"The Politics of Denial:
When Americans Stop Seeing the Warning Signs"
By John & Nisha Whitehead
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — "They Live"
Excerpt: "The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests. Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.
This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way. When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength. When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”
When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.
This is not simply about Donald Trump. The machinery of the American police state has been assembled over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Presidents have expanded executive authority, waged undeclared wars, authorized drone killings, built surveillance networks, militarized domestic policing, and invoked national security to justify extraordinary powers.
What makes the present moment so troubling is the extent to which the public is encouraged to accept increasingly aggressive exercises of government power as necessary demonstrations of strength and resolve. The Constitution was never intended to protect only the innocent, the popular, the patriotic, or the politically acceptable. Its restraints on government power matter most when the government is dealing with people whom society has already condemned.
Yet what happens when the public becomes so accustomed to government overreach, corruption and brutality that it no longer recognizes them as warning signs? What becomes of a constitutional republic when its leaders and citizens stop asking whether government actions are lawful, justified or necessary, and concern themselves only with whether those actions punish their enemies, advance their political interests or preserve their sense of security?
We are witnessing a political culture in which demanding due process for an accused criminal is treated as defending criminality, questioning a military strike is equated with sympathy for the enemy, and opposing government cruelty is portrayed as weakness. The government doesn’t have to abolish the Constitution outright when it can persuade the public that certain people should no longer be entitled to its protections. That is how constitutional rights cease to be rights at all and become privileges granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion. And that is how a population becomes conditioned to accept the unacceptable.
We’re living in two worlds. There’s the world we see - or are made to see - and then there’s the one we sense and occasionally catch a glimpse of, which bears little resemblance to the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by those in power and amplified through an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America - privileged, progressive and free - is a far cry from the reality of a nation where economic inequality persists, government power continues to expand, and freedom is increasingly subjected to the demands of surveillance, security and control.
All is not as it seems. Monsters with human faces walk among us. Some of them wield extraordinary government power. This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film "They Live," released in November 1988, which remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age."
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