On December 8, 1941, the United States House of Representatives convened for a vote which would change the course of American and global history. The consequences of this vote – most significantly, the eventual use of nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – would define the next half century of geopolitics and are still cited as case studies today. But in the moment of that vote, none of that was known. The only thing that was known was that the House was voting on a declaration of war on Japan, and only a mad anti-American would have any possible thoughts of voting against it. But the vote was not unanimous.


Jeannette Rankin, a Congresswoman from Montana and the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was the sole vote against. She was ridiculed as she left the building. She was hated by her state. She was not re-elected. For the majority of my life, I have only known her for this strange action, and I have always wondered what justification anyone could have for standing idly by in the wake of an attack from the axis of evil. Surely she must have seen the writing on the wall. She must have known Japan was threatening to take more and more territory unless someone stood up to them. Everyone in America must have known that. So why didn’t she?

But I realize now that she did know what everyone in America knew, and far more. Her action was not about Japan. Maybe, perhaps, she told the press that she was a pacifist and she was voting against the resolution in the name of maintaining American neutrality. But I believe that the real reason behind her vote was a fear of consensus. And that is a fear that I have now seen realized before my own eyes.

Consensus is, of course, a powerful thing. Anyone with the ability to create consensus can exact their will upon the world. Once a consensus is upheld for a few generations, it stops being questioned. It becomes a fact of life, entirely immutable except through blatant revolution. This isn’t the way consensus is supposed to work. It isn’t the way it works in science, for example, when a long-held hypothesis can be overturned through documented replicable experimentation. But it is the way it works in politics, in society, in culture.

“All men are created equal.” I have never questioned the truth of this statement. It is enshrined in the founding documents of this nation, and despite our history of disrespecting this core tenet and the suffering that disrespect has brought about, I have always considered it nothing less than a fact. It has always been true and will always be true. It must always guide our decisions, wherever it is concerned. I have never considered that at some point, someone had to actually write down those words. Someone had to generate that idea. Someone had this belief, and gradually, through the work of hundreds of thousands of people from all corners of the globe and all walks of life, they convinced everyone else in the free world to share it. It is a consensus. I would like to challenge it here but I am not exaggerating when I say I am actually afraid to do so, because challenging that idea would put me on the same side as history’s villains – monarchs, fascists, segregationists, and so on. Either you are with us or you are with them. If you don’t believe in equality, you are a Nazi, and if you are a Nazi you are a racist and murderer at heart, and the consensus is that these are very negative character traits. If you don’t align with the consensus, in other words, you are a bad person. Barely even a person, if the consensus is strong enough.

That is how successful a consensus can be. How powerful it can be, if its enemies can be overcome. How damaging it can be to the democratic process. 

I am not someone who is very good at having political opinions. I have never won a political debate: I am always too willing to change my mind; I can always see the merits in what the other side is saying. I have never convinced anyone of anything seriously important. Perhaps this is a virtue. I hear all the time about how devastating to democracy polarization is, that Democrats and Republicans’ refusals to change sides or even just listen to the other side is what is causing democratic backsliding in the US. But I don’t consider myself blessed with open-mindedness or neutrality. I’m afraid of my lack of principles. I’m afraid of how I waffle on everything. The winners in history are never the undecideds. It is one side or another. I have to pick a side. “If you stand for nothing, what do you fall for?” If anything, it is people like me who are the greatest threat to democracy – people dangerously susceptible to harmful philosophies (are “harmful philosophies” possible, or is that just a consensus that has itself been baked into my consciousness?).

I suppose this is the perfect time for me to become paranoid about consensus. Here I am, reading Ayn Rand, considering the merits of individualism. Perhaps her argument, like any other, has swayed me too much. But there is something to be said about the poisoning effect of consensus. I witnessed it today. 

Imagine the following scenario: A baron tells his wife to stay home at a castle all day while he visits some foreign ambassador, and warns her she will face a severe punishment if she does not listen. Still, she disobeys him, goes to see her secret lover, and then attempts to return home, only to find her path blocked by a gatesman. He insists he has been ordered by the baron to kill her if she attempts to return home (we have no way of knowing whether what he says is true; in fact, some versions of this story state outright he is lying, but the version I read implies he is telling the truth). After consulting her lover, who refuses to help her through, she desperately returns to the path, where she is slain by the gatesman as he said she would be. Who is at fault? Who is responsible for her death?

I’m not sure whether I had an opinion when I first read this. When I heard the question “who is most responsible,” I misinterpreted it in the sense of responsibility as a character trait (“who is the most reasonable and mature?”), giving me time to be confused and thus convinced. Or maybe I am misremembering events to save face. It does not matter. After a minute of conversation with the three other boys in my group, we had all written down that the baroness was most responsible for her own death. 

I don’t know if any of us believed that. I don’t know whose idea it was. It doesn’t matter. A consensus had been formed (it didn’t help that our teacher required each group of four to be in total agreement), and to disagree with that consensus was pointless. But there was no need to disagree with that consensus. It was a fact, plain and simple. When the time came for the classroom discussion, I was pleased to see every group had agreed with our judgment. It was obvious, I thought, that the baroness was responsible for her death. In the discussion, I defended the choice vehemently against no opponent, insisting that she was fully aware of the consequences that would befall her and capable of behaving differently, whereas the baron gave his order unaware of whether it would have to be executed and the gatesman was bound by his responsibility to protect the kingdom and could not disobey that order. 

It was the only possible truth. It was the consensus. It was, therefore, what I believed, and I remember believing it truly and wholeheartedly. I have often made arguments in bad faith because I wanted to point out flaws in my own compatriots’ arguments. Sometimes in debates we are instructed specifically to argue against our own beliefs. That was not what I was doing. I agreed with everything I said.

