Author Archives: Julian O. Long

So here we are again

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I apologize at the outset for the us v. them tenor of these remarks. There is, however, no way to say these things without partisanship. None of this will be new, but it represents where I am today as a person who thinks about serious things. I am a progressive social democrat who has worked in political campaigns since I became a voter. I cut my teeth, politically, as a high-school debater who one year argued that the electoral college should (or should not) be abolished. The conventions of debate require that one become proficient in arguing both sides of an issue. My remarks here, however, will be ex parte.

For those of us who adhere to an orthodox Christian calendar it’s still Christmas, time to reflect and look forward to Epiphany. For others, since the western new year has already begun, it’s time to review the past twelve months and take stock. Numberless folk are presumably consuming stories about the top news stories of 2019 from whatever source of punditry they may favor. But the indifferent time we all acknowledge during the first several weeks of January brings its own sadness and its own terrors. Today I am saddened to learn of the death of another dear friend as I am greeted by news stories about the coming schism in the Methodist Church, the denomination in which I spent the first forty years of my life and for which I still have much affection. That, and the terrible news of Australian wildfires which threaten the survival of that country’s political system, and the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, which is already being perceived as a US escalation of Mideast tensions.

I’ll not name my friend but only say that he and I went to high school together. His obituary touts his experience as a football player on our West Texas ‘dream team’ that won three state championships in a row in the mid fifties. The bond among the men who played on those teams is profound to this day. I do not share it. Indeed, my friend and I only grew close as old men who discovered we had a bond as fellow progressives who had read widely. My friend had chosen to spend his life as a small-town dentist, in imitation of his grandfather who had been a country doctor in West Texas. He chose that life for himself, I always thought, because it gave him the opportunity to know his patients personally and to form lifelong bonds with some of them. I admired him greatly, though he never tired of telling me that I was his ‘hero.’ Where that came from I have no idea. I squirmed when he said those words, and I would often tell him that he was my hero. But he would have none of it. Perhaps, now that he is gone, I can say as a memorial to him that he was my hero without fear that he will contradict me. I knew him for a model of civic virtue.

Long before, I had been baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the southern Methodist church with its history of support for slavery and Jim Crow. In 1939, just a couple of years after my baptism, the Methodist Church reunified, but the tensions between evangelical and progressive Methodists remained. Merger with the United Brethren in the sixties created the present day United Methodist Church but did nothing to heal the Church’s historic divisions. If anything, the addition of United Brethren to the mix intensified those divisions. I remember a dispute over ecumenism in the late sixties with a fellow graduate student at Duke who had been brought up in the United Brethren. I was committed to ecumenism, he to a program of religious identity that emphasized difference and seemed sectarian to me. That argument seems quaint and old-fashioned to me now, in this age when religious identity politics is all around us. I became an Episcopalian in 1973 when I found myself in an Episcopal church as a musician. I encountered the Book of Common Prayer and realized that the things I had always valued about my Methodist church were more or less entirely derived from Anglican tradition. Since the seventies, with the ordination of women and adoption of the 1979 prayer book, the Episcopal church has been a better fit for me in my struggle with agnosticism than the United Methodist Church (UMC). This current split in the UMC is being touted as parallel to the split between The Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The comparison is just doctrinally, I suppose. But the Methodists are being far more civilized about their divorce than we Episcopalians were, the Methodists having worked out a settlement in advance of the split; whereas ACNA congregations walked out of TEC and tried to take their property with them, creating a series of lawsuits which TEC has mostly won, though some still remain in doubt.

When I was yet a Methodist, during the spring and summer of 1967, there were massive voter registration drives in the city of Durham, North Carolina in which I participated as a volunteer along with employees of Operation Breakthrough and others. I was fortunate enough to have a car (indeed, as a graduate student I was far more fortunate than many of my fellow citizens). My participation included driving folks without transportation to registration offices and later on, driving voters to the polls. Most of my passengers were grateful, but one passenger gave me pause and caused me to question the purity of my intentions, perhaps for the first time in my life. She was a woman who looked to be forty, and she glared at me when she got in my car, sat as far away from me as she could on the broad bench seat of my 1961 Chevrolet, and refused to speak to me or to answer any question I asked as I tried, I thought, to be polite. When I deposited her at her door a bit later, she glared at me again and slammed the car door as she got out. She knew I was a white liberal, and she had little use for me. She would ride in my car to register to vote—I didn’t see her later on election day—but she cared very little for what I have come to think of as my white privilege. Nowadays I doubt my more conventionally grateful passengers those days were any less suspicious of me than she was. The difference was she let her suspicion show, and those others masked theirs with a simulacrum of politeness.

