Americans Have the Government They (Collectively) Deserve

“Every nation gets the government it deserves"    

- Joseph de Maistre

I have heard different versions of the above quote.

And while I was younger had a difficult time believing that this could possibly be true, I tend now to agree with it in my older age.

That is not to say that I feel that the people recently killed by ICE deserve it. Or that all Americans deserve to see their just how fragile our democracy actually was all along. In fact, it now seems as if it might be on life support. 

Never would I say that all Americans deserve what is happening to the country right now. Most certainly not.

However, there was a political apathy and, let's call it what it is, a collective arrogance, a hubris that seemed to suggest to Americans that we were better than the rest of the world and immune from whatever happened on the outside of these sacred borders of ours. That something as ugly as fascism could never take root here. Not really, right? That we were better than that. You could believe it, because countless Americans kept repeating that mantra over the years and decades, from politicians to actors to athletes to almost everyone else.

We were better than that. 

It can't happen here, right?

As it turns out, however, there was a reason why Sinclair Lewis had a book with that exact title.

Turns out, it has happened here. 

And it happened, at least in part, because Americans kept insisting that they were immune from any kind of serious consequences for their actions. Numerous times, when I asked people in and around the 2016 election why they support or supported Trump, they would hesitate (or perhaps would be unable) to give me serious reasons, but they would say "at least he's entertaining."

Admittedly, I never found him entertaining at all. But that's besides the point.

It horrified me to learn that some Americans truly felt that entertainment value was apparently enough of a consideration to vote someone into our highest office. But for too long, we felt that nothing we did could ever come back to bite us. Our collective ignorance of the rest of the world had become like a bad joke, but Americans - if they ever heard such criticisms - would just shrug.

Oh well. What are you gonna do?

The thing is, that kind of hubris has a way of catching up to you at some point. And I suspect that this is what is happening to us, collectively, right now. 

Indeed on some level, we Americans do deserve this. You reap what you sow.