Why Does America Choose the World’s Worst Leaders?
How American Politics Descended Into the Tragedy and Farce of Self-Destruction
As you and I watch the grim spectacle of Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, jetting back from a vacation to Cancun, since, well, his failed state is a place going largely without electricity, heating, or water, a question needs to be asked: why do Americans choose such bad leaders?
To the rest of the world, it’s hilarious, tragic, and bizarre in equal measure. Americans don’t live in an authoritarian state…yet. They live in a failing democracy. They still have the power, however weakened, to choose their leaders. Billions of people around the world don’t. And look at who they choose.
Who on earth elects this grab-bag of malicious fools, incompetents, and demagogues? How do you, for example, vote for a man like Ted Cruz? Someone so venal, so corrupt, so flagrantly awful that he rode the coat-tails of white supremacy for political gain by becoming the sycophantic flunky of the very man who abused him, and then jets off to paradise, while his failed state thunders apart into post third-world levels of catastrophe?
What exactly is wrong with Americans, the world wonders. The answer that the world comes up with goes like this. They’re idiots. Nobody else could choose such hilarious, tragically self-destructive buffoons as leaders over and over and over again. In the rest of the world, where such figures come to power, nobody much elects them. They storm in with tanks and militias and men on jeeps with AK-47s. Americans alone choose to be ruled by people who literally couldn’t care less if they or die, and the only possible answer to that is: they’re the world’s biggest idiots.
Yes, there are now contenders to the throne. Britain’s lost its mind in a fever dream of nationalism. But even Brits might draw the line at losing water, power, and electricity. Texans, though, are probably going to vote in Ted Cruz all over again.
And it’s hardly just about Ted, or a problem on the right. It exists on the left, too. Americans desperately need the following things: healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, income, safety nets, housing. The skyrocketing costs of all those things have plunged the average American into a life of destitution — yes, really. The middle class and working class have imploded into one giant underclass, fully halfof Americans now work “low-wage service jobs”, meaning they’re glorified servants, maids, drivers, cleaners, and so on, and the average American dies in massive debt, meaning they never save a penny.
But who did Americans — even those on the centre and left choose? Not Bernie. Not Liz. The two figures who were brave, fierce, bold, and smart enough to offer them the very public goods they lacked. They chose Joe Biden — who didn’t offer them a single one.
What turning Liz and Bernie down means is that Americans — even the “good” ones, on the centre — rejected the politics of having the very thing that they needed most.
That’s perplexing. Why would you turn down the very things you need most?
Because something else must have appealed to you more. But what could that something be? What could be more crucial than what you yourself need most?
The answer, again, comes from examining the amazingly self-destructive political choices Americans make. Instead of supporting having the things they need most, they back everyone else not having anything at all.
Take the example of healthcare, retirement, affordable education, any public good at all. Americans simply won’t vote for having it. Not on the right, certainly, where decades of indoctrination have convinced the average rube and hick that all this is “socialism.” But not even on the centre and left. Instead, Americans vote for the diametrical opposite of having what they need most, in socioeconomic terms: for everyone else to have nothing at all. When it comes to public goods, instead of saying: “Yes, please, I need that,” Americans say: “What I need more than that is everyone else not having it.
That might seem bizarre, but think about it in what economists call “strategic” terms, or what a psychologist might call relational ones. What are Americans really doing? They are withholding resources from each other.
They are making a choice. An active, deliberate, and very real choice. Nobody is forcing them to make it. They are exerting their own agency — but in a way so self-destructive it baffles the world.
The American is saying that instead of me having what I need, badly, I would prefer to keep the things from everyone else that they need.
The power to withhold and deny resources to everyone else matters more to me than having the resources I need.
The paradox, the part that makes the world shake its head and laugh at Americans, is that the “everyone” in “I’m going to deny everyone the resources they need” includes the average American, too. “Everyone” of course includes you. Do Americans get this part? Do they not care?
As an economist, I can only really apply the principle of “revealed preference,” which basically says: actions speak louder than words. Americans value denying and withholding critical resources from everyone else more than they value having exactly those same critical resources even for themselves. And when I say critical, I mean it. Healthcare, medicine, money — these are the things of life or death. As are the water, power, and heat that Texans now don’t have, either, because, well, by voting for Ted Cruz and Co., they denied public goods to each other, choosing a failed state over a functioning one.