The next year, in the spring of 1968, I remember being addressed by an African American labor organizer on the quad at Duke during what we called The Vigil. He advised us privileged white kids—I was 30 that spring but still a kid—not to try to be black. Some of us were doing that, I suppose. I led a Sunday School class whose subject was ‘race relations’ at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Durham that year. I remember that many of our meetings turned into shouting matches, but we succeeded in opening our church to the few brave African Americans who came to our doors. Many of us were aware, however dimly, that we were part of the history of something bigger than we were, the ‘dawning of the age of Aquarius’, perhaps, in the words of a popular song of the times. We sensed the coming of the pluralist social moment that now stands among us as the potential that gave us Barack Obama for a harbinger and has now given us Donald Trump as the unlikely embodiment of privileged (and wannabe privileged) resistance. I have tried to understand Trumpism, particularly to understand the devolution of the Republican party into a cult of Trump, and I have come to a few more or less tentative conclusions.

I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of politics, at first dimly because of my father’s service in World War II. He participated in the fall of the Philippines where he arrived in early September, 1941. My last memory of him as we saw him off on a troop train from El Paso, was that he told me to take care of my mother. You can read a biography to which I have contributed here. But my first awareness of politics that is germane here likely came in 1948 as Strom Thurmond led a rump group of Democrats out of their party’s convention in protest to its growing acceptance of civil rights for African Americans. The Dixiecrats (as these rump Democrats came to be called by their enemies; they called themselves States Rights Democrats) failed of their immediate objective of denying Harry Truman an electoral majority, but they left their mark on retrograde politics in the South which eventually issued in a response to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” that appealed in 1968 to the deep resentment that Southern segregationists felt about being marginalized by the growing pluralism of the Democratic party.

I now understand Trumpism as a political nihilism that ruthlessly suppresses and violates minorities, imprisons immigrants and their children in concentration camps and denies trhem flu shots, denies human rights and the climate crisis, attacks and overturns the norms and conventions of democratic political behavior, promotes conspiracy theories and discredited ideas; some of them, like the lost cause of southern aristocracy, being ages old: I now believe that nihilism is of a piece with the colonizing tactics of bygone times in America, with the states rights ideology of the Dixiecrats, with McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the Ku KLux Klan, with the perpetuation of slavery in the south through Jim Crow laws until 1964, with lynching (Under pressure from Southern senators, congress refused to outlaw Lynching until 2018), with white flight, redlining, and the Christian school movement which have resulted in the fact that inner city American schools are now more segregated than ever, with the moral majority and the Christian right (so called), with the Native American genocide. It is also all that is left in today’s Republican party, of the legacy of William Buckley and Ronald Reagan, of what passes for conservatism on today’s political stage, because, of course, it was always present under the dog whistles of conservative rhetoric.

The claim is often made that today’s rightist nihilism denies even the existence of truth. Though likely correct, that claim obfuscates another important point. It’s what the right thinks of as ‘liberal’ truth, with all of its positivist falsifiability and thick matrix of scientific theory and substance, that the right denies root and branch, especially as that substance impinges upon what rightist political classes think of as their inherited cultural territory: the ‘history’ they cherish and desire, the religion and politics they cherish and desire, the family life and sexuality they cherish and desire, together with a license to continue extractive exploitation of the planet, etc. Faced with demographic death, the Republican party have now embraced an anti-liberal ideology so extreme that they can countenance whoesale suppression of the constitutional rights of those citizens and potential citizens Republicans believe to be their enemies (also their social and moral inferiors). And today’s Republican party is no longer conservative. It is a rightist insurgency that resembles European fascism, that defends its antidemocratic ideology by constantly pretending to be victimized by the liberal establishment. A recent Amanda Marcotte essay in Salon put it as follows:

Whatever word you want to use for it — fascism, authoritarianism, pick your poison — the grim reality is that Republicans, both politicians and voters, appear to be all in on this project. It’s painful to admit this, but Republicans have flat-out rejected democracy. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds disproportionate and borderline tyrannical control over government and blocks the majority of Americans from having meaningful say over the direction of the country.

