The politics of denial: When Americans stop seeing the warning signs
When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength, we are living under the politics of denial. This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way. This is what it looks like when Americans stop seeing the warning signs.
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.
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.
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.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government. Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In They Live, two migrant workers discover that the world is being subliminally controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by hidden messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
Sound familiar? It is only when homeless drifter John Nada, played by the late Roddy Piper, discovers a pair of special sunglasses that he sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage. When viewed through Nada’s lenses, the wealthy and powerful who appear human are revealed as monsters exploiting the citizenry.
Likewise, seemingly mundane advertisements conceal subliminal, authoritarian messages. Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” Money proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Other hidden messages reinforce the same demands: CONFORM. SUBMIT. STAY ASLEEP. WATCH TV. DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT. This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the workings of an authoritarian state.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled. In this way, the message of They Live provides an apt analogy for the distorted vision of life in the American police state. The danger is not simply that powerful interests might conceal what they’re doing. It’s that they can operate in plain sight, confident that enough people will refuse to see—or refuse to care.
For too long, Americans have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for promises of security, rationalizing government wrongdoing because they are told the alternatives would be worse. But no matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil. The warning signs are unfolding in courtrooms, detention facilities, government offices, financial disclosures and daily news reports. And still, too many people choose to look away.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
The greatest danger is not that the monsters have become so adept at hiding among us. It is that we have become so conditioned to their presence, so accustomed to their abuses, and so willing to excuse their corruption that we no longer recognize them for what they are.
Wake up, America! If they live—the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords—it is only because “we the people” are sleeping.
This commentary by John & Nisha Whitehead appears on Rutherford.org and has been edited for publication on this site. It is used by permission.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries.
Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
