More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke made the following observation:

“Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are
what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us… They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

Admittedly, the law touches each of us a great deal more now than in Burke’s time, but the essential truth of his observation remains, simply because law cannot encompass everything in social interaction, business practices, government, and personal life – and when it tries, it fails on some and often many levels, even in the most authoritarian states.

All functioning societies have a shared culture, or at times, more than one culture, each shared by a significant fraction of the population, and each culture embodies a standard of manners. Much of what has been historically manifested in the operation of the government of the United States was never codified into law. It was based on manners and custom. Losing candidates accepted their loss, sometimes grudgingly, but they accepted it. Except for Andrew Jackson, Presidents generally accepted Supreme Court rulings they didn’t like, as did Congress.

All this was based on a mannered acceptance of authority.

Then came the 1960s and 1970s and what amounted to a combination of an assault on manners as phony and hypocritical, the Civil Rights movement, which was a slow-burning explosion against the cultural, legal, and long-standing physical repression of black Americans, and the feminist movement, another slow-burning explosion against thousands of years of male dominance. Over the years that followed, these led to significant but delayed changes in the legal system.

But what revolutionaries and reformers have too often failed to understand is that while laws can, immediately after enactment and enforcement, require different requirements of behavior and conduct, when such laws are enacted, they’re often in conflict with cultural beliefs and behavior. And cultural beliefs and manners are highly resistant to change, particularly when those in power have a vested interest in resisting change.

We’ve seen this around the world in often futile attempts to change social structures and cultures into societies that are more “democratic” and egalitarian.

Yet we’ve failed to notice that we have the same problem here in the United States. We’ve also failed to notice that since the European invasion of North America [a phrase studiously avoided by almost all politicians and historians], the forms and control of culture, business, political and governing structures have been and continue to be dominated by white males, but with legal changes over the last generation or so that complete dominance is no longer assured.

And because so much of the American political and social system has been based on cultural acceptance, when the impact of profound legal changes has truly begun to change the political, social, and economic power structure of the United States, those believing themselves to be disadvantaged by those changes, and who feel they’re the ones being discriminated against by their relative loss of power and influence, have effectively decided to reject the traditional mannered acceptance of popular political change, since it no longer benefits them. Given that, it appears, unfortunately, that more unrest and violence are likely.

I can understand that Republicans feel Democrats spend too much and want to spend even more. I can understand that they feel the “wild left” is pushing gender/sexual politics beyond the law. I can understand why they want more spending on police, rather than less. I can understand their concerns about immigration, concerns that many Democrats share but refuse to acknowledge publicly. I can understand their concerns about excessive government regulation. I can understand, even if I disagree violently, their feelings about abortion. I can even understand [although it’s incredibly difficult] that they want Trump back as President.

Issues such as these, whether we like it or not, are the sort of issues to be decided by Congress, the courts, and the President through Constitutional procedures, not by a mob smashing its way into the U.S. Capitol and not by an authoritarian government.

What I find impossible to accept from Republicans is their belief that the last election was “stolen,” and their failure to accept that the January insurrection was just that – an attempt to overthrow the results of an election that even Republican state officials claim was fair, particularly at a time when Republicans controlled the majority of state governments.

To me, such Republican stances are the precursors of yet another attempt to force their will upon others, even on issues where over two-thirds of the population opposes the Republican position.

In his Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln said that the Civil War was fought so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Today, it’s more than a little clear that the Republicans firmly no longer believe that, but instead will deny facts and ignore the will of all the people in order to create government of Republicans, by Republicans, and for Republicans, and the hell with anyone else, even though Republicans are in fact a minority of Americans.

Lately, especially over the last few years, there’s been a great deal of rhetoric from largely conservative sources about the need to stop “the war on Christian America,” a “war” supposedly being waged by “the left.”

Those making such charges claim that liberals and the left want to replace “Christian values” with big government, but those making the charges conveniently ignore history and the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was drafted, Europe had endured hundreds of years of war over which creed and what “Christian values” were to be the law of what land. That was why the Founding Fathers stated in the First Amendment to the Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

So… by the words of the Constitution itself, the United States is not legally and should never be a “Christian nation.” Nor should explicitly religious beliefs and practices be enshrined in law. Yet when individuals and groups use the law to protest local and state laws establishing or promoting religious values, Republicans and many evangelicals paint those individuals as leftist radicals trying to destroy the United States.

