OPINION
THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN
How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society
May 28,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/opinion/trump-civility-society.html
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
The
conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s trial over his alleged efforts to
buy the silence of a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election is the least
important of the cases against him. Politically that may be true. But more than
any of the other cases, this one is revealing of a trend ailing America today:
how much we’ve lost our moorings as a society.
How so? The
environment offers a good answer. Almost 30 years ago I visited the Atlantic
Forest in Brazil with a team from Conservation International, and its members
taught me about all the amazing functions that mangroves — those thickets of
trees that often live underwater along tropical coastlines — perform in nature.
Mangroves filter toxins and pollutants through their extensive roots, they
provide buffers against giant waves set off by hurricanes and tsunamis, they
create nurseries for young fish to safely mature because their cabled roots
keep out large predators, and they literally help hold the shoreline in place.
To my mind,
one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how
much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today
— but not just in nature.
Our society
itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as
well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political
extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young
people to grow up in and which hold our society together.
You see,
shame used to be a mangrove. It used to be that if you were a candidate for
president of the United States and it was alleged — with a lot of evidence —
that you falsified business records to cover up sex with a porn star right
after your wife had given birth to a child, you would lower your head in shame,
drop out of the race and hide under the bed. That shame mangrove has been
completely uprooted by Trump.
The reason
people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their
cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short, explained Dov
Seidman, the author of the book “How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything”
and founder of the How Institute for Society and LRN.
“But in the
kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and
leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel
shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”
To be
clear: People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American
politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it
so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it
again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like
suckers for following them.” Whether President Richard Nixon was or was not a
“crook,” he gave the impression of feeling ashamed that anyone would think that
he was. Not so with Trump.
Nothing is
more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman,
than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms
and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the
Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will
never unite us.”
Just
consider one scene in another Trump case, about the Mar-a-Lago classified
documents. It was after a federal grand jury subpoenaed Trump in May 2022 to
produce all classified material in his possession. Notes written by one of his
lawyers quoted Trump as saying, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.
I really don’t,” and making the following statements: “What happens if we just
don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better
if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
Better for
whom? Only one man.
That’s the
point. Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a
broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a
broken system. He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the
zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he
says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get
flooding with lots of mud.
Responsibility,
especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove
— has also experienced serious destruction. It used to be that if you had the
incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest
dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down (carried that
way by hooligans who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021) outside your home,
let alone your wife sending emails urging senior officials to overturn the 2020
election. Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to
uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.
Not anymore
— as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito recently demonstrated. And
before that, in 2016, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was way out of line herself when she
denounced presidential candidate Trump as a “faker."
Civil
discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of
immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.
In a column
I wrote in 2016 under the headline “The Age of Protest,” Seidman observed that
“people everywhere seem to be morally aroused” and that is “generally a good
thing” when it comes to confronting issues like racism or abusive policing. But
when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for
firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with
equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of
forging real understanding.”
Many
universities today seem to be in the grip of a progressive ideological
framework that divides the world into hierarchies of colonizers and the
colonized, oppressed and oppressors, racists and anti-racists — and now
pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists. As a result, those who fall on the wrong side
of those binaries feel the need to stay silent or risk being ostracized. The
first impulse in too many cases these days is to seek cancellation, not
conversation.
In November
2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564
full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in
five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like
religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative
backlashes by classmates.
Indeed,
civility itself also used to be a mangrove. During the Covid-19 pandemic I
found comfort in watching old movies like “Inherit the Wind,” which came out in
1960, when I first saw it at the age of 7. It was loosely based on the 1925
Scopes “monkey trial.” Rewatching the film as a nearly 70-year-old journalist,
I couldn’t help laughing at a courtroom scene when the lawyer, Henry Drummond —
who was defending a local schoolteacher who was teaching the science of
evolution — notices that there is a microphone in the courtroom from station
WGN in Chicago. The Scopes case was the first time a trial was covered live by
a radio broadcast.
“Radio!"
Drummond thunders into the WGN live microphone. “God, this is going to break
down a lot of walls.”
“You’re not
supposed to say ‘God’ on the radio!” the WGN announcer fires back.
“Why the
hell not?” Drummond asks.
“You’re not
supposed to say ‘hell,’ either,” the announcer says.
You are not
supposed to say “hell,” either. What a quaint thought. That is a polite
exclamation point in today’s social media.
Another
vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades: A
March 29, 2021, Gallup report noted that “Americans’ membership in houses of
worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50 percent for the first
time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend.” Bad timing because, as Enrique Lores, the
C.E.O. of HP Inc., once remarked to me, “Today we have the power to part the
Red Sea” — but too often “without the Ten Commandments.”
Locally
owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our
national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to
one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community
and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve
and nurture healthy interdependencies — to keep the schools decent, the streets
clean and to sustain local businesses and job creators.
But a
recent study by Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern found that in 2023,
the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week,
“leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than
half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and
information.”
So now the
most partisan national voices on Fox News, or MSNBC — or any number of
polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson — go straight from their national
studios direct to small-town America, unbuffered by a local paper’s or radio
station’s impulse to maintain a community where people feel some degree of
connection and mutual respect. As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with
fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species
and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.
In a 2021
interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama observed that when he
started running for the presidency in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go
into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural
America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. … They
didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me
at face value.”
But then
Obama added: “If I went into those same places now — or if any Democrat whose
campaigning goes in those places now — almost all news is from either Fox News,
Sinclair news stations, talk radio or some Facebook page. And trying to
penetrate that is really difficult. It’s not that the people in these
communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in
and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set
of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”
Alas, we
have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that
is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and
psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires
today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping
Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means
by our geopolitical rivals.
More than
ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me
back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the
things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown
away.
Blown away
— that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an
ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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