This isn’t a new development. It’s been a good many years in the making, and both political parties have contributed to it, as Professor Tim Wu pointed out in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “In our era,” says Wu:

Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs — and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances.

Moreover, what we liberals and ex-liberals have to face today, and what has been on full display in the recent impeachment hearings and since, is that in the age of Trump we again have government by Bull Connor, who set his police dogs to savage protestors not as a deterrent, but because he enjoyed it. In a recent tweetstorm, the President twice repeated the name of the Ukraine scandal whistleblower. Moreover, there is an element of sadism in the constant claim of persecution that Trump gleefully makes and that Republicans have settled upon as the chief defense of their leader. It has now been widely identified as a form of trolling. Republicans have perfected the rhetorical gesture of claiming persecution in order to deflect attention from the antisocial behavior of the worst among them (indluding Trump) and at the same time to ‘stick it to the libtards.’ Franklin Graham even went so far as to blame anti-Semitic attacks during Hanukkah on ‘hatred of Trump.’ And Trump’s role in the ongoing troll game was again (remember the ‘lock her up’ frenzy) on full display at a rally just lately when Trump directed his ire at MSNBC reporter, Katy Tur. The incident has all the elements of the sort of trolling I mean. First, Tur is female but strong and outspoken. She can be taken to represent both the feminism Republican trolls love to ridicule and the ‘liberal’ press Trump has identified as an enemy of the people.

“Little Katy, third-rate journalist,” Trump declared during a bitter peroration about the “absolute scum” who allegedly populate the news media and report “dishonestly” on his triumphal march to the White House.

What Trump counts on, and what his supporters feed their inflamatory rhetoric into, is the retrograde commitment of today’s embattled main stream media to bothsidesism. Which ensures that rightist trolling will be largely reported as a series of benign utterances from one side, or as example of equal partisanship. This last is displayed in clickbait headlines like this one: Partisan rancor are on full display at House hearing on Trump impeachment, to a story whose content hardly bears out the headline’s claim. Note the verb “are” in the headline, in a context that would normally require “is.”

As I’ve said, Republicans, as the party of angry white people, are now faced with demographic death. Don’t believe them when they tell you that they secretly deplore Trump. Trump is the perfect front man for the antidemocratic program Republicans require if their hegemony is to survive, especially immigration and voter suppression, election fraud, court packing, and the surveillance state. If Trump had not existed, Republicans would have invented him. What Republicans envision as the true American Republic is a continuation of the present oligarchic kleptocracy for as long as it can be sustained. We’ve had a taste of this, not just for the past almost three years but for all the years since Mitch McConnell announced his determination to make Barack Obama a one term president. Mcconnell was not able to make good on that intention, but in settling for obstruction—remember Merrick Garland—he achieved much of his objective, and in forcing Obama to overreach prepared the way for our present authoritarian regime. Trump and his Republican enablers have now openly announced their intention to vitiate Social Security and Medicare in a second Trump term, presumably to offset the effects on the deficit of their current program of taxation. Trump supporters seem not to have taken this up yet, but since many of them are in the age cohorts that depend on these programs, I wonder if they are uneasy.

Still, I have no hope that the Senate will do anything but acquit Trump. Republicans all know he is guilty as charged, but they don’t care. Some may convince themselves that his crimes don’t rise to the level of impeachment. Most agree with him that his attempt to extort Ukraine to help him smear Joe Biden was just fine. Faced with the certainty of Trump unleashed again in the 2020 election, and faced with the prospect of a series of neofascist campaign rallies with Trump claiming vindication (and perhaps even the prospect of war with Iran) I think it’s time for another massive voter registration and voter turnout effort. We need to engage Trump on the ground, and not primarily in the media. There are three questions for Democrats in 2020, I think. The first is whether to choose a centrist nominee. The Primary process may settle this issue, but I think Democrats should be wary of engaging in the sort of chicanery that was employed against Bernie Sanders in 2016. I am more and more inclined to a further alternative, the selection of a nominee who can perhaps transform our politics. The disruption wrought by the rightist insurgency may have created a moment Democrats could take advantage of by nominating Bernie Sanders, as Elizabeth Warren tacks to the center. Barack Obama campaigned as a transformative candidate. His success as a candidate (who remains very popular, by the way) might be instructive, though his centrist behavior in office disappointed me and others who supported him enthusiastically. On the other hand, a transformative candidate would not only have to run against Trump but also against entrenched financial interests. Note that I don’t take the Steyer and Bloomberg candidacies seriously.

