The Enemy Within

Hi. I’m the “enemy within.” At least, according to the new regime soon to occupy the US White House. I’m not even sure how I got to be an enemy. I thought I had been a good Christian girl and a nice, obedient citizen all my life. Never mind. Now, I am exiled from the denomination of my forebears, and apparently many of my fellow citizens find me threatening, too.

Because I believe the president-elect’s rhetoric, behavior, and ideas about governance to be foolish, corrupt, and dangerous, to many fellow Americans I’m the enemy. If you’re reading this, you might be, too. Those of us who are White and old might escape direct retaliation from “the other side” in the next four years—who knows?—but I fear more vulnerable people may not escape.

Maybe this is just another “take” on the election. Sorry. We’re probably all getting tired of the “takes.” We have to process, I guess, especially those of us who are deeply grieved by the threats to democratic order and rule of law that have been building, let’s face it, since 2015. Maybe even 1980. Nah, they’ve always been there, in the DNA of this country. Right now, though, the threats to democracy and rule of law are ascendant.

Why? I keep going down, down, down further to search for whatever is beneath all this. Yes, it’s misinformation, disinformation, a whole machinery designed to apply weapons of mass distraction to the public. It’s disillusionment with the presumed promise of the future. It’s deep-seated American individualism, turbo-charged by consumer selfishness. We’ve been formed—by what? everything?—to care only about ourselves, to complain about the economy (no matter what economic indicators actually say), to feel entitled to prosperity even while we resent other people’s entitlements. All this is true.

It’s also true that the American vision of e pluribus unum has always been aspirational. Living into that vision is heavy going, because any kind of pluralism is always so hard. The wan plea Why can’t we all just get along? seems trivial and stupid, but it’s actually a good question, one humans have been asking since forever. Maybe the rock-bottom answer is always the same: the primordial sin plaguing us since Cain and Abel. Kin-conflict, kin-hatred, kin-violence.

Ultimately, existentially, maybe it’s just this: we love to have enemies.

In a bracingly clarifying interview between Jon Stewart and historian Heather Cox Richardson, Richardson offers rafts of insights from the long perspective of America’s fraught history. The insight that sticks with me most, though, is a little parable she tells (time index 23:00).

Imagine there are ten people in a room. Eight of them just want to live and do their thing and be OK. Two of them, however, want to control everyone else, to dominate. How do these would-be rulers gain this control? They deploy a simple, age-old strategy from the standard authoritarian playbook: Get six of the other eight people to blame and fear the remaining two of the eight.

Doesn’t even matter which two people you put on the bottom. Trump up (I use the verb purposely) some paranoid stories about how those two “bottom enemies” are stealing whatever could make life good for the six: those brown immigrants are “poisoning the blood,” committing heinous crimes; those libs are doing surgery on kids at school, turning them trans; those immoral women are gleefully aborting babies; those elites scorn you and think you’re stupid; experts are engaged in a big, scary conspiracy. Doesn’t really matter. Just lie. The six will turn on the two, and so the eight people who would otherwise just want to go on with life instead remain furiously distracted with fear and enmity—and the would-be rulers can do whatever they want.  

I would add one more element to our parable. Of those bottom two, number two will happily turn in enmity on the very bottom one. Thus, the enmity multiplies. The seemingly obvious way to deal with fear and enmity is by dominating the perceived threat: voila, now we need those powerful rulers to dominate the threat. Power and dominance now feel like safety.

All of us are capable of recognizing this divide-and-conquer strategy for what it is. We are capable of resisting it. But we don’t want to. We like to have enemies. No one is forcing Americans to listen to news sources and podcasts that lie about reality, that trigger and stimulate our hatreds, keeping them constantly stoked. We take pleasure in it. The sin of Cain, always always with us. That love for enmity itself—that’s the real enemy within.

Obviously, Christians are not especially immune. Two-thirds of White Christians favored the president-elect, despite everything he and his enablers have said and done. One-third of Christians of color. I don’t think they’re overlooking a few fussy details around the edges because they think “the economy” or “abortion” are more important. Nah. I think Christians fall into this trap, too: getting our fears stoked, blaming things on some enemy among our fellows. We can easily put God-frosting all over it, too.

I am well aware that we all have pain, we all have fears, and we are all ripe to have the pain and fear exploited. We are all subject to this dynamic. I feel it in myself, though I consciously resist it. This resistance requires some effort, amid the cacophony of American public life.

I’ve been thinking about the elements of American society that inflame our hatreds and paranoias. Yes, it’s the lies perpetuated by craven media outlets. But news and media chatter amounts to storytelling, ultimately, and we have long been trained to love drama and conflict in the stories flowing through our imaginations. The reality TV shows, the vast hero stories where the villains are clear and violence solves problems, the video games that fantasize about mowing down enemies. Our fundamental limbic responses are tuned to resonate with the stories of squashing enemies. The counterstory—let’s all get along despite differences and work out problems together—that’s just not as compelling.

And so we’ve turned our public life into World Wrestling Federation, because that keeps us triggered and stimulated and enraged—and we love it. It’s a stimulating fiction that we have chosen, now, to make very real in our federal government.

I don’t know the answer. I don’t know anything. Among Jesus’s most difficult words are “love your enemies.” This presumes we will always have enemies. I suppose Jesus is realistic about human nature there.

Is something else even possible, ever? Unscrupulous people will always seek to rule by distracting us from real problems and covering their own greeds with trumped-up threats. Could we refuse to play that game? Could we punish with our refusal the people who deploy that strategy? Could we get over the idea that the belonging we deeply crave can only come through warring tribes? As my son Jacob wisely observed, there are powerful “community and emotional overrides” that confuse our ability to make rational decisions or even process information rationally. But could we at least say: absolutely not to those who would pit us against each other?

I want so much to believe that we could. I long to turn away from enmity and work together, realistically, on energy transition and biodiversity loss, on wealth inequality, on the health care system, on ridiculously byzantine and outdated immigration policies, on global cooperation and poverty, on any number of real issues. I wonder how many of my “enemies” long for this? I wonder if we could all set down our fears and hatreds long enough to perceive this: we don’t have to be enemies. I don’t know if we can do it. I’m afraid.

Because the recent US election seems to demonstrate that millions of us prefer the pleasure of enmity.