Brightest and best of the sons of the morning
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid.

I have yet to encounter the Southern Cross outside of Dante, who may or may not have known of it but gave allegorical preeminence to a group of four bright stars “known by the first men but since to no living eye” in Purgatorio I, 23-24. The Southern Cross is now known as an asterism, part of the constellation known as Crux among the eighty-eight constellations recognized by modern science. Crux, as Dante may or may not have known, has not been visible in northern latitudes since around 400 CE, as the precision of equinoxes has gradually altered earth’s position with respect to the so called “fixed stars.”

I say encounter rather than see as homage to a poet who taught me first to think of southern constellations and how various astronomies have tended to map the constellations to their parochial mythologies. But I also use the term encounter because I awoke this morning thinking of two things: how the history of our epoch has once again brought us to a time we might aptly describe with the title of P. F. Sloan’s 1964 protest song, “The Eve of Destruction”; that, and the final lines of Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.” Perhaps you remember that the poem addresses a mythopoeic star asking for a statement, “we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.”

The speaker’s first thought upon imagining such a star is that it it says only, “I burn.” but after having played, perhaps forgettably with a few bits of science, the speaker again encounters the star by way of answering her own question:

It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

I will forever encounter this poem in Randall Thompson’s musical setting in Frostiana, which I had the pleasure of performing as a chorus member some years back with Hal Gibbons and the Denton Bach Society. Thompson’s setting gives the poem that “certain height” to which it aspires but then loses in ideology until those wonderful two lines at the close, “We may choose something like a star / To stay our minds on and be staid.” Still, I find I welcome the poem’s ideology as I read of recent violence that seems to be erupting almost everywhere in my country. I also welcome the poem’s emphasis upon choosing. It affirms the element of risk posed by ‘the mob.’ That mob violence is being driven on the surface by strife over our recent election results and resentment of public health measures enacted around the country to slow the spread of our current pandemic, is the preoccupation of a seemingly endless stream of media.

Some media are aware of the extent to which violent trends are being stoked by the unscrupulous leadership of the political right. But most left leaning analysts, including our incoming political leaders, seem loath to betray a core theoretical commitment of liberalism (not to be confused with liberal practice) to wit: that at all times persuasion is preferable to force when dealing with enemies. Liberal practice has never eschewed force, but it has been a constant  theme of liberal talk to proclaim righteously that force must be the last resort of liberal practice, to be employed only when all other means to solve a pressing problem have failed. The Republican rump, however, doesn’t share this aversion to force. This is how I am understanding our present politics in America (to some extent around the world as well). While the tenuous consensus among liberals and progressives within the Democratic party affirms the validity of our recent election (making constant reference to its peacefulness and the accuracy of its vote counting), and while the same consensus proclaims the legitimacy of needed public health measures, the Republican rump shows up with guns to protest.

I used the expression Republican rump during the government shutdown in 2013 because it had occurred to me that that hostage crisis somewhat resembled what happened during the long parliament that issued in the English civil war of the seventeenth century. Now that events in my country have come more to recall those that preceded our own nineteenth-century civil war, perhaps I shouldn’t use the term. But I want to link my thoughts today with those I expressed back then, and besides, the Republican rump doesn’t represent the Republican party as a whole. Witness The Lincoln Project. Witness the efforts of heroic Republican election officials around the country who ensured the integrity of our recent election in spite of the constant barrage of attacks on the process by Trump and his pack of loyalists. Perhaps I should call it the American rump; its historical roots are in the Democratic party. Most recently, though, the ideology that has come to be called Trumpism seems to belong to the remnants of The Tea Party together with its adherents among the donor class such as Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson and its fellow travelers such as Lindsay Graham whose sycophancy would be embarrassing if it weren’t sinister.

I cannot imagine an innocent vote for Trump. To be sure the intellectual engine of movement conservatism will likely rev up to chase arguments why the [T]rump campaign against public health and the election was justified within the constitution; but my counter argument has to be that a campaign that demonstrably has caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and arrayed itself against the vote, itself, in the recent election cannot have been innocent. However it is framed within whatever constitutional justification it may claim, [T]rumpism has violated the very principle of a free society. And it doesn’t matter from this perspective how loudly or how often [T]rumpist sycophants proclaim that the United States is not a democracy. By now it ought to be plain for all to see just how much contempt the Republican rump have for the republican institutions of our country. After all, it has been the settled determination of the Republican Senate to subvert our court system, and as we have recently seen, the Republican rump are not above attempting to subvert the electoral college, an attempt that may have another few acts to play out before the election is done.