The two other questions for 2020 are first, whether the country is ready for a massive uprising to defeat Trump. We will need to overwhelm the electoral college, reclaim the Senate and increase the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives if we have any hope of reclaiming American Democracy. The success of popular efforts such as last month’s organized protest in support of impeachment is a hopeful sign; but if the past is a guide, we may not be ready. The massive voter registration efforts of 1967/68 failed to prevent the election of Richard Nixon. Democrats were in disarray after the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the first of many efforts by Eugene McCarthy to win the party’s nomination. The late entry of George McGovern, who would become the party’s nominee in 1972, was likely unhelpful. The sheer turbulence of those times likely contributed to Nixon’s election, albeit the southern strategy had to contend with a strong candidacy from George Wallace, who in spite of being “nuked” by his choice of a running mate, still managed to poll significant minorities in the general election and to win his own state of Alabama together with the four states of Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The third question for 2020 is whether Trump and the Republicans will be willing to concede if they are defeated at the polls. We have faced this prospect only once before in the aftermath of the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. It’s hard to envision another wave of secession like the run up to the Civil War, but it’s not hard to imagine that Trump might claim massive election fraud, declare a national emergency in the event of the country’s repudiation of him, and install himself as a banana republic like dictator. He already has the support of many rank and file Homeland Security agents and police. Do the military still support him? There are signs that that may be on the wane, but were the OK hand signals at the Army-Navy game benign as the services have claimed? With Trump as the lynchpin of civilian control, the military remain problematic. I note here, too, that the military have not challenged Trump’s current war mongering, in spite of its blatant and cynical intent to perpetuate his own power. Much will depend, I suspect, on the strength of the public repudiation, if it happens. But if this year’s anti-Trump backlash is tepid, or if it doesn’t happen at all, if Democrats don’t unite and many stay home from the polls, we’re likely headed for a catastrophe that is quite new. Will the combined chaos resulting from a continued rightist insurgency running the country coupled with the coming environmental catastrophe result in the breakdown of our political system? That’s the real import of my third question.

In Australia as I speak, wildfires are now generating their own weather in a massive climate induced crisis to which the Australian government’s response has so far been too little and too late; though The New York Times is now reporting that the Australian military have been called out to aid beleaguered firefighters. Australia may well be a test case for the entire complex of issues involved in today’s world politics—for the entrenched disputes that prevent us as an exploding world order from taking rational action to combat the dying effects of late capitalism and its wars, the real terror of our times, that gave rise to the occupy movement and is very much in play as Australia’s government continues to serve the interests of the continent’s coal industry. Will the perceived need to preserve profit at the expense of all else be overwhelmed by Australian wildfires and the thousands of Australian citizens displaced by them? What we Americans need to realize, in my view, is that our own house is on fire. Right now those thousands in Australia are looking to survive. They will have no time for politics for a while. We Americans, perhaps, still have time.

Advent IV: The Terrible Beauty

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The winter solstice came and went night before last at 11:19 EST. It was the last (or next to last) winter solstice of our current decade. From now on the nights will get shorter and the days longer for a while as our planet continues its yearly dance with the sun. Some snow remains on the ground here from last week’s snowfall, but no new snowfall is forecast for the immediate future. Guess we’ll have to make do with sunshine for a while. As we drove home through the city streets yesterday evening after a party we noticed that snow had melted on streetsides that receive afternoon sun but not on the streetsides opposite them.

