By Melissa Walsh

I'm an extreme centrist. This doesn't mean that I am necessarily “moderate” on all issues or ever “on the fence.” I'm not apolitical or apathetic (as anyone who knows me will tell you). I strive to center my political propositions in preserving inalienable rights of individuals while remaining true to the duty of protecting the common good, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Politics aside, how I aim to treat others is grounded in my belief in and understanding of moral law. To know moral law, I follow C.S. Lewis’ test in checking moral beliefs: they must be accountable to reason, and reason must be accountable to science.

'Cognitive Dissonance'
What moves us off from centrism is what Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris identify as "cognitive dissonance" in a July 12, 2020 article in The Atlantic — "the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings — even when those findings can save our lives." They present this phenomenon in the context of how wearing a mask during a pandemic became politicized. Cognitive dissonance, I would add, is the refusal to dissent from unconstitutional practices or unreasoned or immoral statements and activities driven by prevailing forces, or voices, in a political party, church, or other faction we belong to. It explains why "good" Germans tolerated Nazism and why anti-fascist freedom fighters accepted Stalinism. These shifts to the extreme right or the extreme left, we know well from history, are dangerous, which is why I periodically tweet #makeamericareadhistoryagain. Those who simply read history again, sans identity-politics denial, are bound to have an aha moment about how grave American unrest is today.

We are witnesses in real-time, in living history, to the dangers of identity-based politics, or populism, in the United States. This populism is not driven by a true identity with being American, but with belonging to a special faction of Americans, a sloppy ideology that narrowly divides Americans by identifying each citizen by race or religion or income level or education, etc. In 2016, I forewarned against the ugly events we're witnessing today (and hoped to be proven wrong), as I listened to the statements (and read the tweets) from the hyperbolic fear-based canon of Donald Trump, the regurgitation of hate speech, which was devoured by his base. Trumpian populism initially attacked Latin Americans and Middle Easterners (and continues to). Then it launched an attack on the press (even turning "media" into a singular word to describe a monolith rather than a plural word to describe voices accountable to verification in a free press). It purged centrist judges. It gave legitimacy to the unreasonable, formerly concealed inhumane biases among a base that takes pride in being poorly educated, anti-science, pro-conspiracy theory, so-called “pro-life,” pro-gun, Evangelical, and pro-white power. Five years ago, who in this nation could have conceived of crowds of American citizens proudly waving Confederate flags, Nazi crosses, and AR-15s in public spaces while professing to be Christians and patriots.

It took some time — too long — for centrists with a microphone or many Twitter followers, including Never-Trump Republicans, to grow a backbone and vigorously stand up to this asinine and nefarious take-over of the GOP. Thanks to The Lincoln Project, they've found a forum and gained momentum. Those to the far left were way ahead of these moderate, or reasonable, Republicans, reacting fiercely, courageously even, but also unrefined, many of these activists too young to have cultivated the wisdom that comes with decades of adulting. And Democrat POTUS candidates were unable to achieve commonality on critical issues, most notably on healthcare, and ended up with essentially an incumbent as the 2020 POTUS candidate. I consider Joe Biden a centrist, but what will he do to stop the bleeding? My hope rests in his skill in gathering a great team of thinkers and doers, including those who can see and understand how to meet the economic needs of Trump's base.

Reagan Democrats and Me
I grew up in the land of the (over-analyzed and under-heard) Reagan Democrats in the near-east suburbs of Detroit among the first wave of gen-Xers (our older siblings were baby-boomers) raised by autoworkers. Many of my peers entered one of the last classes of automotive skilled-trades apprentices and moved onto a long career of turning a wrench for good pay and benefits, thanks to the UAW. They have recently retired or are about to retire with pensions, the last Motor City generation to reap the promise of retirement after more than three decades of working in a blue-collar shirt with a Big Three branding. They voted for Trump in 2016.

Why would they support a whiney narcissistic blue-blood like Trump? Mainly because he’s the alternative to Democrat candidates who have been talking over them and past them for decades. They feel seen by Trump. They feel unseen by the Democratic Party. The truth is that they remain unseen by both parties. They’re misunderstood. They’re undervalued. Trump strategists, including the Breitbart and FoxNews ilk, seized this void, and these Reagan Democrat heirs were sucked into believing the hype, the fear-mongering, the need to build a wall, the need to make America great again.

