence.
People hurling abuse at fellow citizens who’ve had enough useless, performative mask-wearing and social distancing have, in the course of two pandemic years, declined into a state of vapid, officially induced frenzy. They are among a growing cohort incapacitated by irrational fear, who want only to be looked after and bossed around by government and to acquire thus a false sense of safety.
The Left and its party, which controls Washington, stoke this fear. President Joe Biden and his colleagues nurture it to persuade people that Democrats will make the nation safe. It is, among other things, behind the administration’s efforts to punish Arizona for its mask nonconformity, which is being tested in court.
But left-wing fearmongering is not confined to COVID-19. It is evident in almost every area of Democratic policy. It posits a fanciful threat to our republic from white supremacists; it suggests, with Biden as its mouthpiece, that nearly 250 years of democracy may die in the 2022 elections unless Democratic “reforms” are enacted; it argues that racial minorities, victims until eternity, are too weak to thrive without federal intervention; it argues that every other discrete minority the Left can concoct requires preferences and taxpayer money to avoid sinking beneath waves of oppression by people who are white, male, or wealthy. In a widening circle of grievance, an ever-greater number of victims are encouraged to make demands from, without obligation to, their own country.
This is a culture of failure. It diminishes Americans at home, and beyond our shores, it undermines our nation as leader of the free world. This culture is embarrassed by that leadership, doesn’t think it is up to it, and is loath to stand for America’s interests or what is right, which are often the same. Biden timidly appeases Russian President Vladimir Putin by
refusing to boost Ukraine’s defenses
against Russian invasion. Longer ago, in the same vein, Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama, used his time in office to conduct an
eight-year “apology tour”
for the sin of being American.
Courage, strength, and optimism are not just pillars of past American leadership and long-standing national character. They are necessary to a successful future. But those are not the characteristics that jump out at you as the nation videotapes its decline.