What do we call a relationship based on withholding and denial of critical resources — instead of the sharing of them, generously? If I was a psychologist, I’d have to say it was an abusive one. This is exactly what abusers do. They deny and withhold. Critical resources. Right down to food and water, usually beginning with money and options. The point is to control the other person, by wrecking their spirit, their morale, crushing their self-esteem, making them feel so worthless that they simply give up on themselves.
This is what Americans appear to be doing to each other — and always have been. Playing out the script of an abusive relationship, by way of politics, on a massive social scale. They deny each other critical resources, in order to control people they don’t like very much — crushing their self-esteem, morale, worth, agency, sense of meaning, confidence, purpose, truth, goodness.
The right takes healthcare and retirement and childcare and women’s rights away from the left, which in America is just really another right, and then that so-called left turns right around and does it, too.
The result is that the abusive relationship works just as intended. Americans do lack all the things a healthy self is made of. Confidence, inner beauty, truth, goodness, decency, true strength, as in the capacity to care, wisdom, a sense of agency, purpose, meaning, trust. They are just not “normal” people anymore, the world says, quicker to draw a gun, or flare up in a rage, than read a book or have a conversation. And the world, sadly, seems to be right.
But what the world doesn’t see is that Americans have been destroyed on the inside, because they are in an abusive relationship with each other. Their inner moorings of worth, respect, dignity, and purpose have been eroded to the point of nonexistence — so what then is there left to give anyone else?
The only choice left, really, to such a mind is vengeance. Todays’ abused become tomorrow’s abusers. That is what happens in America, and Americans call all that politics. They play out an endless cycle of abuse. But not in the way they think. Not left versus right, so much as all the above. Everyone withholding critical resources from everyone else, in a raging, terrifying battle of narcissistic wounds.
Ask the average American what a person deserves, just as a condition of, well, existing, and they’ll look at you, baffled. The answer, to them, is nothing. Ask a Canadian, European, or Australian, and you’ll get a long, long list of basic human rights, from healthcare to dignity to purpose to the opportunity to live with truth and beauty and goodness.
Americans don’t believe anyone deserves anything because they have internalised the belief that nobody has any intrinsic or inherent worth to begin with. That is the only way you end up at the conclusion that nobody deserves anything: if they aren’t worth anything. The result of this logic is where Americans end up. Being “liabilities” and “burdens” the moment their “productivity” — meaning their profitability to billionaires — declines. Getting million dollar medical bills, instead of having free healthcare for all. The idea that nobody has any intrinsic worth and so nobody deserves anything is the most American idea of all — it is the single, simple problem that left America a smoking wreck.
The Democrats believe all that — nobody deserves anything because there is no such thing as intrinsic human worth — just as much as the Republicans do. They are not out there giving everyone abundant, next-generation human rights. They are still dithering and “debating” if such things exist.
It’s not a surprise that the Democrats believe the idea that nobody deserves anything because there is no such thing as intrinsic worth, as much as the Republicans do, either. They have to. That’s what American voters want. That’s the message they sent when they rejected Bernie and Liz in favour of the old neoliberal establishment.
How do you rebuild a society premised on a mistake that big? On the idea that withholding and denying critical resources is more valuable than having them yourself — so that, at least, that way, you stay on top of hierarchies of a power, even if society collapses? How do you reconstruct a society premised on an abusive relationship, replicated hundreds of millions of times, played out a massive social scale, and which calls all that “politics”?
I think there’s a question even more basic. Can you? Can you teach people to think — millions upon millions of them — in a more civilized, educated, decent, considered way? People who don’t want to think any other way? Can you rescue an addict, alcoholic, victim of abuse, who doesn’t want to be saved?
You will have to tell me, my friend. I’ve been trying all my life, and I can only tell you this much. So far, I’ve failed miserably. No, don’t cry for me. So has anyone else who ever tried to teach Americans the most basic truth of all: they don’t have to live this way, and never did.
Umair
February 2021