My Eastside Detroiter, Reagan Democrat instincts were radically altered and sharpened while earning my degree in International Studies. (I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree.) During and after college, I lived briefly in different European cities. I spent a semester in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1988. (I also had spent two weeks in Sarajevo in the summer of 1987 and travelled there a few times while living in Vienna, Austria, in 1989.) In 2016, this pre-war Yugoslav experience gave me foreknowledge of the decline our nation would sustain if this sleazy real estate mogul and populist with no government experience were elected. On social media and during cocktail-party conversation, I could not be silent in 2016. I sensed a calling to warn against the fear-mongering and hateful scapegoating of the other spewing from Trump’s campaign. So I posted and stated my observations that Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric struck me as gravely similar to the hate speech, dressed as ethno-religious nationalism, I heard among Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia.

A handful of hearers of my warnings agreed that Trump was bad news, but said, “Well, that (ethno-religious violence) can't happen here.” I responded, "If the economy fails, the violence will follow."

Several others revealed themselves to be Trump supporters and broke ties with me, or I broke ties with them due to their posts and statements that I viewed as ignorant and hateful.

​In 2020, it IS happening here. Our American union grows more fragile.

Smrt fašizmu... ('death to fascism')
I saw 2016, 2017, and 2018 from the perspective of my young-adult self in 1987, 1988, and 1989. I saw 2019 from the frustration and pain of watching footage from Sarajevo in 1992. I grieved before the images and tragic accounts of families separated at the U.S. southern border and of immigrants rounded up at their homes, schools, or places of business for incarceration and deportation — many of them my neighbors here in Detroit who have lived in this nation for decades after leaving their middle eastern homelands.

Today, in 2020, with more than 140,000 American lives lost to the pandemic, which the Trump administration denied and did little to contain, I'm weighted down by the overwhelming sorrow of so many souls who lived and then died so suddenly that we can't even list all of their names on the newspaper obituary pages. Now the Trump administration seeks to control that information — the data on those who remain to be infected by the COVID-19 virus, an invisible non-partisan enemy that Trump seeks to will away with despotism and whose effects he wishes to conceal from scientists.

Concurrently with the federal government's coup and dismissal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump unleashed paramilitary troops wearing unnamed military swag and egressing from unmarked vans to arrest citizens in Portland, Oregon, at will, without charge, and without regard for the U.S. Constitution or moral law. As in Sarajevo in 1992, a city known for youth, art, progressiveness, energy, and hope, Portland is being attacked from the outside by irregulars sporting camo and clutching ammo.

And if that wasn’t enough to bring a tear to your eye, the news broke that John Lewis died.

'Get in good trouble'

It’s time for extreme centrists in this nation to exert the same courage John Lewis did, to move past fear and cognitive dissonance and hold tight to our nation’s founding principles, to "get in good trouble," as he defined it. To do that, we must vote Trump out. We also must support the non-partisan pro-Constitution advocacy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is good centrism that insists on pursuing common sense, reason, and care for one another as we stand against the identity politics that are obstructing the cause of America.

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in January 1776. “Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is”

Trump’s America is unAmerican. Make America Great Again today is the Make Germany Great Again of 80 years ago and the Make Croatia Great Again and Make Serbia Great Again of 30 years ago.

Looking forward from the past and today's ugly present, the inclusive, universal call to action ought to be what Thomas Paine urged, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” For after all, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
​
As Americans, we are obligated to strive for a more perfect union. The key word here is “union.” American extreme centrists must remain steadfast to the cause of America by knowing and revering the U.S. Constitution. They must boldly reference it as the premier primary source to defeat the defective opining by those with ulterior political motives rooted in power and greed (in Trump’s case, power and greed plus narcissism).
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​And as citizens of the world, we must live in harmony with a moral law that does not divide our shared humanity or scorn science.
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#AmericaOrTrump

​​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

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By Melissa Walsh

The History Channel’s Sons of Liberty was beyond bad; for a channel whose namesake is “history,” it was irresponsible. The script not only presented ridiculous falsehoods in a ludicrously dummied-down drama of what an unread audience might perceive as history; it omitted key figures and developments that led to America’s prodigious Patriot Movement of the 1770s. 

From the early first-episode scene depicting Samuel Adams pursued by one-dimensional red-coated thugs and running across Boston rooftops like David Starsky, I was disappointed. Artistically the truth would have been a much more compelling story to portray than the soap-opera casting and cheesy, 21st-century dialogue the History Channel gave us in Sons of Liberty. Perhaps the screenwriters interviewed Drunk History contributors as research. 

I continued to watch nonetheless, with an agenda: I wanted to see if the writers bothered to add Common Sense to the script.

They did not.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, not Sam Adams' strong-arming, was arguably the key cultural force that pulled colonists en masse away from British loyalist tradition and pulled them into vision for a new American nation-state. Common Sense is what dared and convinced them to take up arms against the super power of the world. This is not to say that Sam Adams’ contribution to the American Revolution was not remarkable. It is to explain how Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty comrades in arms were able to gain the sizable Patriot following and build an army of men and boys that paid for independence from Britain with their lives. 

