Almost a decade ago I heard those words from one of my co-workers as we were having coffee. It was unusual for us to be speaking about politics - I can't recall what I said to prompt her reaction. "What the people really want," she asserted, "is a strong leader."
She had almost 4 decades of experience more than me and had been born in Hong Kong so I wasn't sure how much of her viewpoint was generational and how much of it was cultural, but I was stunned to hear someone speak so dismissively about democracy. I was, I suppose, inclined to think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s adage that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" and assumed that meant we (humans) were becoming more just and more democratic as time went on.
The US election in 2016 really unnerved me. It challenged what I thought about democracy and justice and what that nation's beliefs supposedly were. For some reason, I came down hard on the television series The West Wing. I recall shortly after the election that I got into a rant while speaking to one of my friends. My argument was, "why would anyone ever watch The West Wing again?"
The West Wing was an extremely optimistic program when it came to politics. Generally, politicians who were exposed as charlatans and hypocrites would slink off, never to be seen again. Politicians who opposed the White House's policies would do so in good faith, standing on a principle which conflicted with their goals. The opposing party could be brought around by a persuasive argument rooted in their common beliefs and goals.
So my argument was: none of that is true about the USA. The contempt one half of that country has for the other -- the irrational self-destructive hatred -- renders all of The West Wing's high ideals meaningless. I not only questioned their present commitment to democracy, I began questioning whether they were ever truly interested in democracy.
After that I picked a fight with another friend, this one a former poli-sci student. There I argued that the entire discipline of poli-sci was meaningless if any uneducated boor could attain the highest office on earth by merely appealing to populism. My friend fired back that, in fact, he found the election of Trump had made his poli-sci easier to teach in the classroom. When courts refused to back Trump's orders it provided useful examples of how the US government branches functioned.
I had allowed myself to become very anti-US in my outlook. I posted on Facebook on the day of Trump's election that I wanted my nation to find a new "best friend". I was not making a joke. And the darkest place I went to in that time was deciding the 'good' side of Trump's election was that it would hasten the collapse of the USA.
In retrospect, what I wanted was to see that country humbled - chastened - humiliated, perhaps. I wanted to see them lose prestige and somehow that was the worst-case scenario in my head. I did not foresee the 'Muslim ban', the children in cages, the catastrophic death toll from COVID-19 or the attempted coup. So although those events were the ugliest of all 'ugly American' attitudes I have ever experienced, more and more I came feel for all of those were suffering. That has helped me to expunge some of my anti-US sentiments.
Earlier this week I put on my DVDs of The West Wing for the first time in... what, 5 years? It wasn't consciously because I felt differently about that country or wanted to somehow commemorate the inauguration of their new president. I was simply scanning my DVD shelves, saw the boxed sets and thought, "why not? Maybe it will hold up after all."
It does hold up.
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