It wasn’t until later, surrounded by an entirely different audience, that I witnessed another consensus, and one that was entirely opposite to my own beliefs. In front of my family, I matter-of-factly stated that the baroness was responsible for her own death, to the shock of everyone. They brought up arguments we had never considered. Not that they were particularly thoughtfully-crafted, complex arguments. They were simple arguments that I should have considered from the very beginning. It was like when a magic trick is revealed, and then you feel stupid because the gimmick seemed so obvious the whole time. But I never considered them. I never considered that the baron’s actions essentially constituted domestic abuse, and that if the story took place in a modern setting he would be the one arrested. I never considered that no matter how much the baroness’s actions contributed to her death, the baron’s had created the scenario in the first place. Everything was built around the baron. When I was arguing that the baroness was at fault, I was arguing in favor of dangerous ideas, harmful philosophies (there goes that phrase again). I was justifying murder.

It doesn’t matter who was at fault. Not seriously, since the entire story is fictional. But having witnessed an entirely opposite consensus to what I had experienced, I found my resolve draining. By the end of the discussion I realized I had been wrong all along in blaming the baroness, and I had aligned myself with some traditionalist, conservative side of my consciousness that I didn’t realize existed. My previous actions were entirely out of line with what I now believed about myself. I was justifying murder! As we walked out of the building, I wondered if I was a psychopath. Such was the effect of this brutal cold plunge after walking out of a sauna. I’m still a bit chilled from the aftermath.

But that’s just how a consensus works. It drives you to believe anything else is insane, objectively wrong. It mimics whatever ideology you believe you subscribe to. And you genuinely believe it, no matter how hard it is afterwards to believe you believed it. 

A Kansas progressive wrote, in the days following Jeannette Rankin’s strange refusal of consensus, that “probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did,” but simply didn’t out of a lack of courage. I do not believe this is true. I believe everyone who voted for war with Japan believed in it, entirely, because it was the consensus and to not believe in the consensus was heresy. I think that perhaps in early August of 1945, perhaps finding themselves down a friend or a nephew or a brother, reading in their morning paper about the vaporization of an entire metropolis, probably a hundred men wished they had done what Jeannette Rankin had. They were no longer caught up in the zeitgeist. The chokehold of consensus was no longer so strong. Democracy could breathe again, but it was too late. They might have viewed their past vote as despicable. They might never have been able to understand their motive, but if you had asked them a minute after the vote, it would be perfectly clear why they had voted the way they had.

Consensus is the strongest force that exists. It cannot be defeated by one person. The fervent nationalism that gripped America after Pearl Harbor was not diminished by Rankin. The ACLU could not stop the movement to create Homeland Security. A couple of abolitionists could not take down slavery on their own.

Perhaps the momentum of consensus is good for society. Perhaps the “good ideas” that have persisted, the beneficial philosophies like democracy (Why exactly is democracy so beneficial? And why does that question frighten people?), have been fortified by the persistence of consensus. Perhaps I’m reading too much into everything. I don’t know if I still agree with everything I’ve written here. I don’t think I will by the end of the month. All I know is that there is no good consensus.

I find it funny that everyone supports those who rebel against conformity, but only when the conformity is fictional (as in Anthem) or historical (as in the case of, say, Jesse Owens). When it comes to a modern “good” consensus, a conformity that’s beneficial to society, rebelling against it is off limits again. Our fearless protagonist has to rebel against the evil autocratic regime because the real consensus, our consensus, is that autocracies are bad. That hero will never be seen fighting against liberal democracy until it becomes the consensus that liberal democracy is bad. They will never fight against truth, justice, or the American way. “All men are created equal” is a consensus that must be defended, not one that we can afford to challenge right now. In the last few months, Czechia has banned advocating for communism. This is fine, right? Communism is a threat to democracy, and the consensus is that the former is bad and the latter is good. 

Noam Chomsky once wrote about concision, and about how it restricts our ability to argue against the consensus. I don’t entirely agree with his argument, but I will still close this essay with it, because I don’t know how else to stop writing.

Concision means you have to be able to say things between two commercials. Now that’s a structural property of our media—a very important structural property which imposes conformism in a very deep way, because if you have to meet the condition of concision, you can only either repeat conventional platitudes or else sound like you are from Neptune. That is, if you say anything that’s not conventional, it’s going to sound very strange. For example, if I get up on television and say, “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a horror,” that meets the condition of concision. I don’t have to back it up with any evidence; everyone believes it already so therefore it’s straightforward and now comes the commercial. Suppose I get up in the same two minutes and say, “The U.S. invasion of South Vietnam is a horror.” Well, people are very surprised. They never knew there was a U.S. invasion of South Vietnam, so how could it be a horror? They heard of something called the U.S. “defense” of South Vietnam, and maybe that it was wrong, but they never heard anybody talk about the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam. So, therefore, they have a right to ask what I’m talking about. Copy editors will ask me when I try to sneak something like this into an article what I mean. They’ll say, “I don’t remember any such event.” They have a right to ask what I mean. This structural requirement of concision that’s imposed by our media disallows the possibility of explanation; in fact, that’s its propaganda function. It means that you can repeat conventional platitudes, but you can’t say anything out of the ordinary without sounding as if you’re from Neptune, a wacko, because to explain what you meant—and people have a right to ask if it’s an unconventional thought—would take a little bit of time…. Here, our media are constructed so you don’t have time; you have to meet the condition of concision. And whether anybody in the public relations industry thought this up or not, the fact is that it’s highly functional to impose thought control.