Were colonists upset over taxation without representation? Yes. But were they more likely to own land in the American colonies than in Britain? Yes. American colonists remained largely loyal to the crown in 1775. And, despite the rebel-rousing of Sam Adams and friends, they may have remained complacent under colonial rule if it weren’t for a devoted, prolific, and enlightened writer -- Thomas Paine. 

As the Sons of Liberty managed the muscle and logistics of American revolution, Paine gave it the authority of Common Sense.

Written in 1775 and reviewed by Dr. Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse, and Samuel Adams, Paine’s 48-page pamphlet Common Sense was released in January of 1776 and sold 120,000 copies in three months in the American colonies alone. Paine published the pamphlet anonymously, taking no royalty payments. Initially, many believed that Common Sense had been written by Benjamin Franklin (Paine’s friend and mentor) or John Adams. Soon it became common knowledge that Paine had written the explosive, seditious pamphlet.

“If any man is entitled to be called the Father of American Independence,” wrote Sidney Hook in the Introduction to a Signet Classic collection of Paine’s writings," it is Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense stated the case for freedom from England’s rule with a logic and a passion that roused the public opinion of the colonies to a white heat.”

What Paine understood:

New Media 

As a writer, Paine knew the potential power of the modern medium of his day to make his message go viral, if you will -- the printing press. He was a journalist in Philadelphia well-positioned to spread his message. Common Sense remains the highest selling and circulating title in American history.

“Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.” 

~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“The People”

The 18th century was a period of rapidly expanding literacy among common classes. While writers continued to address the traditionally literate aristocracy and gentry, Paine addressed all of society. The democratic appeal to an all-inclusive readership, to the people, was radical and fresh, and later adopted by Thomas Jefferson as “all men” in the Declaration of Independence. Paine wrote in clear language a common message to all classes of society of the American colonies. He galvanized them into a single American identity and loyalty.

“For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.” 

~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Loyalism

Paine appreciated the colonists’ nostalgic and cultural ties to the British monarchy. In Common Sense, he convinced colonists that they were indeed merely colonists in the view of Britain, minor subjects ruled by an Imperialist power, and not citizens of England. He fastened a new allegiance to a vision of an American nation-state, with Europe as its parentland, not Britain.

“One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” 

~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Enlightenment

Paine was a driven student of philosophy, long before landing in Philadelphia in late 1774. To present a grand and global vision of American legacy, Paine submitted arguments borne from his study of leading-edge philosophical ideas of his time, such as Kant’s notion of reason as central to morality and Voltaire’s advocacy of separation of church and state.

“Posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.... The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Perseverance

During the Revolutionary War, 1776 to 1783, Paine released a series of pamphlets known as The American Crisis, using the pseudonym “Common Sense.” As Common Sense convinced colonists to resist British rule and fight for independence, The American Crisis kept their faith in the American cause for independence as they suffered the horrors of war.

“Give me liberty, or give me death.” 

~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Would the American colonies have become the United States of America without Thomas Paine’s writings? No matter the response to that question, Paine and his Common Sense should never be omitted from the telling of the story of America’s Sons of Liberty.

​© 2015 Melissa Walsh

By Melissa Walsh

​In a letter to W. T. Barry in 1822, James Madison wrote, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Demand Fact-Based Content; Reject Sensationalism as 'News'

Every new grad of journalism has a fundamental career decision to make. Sell sensationalism. Or aim for truth-telling. Call me “old-fashioned,” but I find the “the new journalism” of leading 1A stories with opinion, speculation, or rumor quite disturbing. Save it for the op-ed page or a blog entry.

Readers are also accountable; the journalist’s commitment to truth-telling cannot sustain a democracy if the readership discontinues a demand for truth. For our American democracy to thrive, media consumers must make the effort to discern fact-based information from sensational speculation. They must actively support media outlets and independent journalists who value truth-telling over money and attention.

Filtering the good information from the clutter of unverified statements is difficult. It requires looking deeper than the morning local paper and evening network news, where headline stories may have been rapidly spun from content spoon-fed by press secretaries and decision-makers who are so high up the food chain that they have little to no sense of how those at the grassroots are subsisting. Becoming a critical thinker and good news reader requires becoming a student of history, an independent researcher, a fact- checker, and an informed and listening observer.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis opines that newspapers alone offer little value for acquiring knowledge. "Even in peacetime," Lewis writes, "I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be seen before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand."

