The Hypocrisy of Liberal Democracy

Every liberal hates Trump. For good reason. He's a sad, damaged man who is trying his damndest to download his vile worldview into the American operating system. Maybe it's a strange time then to read a book that criticizes the "stable, virtuous" political system that Trump is dismantling. But I've just finished such a book: Omar El Akkad's, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It's a memoir of his experience as an Egyptian-born immigrant to Canada and the United States, but the story is less about El Akkad and more about how the west "sees" the Arab world. El Akkad finds himself at home with his young children, unable to stop watching graphic images of Palestinian childrens' bodies torn apart in the Gaza siege. The question that he asks is the question any person faced with such violence should ask: "why aren't we doing everything in our power to stop this?"

Put another way, what version of "morality" abides this kind of violence? El Akkad's answer is sober. "Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable (15)."

Americans--conservative and liberal--are so conditioned to seeing ourselves as virtuous. Our national story is the City on the Hill, a shining example of freedom for the world. El Akkad understands there is just enough truth to this image for it to persevere--America is "free enough" to still draw immigrants like his own family. But the story is so much more complicated for most immigrants. America doesn't draw people here from other countries because of its virtue so much as it woos them with vague promises that they, too, can participate in the "privilege" that the west flaunts. America also threatens: immigrants are afraid--after centuries of colonial imposition--that the only way to survive in this world is to fit in with the colonizer. Assimilate or die.

The genocide in Gaza is the event that explodes all pretense of American virtue. America arms Israel; Israel brazenly annihilates a whole people. El Akkad listens to the Biden administration's statements lamenting the "loss of life" and other abhorrent political euphemisms. All words wither against the uncensored images of mangled bodies.

The fierce declarations of this book will stay with me. As a follower of Jesus, I have put morality and the insistence on human dignity at the center of what I think of as "the good life." I have worked furiously to try and redeem America as a place of political possibility--the dream of a land where "all people are created equal" and treated as such. El Akkad's writing is urgent and sharp, his moral vision clear. The United States is a butcher. Only squaring with this reality allows any hope for a different future. "The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?"