Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Leave it to Adam Gopnik to describe America’s embittered political climate in such cynical eloquence (emphasis mine):

The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. Friendman and Mandelbaum [in their book "That Used to Be Us"] wring their hands at “our” unwillingness to sacrifice our comforts on behalf of our principles, but Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don’t have a better infrastructure or decent elementary education exactly because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our great cities, or better-informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible.

It’s something that I’ve come to realize more and more, thanks to the Communist Party and the Tea Partiers. The world isn’t fucked up and shitty because no one cares. It’s that most people don’t care, and a slight minority are actively preventing the world from becoming a fairer, more just, more equitable, more progressive, more forward-thinking place. He goes on:

The crucial point is that this [situation] is the result of active choice, not passive difference: people who don’t want high-speed rail are not just indifferent to fast trains. They are offended by fast trains, as the New York Post is offended by bike lanes and open-air plazas: these things give too much pleasure to those they hate. They would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for. As a recent study in the social sciences shows, if energy use in a household is monitored so that you can watch yourself saving money every month by using less, self-identified conservatives will actually use and spend more, apparently as a way of showing their scorn for liberal pieties.

There is a strand of terrorism running through this depiction. Indeed, a terrorist is more than willing to sacrifice his own well-being in order to harm others. So is it a surprise that the Tea Party and the Republicans responded to the debt ceiling crisis with brinkmanship? Is it a surprise that they run on campaigns of stopping and dismantling government? Gopnik concludes:

The kind of outlook that Friedman and Mandelbaum assume is somehow natural to mankind and has been thwarted [in America] recently—a broad-minded view of maximizing future utility—has from a historical perspective, a constituency so small as to be essentially nonexistent. In the long story of civilization, the moments when improving your lot beats out annoying your neighbor are vanishingly rare.

It’s like that old fable. If you see your neighbor with a beautiful house, there are two ways to get what he’s got. Either you build a beautiful house, or you destroy his.