With the times as out of joint as they are, perhaps one might take uneven snow melt as a sign. In Christian mythology, the solstice occurs on Christmas eve. Not so this year, the event having preceded the final sunday of Advent. So was Advent IV marooned then, and will we spend Christmas suspended between What T. S. Eliot once called ‘the motion and the act’? Or might we understand this time as a fortunate addition to our time of waiting, a time perhaps to tune our hearts more acutely to to the songs of angels. I’ve written of such a time more than once, how at the end of it “thousand seraphim stride the night sky . . . , their huge pennons shedding dark love. Time [as I thought then] to plant bulbs, get a new jacket, watch movies I missed.”

May we still hope for peace on earth? I should like to think so. I should like, for instance, to take the story of the Magi as a prefiguring of the pluralist politics we shall need if our planet is to survive. I cannot imagine a human future in which present world politics collide with the looming climate catastrophe. Perhaps history is again challenging us humans to reinvent ourselves, we who are “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” The spokesman for Eliot’s Magi finds the place he and his fellows sought merely satisfactory, or perhaps he means to understate the case.

. . . . . . . . . There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Perhaps all beauty is terrible. That’s the import of the Jeffers poem I have quoted here from time to time.

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
like the passionate spirit of humanity . . .

Whatever the beauty, whatever the tragedy, we are all part of it now, as we are part of a polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered world the like of which we have never known. History has thrown us together whereas before we were separate, divided by barriers of nationality, class, religion, language, gender. How to form a more perfect union in the face of dissolving difference and the fear that generates, how to do that as the enormous reality of climate change dawns on the world, as it will do, and the fear that generates. These will be the questions we humans face around the world as we reinvent ourselves.

Or not—

The Irish Terrible Beauty was wrought out of the deaths of patriots. Yeats’s great poem, “Easter 1916,” broods on the stories of some of them. I very much fear this advent IV that we humans face an even larger conflagration around the world than the rebellion in Ireland almost a century ago. The issue may well be the same: the inherited privilege of a few versus the needs and desires of the many. We hear tales of billionaire bunkers built as a hedge against uncertain future. We also hear of a billionaire Giving Pledge, though that has largely been a failure. Still, the coming catastrophe may have potential even to wipe out differences of wealth, as the systems of politics that sustain wealth and wealth production perish.

I don’t think this argues for the dawning of a Marxist future. Marx’s critique was far too tied to the particular historical circumstances in Britain at the time of its writing to be much use as prophecy. And neither Marx nor anyone else had ever (has ever) faced a catastrophe like the envoronmental catastrophe we face in post industrial times. Indeed this Advent !V I think I have to face the dawning conviction that human history from now on is pretty much up for grabs, and the more perfect union of my dreams seems less and less likely every day.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this thought disturbs me less than it might. I’ve had a good run at life, and I’m now enjoying a more or less privileged old age. I’m not able to take my privilege for granted any longer, not just because of the circumstances I outline here, but also because my health is now precarious. Still, I find I love being alive, I continue to love the world, and I think these facts do not proceed from mere tenacity. I’ve always loved what Betty Adcock calls The Difficult Wheel. “What we do have is light,” she says, we poets who “have gone out looking for God again,/having no choice,”

. . . . . . . . . . See how they still are burning—
all those classical noses, Coyote’s laughing muzzle,
Shiva’s raised foot, Christ’s cheek, the dazzle
of leafy-armed women darkening, ashy turning.

Perhaps, as Jeffers says, there was heart-breaking beauty before there was ever a heart to break for it, whatever. I don’t need religion or history or poetry to tell me there is an illo tempore not of this world. Every solstice reminds me that my world is but a speck in the great heaven. As an Episcopalian, I’m half a Catholic I suppose. I don’t go to church much, but one of my Jesuit buddies brings me communion from time to time. I love him, and when I look into his eyes I see God.

Advent III, rocked by the infinite: republished from December 13, 2016

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[Today is the Monday after Advent III. I am watching the streets outside fill up with snow and thinking of Advent meditations I have written in past years. Here’s one from 2016, The year I finally retired. Trump had just been elected, more’s the pity. My reaction to the election of 2016 is here, and I stand by it, though my attitude has changed as the devastating consequences of that election have unfolded over the past three years. More about that next week perhaps, and more definitely after the first of next year, which I trust will come.]

Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete.

Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad . . . ; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

Advent customs vary. In my parish church we honored the third Sunday in Advent as Gaudete Sunday for many years, though this year we gave the theme of rejoicing no special emphasis, and we kept to violet colors except for a rose candle in our advent wreath. Just as well—I’m having a solemn advent too this year. As St. Paul instructs, I rejoice alway, liking the locution from the KJV—and I like it that Gaudete Sunday connects me with centuries of of catholic practice.

Do you love the world? I do. To be a Christian humanist, as I am, is to love the world and one’s fellow creatures as the gift of God. As the old hymn says, “All the world is God’s own field.” I’ve just been rereading a poem I love by Stanley Kunitz. It’s called “The Long Boat.” You can find it here. I first found “The Long Boat” on the wall by the elevator at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. It was first published as a broadside, a little larger than ‘double folio’ size. Framed, it is larger still. I initially thought it was a Prairie Lights broadside, but it was published by Norton in 1995. Reading it for the first time was a religious experience. I have passed it many times since, reread it, rather like touching a mezuzah. We don’t see God, but sometimes we know that we’ve been seen, known perhaps—the knowledge and its memory remain fearful and joyous at the same time.

And maybe one has to be almost eighty, as I am, to understand how one can rejoice in being reminded so of one’s love of the world as one anticipates leaving it. It has not been meny years since a student asked, ‘If we’re not rational actors who are supposed to maximize our utility, what are we?’ I gave him an answer he may not have expected, ‘How about creatures made in the image of God?’ I asked him later in the conversation if he thought economics provided a total explanatiion of the world and our human place in it. His reply was, ‘No, but I wish it did.’ I think his point may have been that our human choices might be simpler for us if economics taught us all we need to know.

A small digression: I have to say that I loved this student and thought highly of him as well. I’d never have asked him such a question otherwise. But we were in a Jesuit classroom after all, and besides, there are times when one is given a large teaching moment. I seized that one, and of course I didn’t press for a defense of, I wish I did. He already knew what he meant, and his classmates knew as well. It was a thing for them to ponder in their hearts. What occasioned the conversation was Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Two Economies,” which opens with Wes Jackson’s claim that only the Kingdom of God is a truly comprehensive economy.

The last lines of Stanley Kunitz’s poem land me square in the middle of the Kingdom of God for the same reason that Wes Jackson evoked it in the conversation that Berry reports. When I think that I love the world so much that I don’t want to leave it I’m not expressing a triviality. When Socrates gets to a point like this in Plato’s dialogues, he too resorts to myth making, as does Jesus. I love the the anglo-saxon word for parable; It is bigspell, a distant cognate I like to think, to German Beispiel, meaning “example.” I love the homeliness of it, the use of the soft power of storytelling when argument reaches the end of its tether.

As the writer of Hebrews says, we may not see the world brought into subjection to us—indeed it will never answer to our wishes—but we see Jesus. Orthodox Christians make a gesture of respect at the mention of the incarnation in the creeds and in the eucharistic prayer. This is the part to which the writer of Hebrews alludes when he describes Jesus as having been made “a Little lower than the angels.” Whatever may be true about worlds beyond this one, it has always seemed to me that a substantial part of Jesus’ mission was to reprove a particular sort of worldliness in the here and now, the very sort to which the writer of Hebrews alludes when he admits we do not see the world at our feet. Indeed, the world addressed by the writer of Hebrews was a terrible place, full of violence and grevious injustice, ruled by petty tyrants and an emperor who aspired to be a god. But in the midst of that terrible politics, Jesus advised those who listened to him that they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick—following his example, another use of soft power.

As I’m finishing this, Gaudete Sunday has passed. I’ve had an opportunity to rejoice in the Lord, albeit to do it slant, as Emily Dickinson said we poets should tell the truth. I am resolved again to cease striving to subdue the world, but rather to live within it as a brother to the sun and moon, as St. Francis put it. I am disheartened by the election of Donald Trump, but I do not share the hope of fellow Democrats that Trump can be denied the presidency by the electoral college—nor should he be. The Trump presidency is what our political system has given us in this historical moment. Our response as Christians who disagree should be to continue our work for social and economic justice using all means of soft power at our disposal and to undertake a work of persuasion that will seek to restore good will in a society that has for the present, at least, by intention or default: embraced neo-fascism.