But soon perhaps, we will be able to look back upon this election season and observe the justice of Marilynne Robinson’s thoughtful prediction that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by.” If so, it is to be hoped we shall realize as a people that we have escaped the destruction of our republic by the proverbial skin of our teeth. Perhaps we needed reminding that [T]rumpism has deep roots in American life, in my lifetime in the America First Committee, the the Dixiecrat movement, McCarthyism, and the Reagan revolution. We should recognize it as a potential manifestation of the American spirit whatever our history. And at present it appears that [T]rumpism has upwards of 74 million adherents. How to meet the challenge of their influence on the collective life of our republic will remain an open question for for those of us on the other side in the foreseeable future. The choice between [T]rumpism and affirming the pluralist society emerging around us is what William James called a genuine option: living, forced, and momentous. It is essentially a religious (or at least a mythic) option between two versions of American exceptionalism, which is likely why it tends to defy rational analysis. Apropos of such options (and stars as well–I’ve not forgotten stars) I’m remembering that Tim Redman liked to introduce the topic of Ezra Pound and fascism with this question: “How do you reconcile the poetry you love with the politics you hate?”

Both Pound and Martin Heidegger remain anomalous in the history of modern humanism. The history of our republic is one consequence of that history, stemming as it does from the enlightenment. Both Pound and Heidegger became Nazis in spite of (or perhaps because of) having received humanist educations of the highest order. Neither recanted in later life, though Heidegger was forbidden to teach in a German university and Pound lived out his days in a mental institution after his friends intervened to prevent his going to prison. We humanists are squeamish about the idea that Nazism is a possible outcome of the training we revere, but we shouldn’t be. Not only is humanist history filled with bigots and bigotry, but its core proposition that history is in the first instance an order of texts has meant that humanist history is itself a disputed territory, filled with arguments some of whose pettiness can still surprise us. Descartes and Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century couched their arguments against the humanists of their day. But those arguments hardly escaped humanism, just as the arguments of latter day postmodernists have proved not to escape humanism, sharing core assumptions with humanists and finding themselves equally susceptible to its pitfalls. It likely remains to be seen whether scientific and humanistic “cultures” are truly separate or whether their separation in modern universities is a product of arguments that remain merely academic. But I want to raise Tim Redman’s question again, having enlarged its context. Is the poetry of American exceptionalism that was part of my education and yours inevitably productive of hateful politics?

Part of my argument in this essay is that the exceptionalism of the Republican rump is indeed hateful. The history it promulgates is a false history whose original design was to assert that modern America had escaped its racist antecedents, had escaped accountability for its ethnic cleansing of the continent. If we hope to rescue American exceptionalism from its dependence upon that unusable past, we shall at the very least have to reckon with the Nazis among us and mount guard against the future emergence of their hateful politics. Indeed we shall need to prefer force over persuasion in some measure in dealing with their leaders, partly because their behavior borders on sedition and partly because many of those whom they lead are not capable of being persuaded. This will mean allowing the aftermath of the election to play itself out in the courts, taking whatever measures the law permits to prevent those who do not occupy protected positions within the government from holding public office in the future, and mounting an extended and enlightened campaign to free state and local governments of their influence.

But the United States of America that is the dream of liberal hope is equally a manifestation of American exceptionalism, and that is in no small part because it has always been a movable feast. Jefferson, Whitman, Lincoln all were racists; yet they each left us a set of texts that would inspire future anti-racists and will continue to do so until the crack of whatever doom awaits this planet. I shall not live to see the dawning of the republic of my dreams. We shall have to escape Trumpism first, and it remains too soon to tell whether we shall actually do so. But if that republic arrive one day, its arrival will mark the fulfillment of a significant movement in the history of my country, in the history of its humanist founding documents, and in the overall history of humanism—the thought itself is something like a star as is the thought that we Americans will have to choose that republic,