When I’m on a quest for knowledge about a topic, I don’t accept as real or complete news that passes as “news” alone. Complex events are presented in a news story too quickly and too simply to teach us anything of substance. I know from living abroad where news was happening before my eyes that a newspaper reporter’s black and white rendering too often excludes the critical gray tones and colors of the truth. Therefore, to get the whole story, I invest my dollars and time in news supplements and alternatives:

Study history. 
Just as I might gain insight into Italian from studying Latin, I learn about today’s events from reading history. For, example, I know from studying history that there is a historical pattern of economic instability leading to political instability. Any history buff knows that poverty leads to unrest, that the want for bread generates a hunger for freedom. And look what we see in the headlines today: rebellion triggered by damaged economies and rebels looking for a scapegoat.

Read the wires. 
Reading the wires regularly, I was able to connect the recent ousting of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to the demonstrations in Egypt. Wire services, such as AP and Reuters, function as boots-on-the-ground news services that consumers desperately need to sift through the muck of ratings-driven reporting and to find some essential pieces of information and insight that the mainstream talking heads have left out.

Check the facts. 
For issues that I have a special interest in understanding clearly and completely, I regularly consult primary source material to verify statements made on the networks and in the press. For example, I referred to the DoD’s Comptroller for the complete details of the proposed 2012 defense budget while reading news surrounding conflicts regarding the federal budget. I also check the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website frequently. My concern for our service men and women serving in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) prompts me to review at least weekly the list of casualties. I also scan the DoD press releases.

Support Fair, Reasonable Critical Thinkers; Dismiss Hype-Mongering Pundits. 
As freedom-lovers, we must equip ourselves with knowledge to make our leaders and our press accountable. Passively listening to a tirade on Fox or MSNBC does not qualify as gaining knowledge. Just a little fact-checking, and you’ll find the cracks in the claims of these prime-time windbags who make a heck of a lot of money for their networks. A sign that our nation has become intellectually healthy would be the networks finally booting these guys from the airwaves due to low ratings. When consumers do their homework, interest in anti-intellectual, attention-seeking pundits withers. Pundits like these, whether on the right or the left of the political spectrum, are what I call “Hype Mongers.” And I would love to see the American public tune them right out of business.

In the embedded table, I contract the Truth Seeker (journalist) with the Hype-Monger (Pundit):

Challenge Policy Makers; Renounce Empty Partisan Rhetoric.
Political leaders can be just as ugly and deceitful as hype mongers. Policy makers can severely damage businesses as they make decisions impacting industries for which they are not subject- matter experts, when they gain campaign support for votes. Surely, lobbyists drive policy-makers’ decisions just as ratings drive the headlines in the mainstream network teasers. Also, when policy makers legislate by presumptuously putting people in boxes and labeling them with sweeping generalizations, the lives of many individuals are affected. When defense contractors and commanders looking to put a feather in their cap push for war tactics based on new technology rather than the real needs of the servicemen in the fight, thousands of lives and billions of tax dollars are lost.

In his essay “Congressional Oversight Willing and Able or Willing to Enable?”1 Winslow T. Wheeler described congressional oversight on executive branch national security decisions this way: "Mere words, in the form of prognostications at congressional hearings may catch the momentary eye–and the evening news–but their impact on policy, and history, vary from transitory to nonexistent. Beyond that, poorly informed questions, prosecuted ineffectually at a congressional hearing do little more than help us identify which politicians are the lightweights." As constituents, we must challenge our senators and representatives to do their homework and truly become the check and balance they were prescribed to be in the U.S. Constitution. If an informed citizenry held policy makers accountable, then we would have ourselves one fine democracy.

We Get the Democracy We Deserve.

George Bernard Shaw said, “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Gaining knowledge is hard work, and it is our duty as citizens. Seeking truth isn’t a warm and fuzzy challenge; it forces one to look at evil in the world, to witness suffering, to come to terms with betrayal by those entrusted to lead. But knowledge can equip and inspire citizens to act. It will lead to a higher quality of democracy.

In this dynamic media age, I hope that media managers are considering new ways for supporting a readership’s truth quest, such as enhancing reports with historical notes, facts and figures, and statements from relevant, diverse, and grounded viewpoints.

Instead of following the money, news must follow the truth. This way, the people might prevent legislation from following the money and ensure it protects people. News consumers would stop passively accepting the arguments of the Republican or Democrat dynasties and their ruling heirs, and instead demand transparency, accountability, and truth-telling.

“Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think,” wrote American patriot Thomas Paine. “But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.”2

Let truth be the magnet that attracts and energizes our American democracy. Let the hype fade.

1 The Political Labyrinth, February 2011.
2 Rights of Man, 1792

​© 2011 Melissa Walsh

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