has an intelligent and down to earth analysis of Joe Stack, the suicide flyer who flew his plane into a federal building. Lee Harris points out that the chattering classes have rushed to try to pin Mr. Stack on their ideological enemies. But Harris observes that this just betrays their own biases. Ordinary Americans by and large, do not think in ideological terms. And the best way to understand Joe Stack is as a visceral response, not an ideological response.
The blind spot of the political class is that they systematically tend to overrate the importance of their own stock in trade—namely, ideas and ideologies. In their model of human behavior, people first examine various political theories and positions, and, after careful reflection and suitable debate, they adopt whatever political position most agrees with all the facts. … Now while this may or may not accurately describe how the political class makes up its mind about what political position to adopt, it is an appallingly bad account of how most people decide on political questions. It is also an extremely dangerous account, because it overlooks the immense influence of irrational factors in the shaping of our political ideas, both at the level of the individual and at the level of society—factors like anger, fear, frustration, resentment, and the sense of being wronged.
No ideology motivated Joe Stack to kill himself by flying his plane into the side of a building. He was motivated by rage and his sense of utter helplessness. One of the features of his suicide note that has received scant attention are those passages in which he explains he once sincerely believed in the American dream, and thought that he could achieve it for himself. His intense bitterness was that which comes from a keen sense of betrayal. He believed that the nation that he once trusted to be on his side, and to stand for justice for all, had cruelly deceived him and all the other little guys, like himself, who have been marginalized and ignored, who have no say in how they are governed. Worse, the government he grew up trusting had become a mere tool of corporate greed, forcing ordinary hard-working Americans to bail out the filthy rich or conspiring to force them to cough up money to fill the coffers of insurance companies, under the specious guise of healthcare reform. President Obama is as bad as President Bush. …
This is no ideology—it is a cry of visceral anguish. To attempt to use Stack to score points against one’s political opponents is symptomatic of a profound lack of seriousness. Equally frivolous is the attempt to dismiss Stack as a lone nutcase when already many Americans have hailed him as a folk hero. What he wrote and what he did has struck a deep, and deeply disturbing, chord in the psyche of many other Americans who, rightly or wrongly, feel a similar sense of having been duped and betrayed by a country that they had been brought up to love and to trust. These people share no set ideology. They are just mad as hell, and they are ready to applaud any act, even acts of violence, so long as it is a way of saying, “We aren’t going to take it anymore.”
I second Harris’ plea that the intellectual classes stop treating the emotions of ordinary people as tools. They act as it, “If I can use someone’s pain as a tool for getting what I want politically, then I take those emotions seriously, and even stoke them. If the emotions are not useful to me, I am entitled to dismiss them.” This has got to stop.