What’s ironic about the efforts of the Republicans and evangelicals to paint the left as the enemies of Christianity is that Republicans and too many evangelicals are attempting, through changes in statutory law, especially on the state level, but increasingly on the federal level, to impose mandatory “Christian values” on everyone, whether Christian or not. Currently, a wide range of studies and surveys indicate that roughly 35% of Americans are not Christians. Most of that 35% are either non-believers, atheists, or agnostics.

There’s a clear difference between freedom to practice one’s own faith and enacting laws to force one’s beliefs on others through law, and that difference is ignored more and more, largely, but not exclusively, by Republicans and the far right, not that there’s much difference any more.

We have a long-standing Christmas tradition. Actually, we have quite a few, and I suspect all couples who’ve been married (or together) thirty years have long-standing holiday traditions. But the tradition under discussion is an extensive display of outside Christmas lights – white icicle lights on the gutters on the front and rear of the house, twinkling white lights on artificial garlands affixed to long rear deck railing, some lighted figures on the front lawn, and various strings of lights on the fitzer hedge flanking the front walk and in the side yard.

Needless to say, a number of hours are required for installation, usually taking much of the weekend after Thanksgiving. The labor is necessary for the enjoyment the lights provide us, occasional visiting family members, and the neighbors – and, of course, the power company, which surely enjoys the increased revenues.

We have, however, noticed a trend in terms of the lights themselves. When we first moved to the house we occupy some twenty-eight years ago, we bought six strands of white-wired white icicle lights for the rear of the house. We still have four strands remaining. On three of them every light still works. The fourth strand, alas, lost the lights in a three foot section this winter after two days of winds gusting to 50 mph, likely because several bulbs were smashed. Replacement lights for a 28 year-old strand are not available.

The trend we noted is that almost no set of lights manufactured in the last ten years lasts more than two or three years. The other interesting factor is that although my wife scrupulously saves all the spare bulbs, every strand of newly-purchased replacement lights has a slightly different bulb design, so that if you need more than two replacement bulbs, you essentially need to buy a new strand. And it’s worse than that, because it takes needle-nosed pliers, a surgeon’s touch, and the strength of Sampson to replace one of those bulbs.

Which is why, every January I end up tossing a strand or two of lights, and every late November I buy more, which invariably give out more quickly than their predecessors. I have the feeling that we’re on the way to one-season disposable Christmas lights, and that may be a reason why light displays are becoming limited to those of us who are slaves to our traditions.

In the previous post, I lamented the massive lack of honesty among Republicans, especially among elected office-holders, who are getting to the point where at least some of them will literally do almost anything to hang onto to power and position, whether legal or not.

So far, the Democrats are better, but not nearly as much better as they believe, and therein lies the problem.

The public “lying” problem isn’t new. It’s as old as civilization, but when it gets bad enough that most of the public in a country believes that no public official can be trusted, that country is on the brink of revolution or autocracy, if not both. The United States is coming perilously close to that benchmark, given that the majority of Republicans have effectively declared that they don’t believe the administration on factual matters of national importance.

So how did we get here?

It’s really pretty sadly simple. First, Americans have never liked unpleasant truths, and rather than face them, they prefer to blame others, usually the President in power. Second, while Americans have always had a weak understanding of politics and history, the current generations have an even weaker grasp and, moreover, don’t want to improve that understanding. Third, Americans have become slaves to instant gratification, and with that has come a failure to understand or accept that it takes time to fix things. That’s why the first President Bush lost re-election – because he made unpleasant and unpopular financial fixes – and why President Clinton reaped the benefits of those fixes because he didn’t have to make unpopular public policy choices.

Fourth, politicians of both parties have learned that telling unpleasant truths has the immediate consequence of unpopularity and losing the next election. This bleeds over into everything.

For example, although the official inflation rate for some time, until the last few months, has been below 2%, that methodology for calculating inflation isn’t the same as it was fifty years ago, because the impacts of housing, food, energy, and education are now significantly understated. This “adjustment” not only understated the “official” amount of inflation, but also allowed the government to keep down cost-of-living increases in Social Security, military pensions, and various other benefits and programs, which not only reduced federal outlays but effectively was a hidden tax on beneficiaries.

So… when these costs suddenly increase, and government economists are saying inflation is “transitory,” even people who aren’t economists definitely get the idea that their government is lying to them. And all those years of misinformation and statistical manipulation are coming home to roost in the form of more and more people losing trust in government… and asking, “What else aren’t they telling the truth about?”

Now, even when a public official is telling the truth, most people are skeptical.

And that’s very, very bad news at a time when there are no good quick fixes available.