Arizona Senator Jeff Flake (R) has been a long-time advocate for lifting the travel ban and embargo on Cuba, and in a recent interview makes the case that the last half century of US policy towards that little pocket of communism in the Caribbean has stood in the way of pro-liberty reform rather than moving it forward.
He also observed:
What [the embargo and travel ban] has done is to provide the Castro regime a very convenient scapegoat for the failures of socialism.
Scapegoating is the way of tyrants, demagogues and autocrats throughout history. It has been the modus operandi of Middle East leaders for decades, and is how the PLO and Hamas and Hezbollah have deluded the Palestinians they purportedly care about into blaming Israel and America for their plight. Every “Death to America” rally deflects leaders’ failings at home.
Scapegoating works because of our tribal nature. We naturally distrust other, and naturally defer to those who are our own who rise to power. We want to believe that our guys are the good guys and the other guys are the bad guys. This predilection lets the finger pointers get away with pointing at the wrong targets, and when they do so they mask their own failures.
In the case of the Cuba embargo, it’s hard to argue that continuing a policy that hasn’t achieved its goals in over half a century makes any further sense. Lifting the travel ban will not only expose Cubans to more truth about how life outside Cuba really is (something that parallels the better understanding of the West that Russians got when the Iron Curtain started to fall), but will, as Senator Flake points out, also let Americans who cling to dreams of socialist utopia see first-hand the horrid results of massive government control of an economy. And, as they see realities first-hand, they may become less susceptible to the domestic scapegoating of the economic system that has done so much good for America and the world.
I write, of course, of capitalism. From the earliest years of the 20th century through today, big government has been sold as a panacea, as the next evolutionary step after capitalism, and as the cure to all the bad things that capitalism creates. However, when we make even the smallest cracks in the statist veneer, it is glaringly obvious that government failure is the true culprit of so much that ails our economy and our society. Government starts poking, prodding, twiddling and fiddling, and inevitably makes a mess. The big-government politicians who made that mess, rightly fearing for their jobs, quickly point the finger of blame not at themselves and their statist compatriots, but at the capitalist system they promised they’d bring to heel.
Voters, who are not only likely to wish to avoid accepting that they themselves were wrong in supporting and electing the statists, but who retain the tribal tendencies and deference to alphas aka leadership they identified with, are happy to accept at face value the tales, excuses and deflections of the finger pointers. It’s more comfortable to be wrong and consistent than admit error and embrace truth. By accepting and agreeing with the finger pointers, even when history and the facts on the ground tell them otherwise, they keep the oppressors and autocrats in power.
Today, in America, we have Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump pointing fingers at many wrong targets in their pursuit of fame, power and glory. Each is pointing at different scapegoats, and each is finding many willing to buy into scapegoating in the face of plain evidence to the contrary.
Then there’s President Obama, who has elevated the art of internal scapegoating by blaming every one of the nation’s ills on the subset of Americans who happen to affiliate with the “other team.” The rank partisanship he exhibited from the outset of his term, when he told a thoroughly defeated and utterly powerless Republican Party “I won” as his party disinvited the GOP from any participation whatsoever in health care reform and other matters, established the starkly Manichean nature of American politics since the Republicans broke out of their super-minority status. He promised to be a uniter, but took every opportunity to decry and point fingers at the opposition party with whom his predecessors had found a way to work.
Contrarily, Obama sought to redefine “other” in foreign policy as he sought to embrace and “bring into the fold” those peoples and nations who have long disliked and opposed America. This attempt at uniting IS more along the lines of what he aspired to be, but in scapegoating a large chunk of “us,” (i.e. the tens of millions or more of Republicans and non-Democrats in America) for his own failures, he instilled suspicion of the new “other.”
Today, we are witnessing a spectrum of scapegoating on the domestic front. Free trade, capitalism, big businesses, the wealthy and successful, Mexican immigrants, visas, outsourcing, the high cost of college, climate change, and “not enough government” in things like wages, health care, discrimination, campaign finance and countless other issues are targets that one or more of the presidential candidates have blamed for the nation’s ills. All these are being attacked because they’re easy targets that resonate with the voters, and those attacks invariably rely on divisiveness and appeals to tribalism. These are, of course, the wrong targets. The right target, big government, gets a bye because the attackers like big government and want to be in charge of it. Even on the occasions that big government is attacked, the attack is about flavor, not size. The attackers aver that it’s the others’ big government that’s the problem, and that our big government will do right by us.
I recently wrote that human society has evolved faster than human biological instincts have. Our tribal nature, our need to be among our own, and our inherent distrust of “other” are fertile ground for authoritarians to sow their seeds of deceit and agitation. When we let them, when we let demagogues appeal to instincts rooted in obsolescence, we empower people who will continue doing all the wrong things.
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