Category Archives: politics

everything old is new again

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Today I went searching for something John Dos Passos wrote in The Big Money about the execution of alleged murderers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had read the USA trilogy, which contains The Big Money, back in the 1950s, when its radicalism seemed a little dated, given that of Allen Ginsberg. I didn’t know it at the time, but Dos Passos had already completed a transition from 30s radical to 50s neocon, as so many American writers of his generation did. Still, the passage in question has stuck with me over the years as a cry of hopeless rage on the order of Ginsberg’s Howl.

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do we are beaten

….they have built the electricchair and hired the executioners to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

I found it in plenty of places; a poignant blog by Kevin Drum came up among them. “Everything old is new again,” Drum writes at the end, echoing the Peter Allen song. And it all seems to coalesce into a huge pile of significance today as I read reports of a federal secret police unit raging round the city of Portland, Oregon detaining and maiming peaceful protestors and fast backward to the re-institution of the federal death penalty by a venal Attorney General and a Supreme court that can hardly be trusted to avoid equal venality.

I add these abominations to the list of crimes the president and his minions (among whom I include his enablers in the United States Senate) have got away with: cheating to win the 2016 election and then covering it up, the latest chapter in that sorry story being the Roger Stone commutation; wholesale scapegoating of immigrants including the now infamous separation policies, concentration camps, and other efforts to subvert immigration statutes, undermining our nation’s public health service as part of an overall attack upon the provisions of the Affordable Care Act with the result that we now have the worst of the worldwide coronavirus epidemics whose death toll is now over 140,000 and rising; attempting to seize control of messaging to the nation about the current pandemic first by holding daily press briefings that were little more than campaign rallies and when that didn’t work launching a series of attacks on Anthony Fauci and when that began to backfire demanding that hospitals and states bypass the CDC and submit coronavirus data to the White House; subverting half a century of foreign policy in eastern Europe to further the geopolitical ambitions of Vladimir Putin while ignoring Putin’s cash bounties for the lives of American soldiers. The list goes on and on. George Will has charged that our country “is now being administered by a gangster regime.” I agree.

The Sacco and Vanzetti execution was clearly a miscarriage of justice by legal standards that constituted norms only yesterday. We can now add those norms to the list our present regime seeks to overturn. Support for that regime continues to wane as the coronavirus pandemic grows worse, but leaders, supporters, and enablers of the regime continue to laud and to pursue its criminal agenda, all the while attempting to ratchet up its authority. As of today I am no longer interested in the niceties of analysis. Like George Will I hope for an electoral tsunami in November so profound that it destroys this present regime and the Republican Party with it.

While I intend to vote for Joe Biden, I believe Biden will have to relent about Medicare for All and abandon his historic commitments to the banking and insurance industries. He will also have to confront his record of uncritical support of policing This present Republican regime has exhibited the death throes of late capitalism, particularly its violence against struggling minorities. Perhaps late capitalism will maintain itself by force among us; it can only do so by displaying its illegitimacy for all the world to see. Democratic socialism is the way of any viable path out of our present decadence. What stands against democratic socialism is massing now to support the continuation of our present kleptocracy. Its playbook will include the time-honored tactics of smear and voter suppression, which loom particularly large this election cycle because of the pandemic. Added to the usual tools of voter suppression now are lack of federal support for election reform and the current effort by Republicans to destroy the US Postal Service, which will be charged with transporting the millions of mail-in ballots expected to be cast. But the most disturbing elements of that emerging Republican playbook are a federal secret police of unknown size and the thousands of militarized police forces throughout the country who through their national union have now declared support for the Republican gangsters and their president.

The Fraternal Order of Police supported Obama and Biden in past elections but endorsed Trump over Clinton in 2016 claiming that she ‘snubbed’ them. It is time for Biden to repudiate police militancy if he is to represent the hopes and dreams of the thousands of Americans who have now taken to the streets. This will be a massive task, but it might begin with a truth and reconciliation commission, modeled on the South African experience but with some added legal authority. A more massive task will be to restore the rule of law. It isn’t true that we’ve never before been where we are now as a people, or that the character of our times “isn’t who we are.” But it is true that we have never before confronted so massive a task as it will be to establish justice in a land that can no longer forget its sins nor sweep them under the rug.

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

But we are the strangers who beat our nation bloody. We are the crooks and liars who bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp. We turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people, and we didn’t care as long as it wasn’t us who got herded into those slums and factories and sweatshops. And we have now got this miserable excuse for a government because we voted for it. And it may be too late to vote it out. We can now certainly not vote it out before countless more Americans die. We have hired the executioner to administer the lethal dose.

amor fati

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Whether death is final or whether, as Socrates said, it may be the greatest of all human blessings—I have no idea. But I am relatively sure that we are all irretrievably diminished by the deaths around us from the current pandemic. I am equally sure that to make light of suffering and death by claiming that they are the inevitable outcome of economic or other forces that lie beyond human control, as apologists for capitalist excess have always done, is not only wrong headed but sinful as well.

And no sooner had I recommended a pause in open criticism of the president when he, with his characteristic blend of narcissism and arrogance, telegraphed to New York Governor Cuomo that the governor didn’t need the respirators he has asked for, downplaying the already numerous deaths from COVID-19 in New York and claiming that projections of future deaths in that state have been overblown; and besides the mess in New York is all Cuomo’s fault anyway. Future deaths will be on him and not on the president. This strategy, consisting partly of spreading the falsely reassuring notion that not everybody will be affected by the pandemic, is finding resonance with some, as indicated by the uptick in the president’s poll numbers. The Charles Koch network has been emboldened to echo the president’s claim that social distancing is a cure that’s worse than the disease it attempts to mitigate, and some of the president’s supporters among the God fearing are defying statewide distancing orders to hold massive church services. One evangelical pastor has gone so far as to refuse to accept responsibility for risking the lives of those who attend his services.

People are still going to work, still going to the mall. I encountered more people in Target today then I did during my service last night,” he said. “It’s persecution of the faith for me not to have my worship service and yet I am allowed to go out in public and shop. Why is there one standard for commerce and another for religion? . . .”

Why indeed? the good pastor’s duplicity echoes that of the president. Behind it is an admonition towards a species of moral quietism in the face of public calamity, of which more later. ‘All is well in the best of all possible worlds,’ says the president, perhaps echoing his grounding in the pop theology of Norman Vincent Peale. ‘Be happy—go back to work when I say it is time. Meanwhile, I guess we should all shelter in place, but don’t believe what the doomsayers tell you. This will all be over soon.’ If that sounds like stoicism, perhaps it should; it is at least a debased form of stoicism.

Stoicism is enjoying a revival these days, with at least a couple of pretty good books, a spate of articles, blogs, internet communities, meet-ups in various places around the world, and the like. Here’s a fairly recent article that reviews most of of these things and will put you on to other resources. Apparently the movement began in the self-help culture as an offshoot of interest in mindfulness, but it is now gathering serious philosophical underpinnings as well as some sectarian rivalry among practitioners. At my age I’m disinclined to join movements, but if I were I think I might join this one. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to support the president. But at best, in the United States in contrast to the president’s screed, the stoic revival seems to be attempting to restore the ideal of civic virtue without its sometimes poisonous grounding in Christianity.

In keeping with this new interest, I am reading around, have ordered some new books, and have just now ordered a couple of stoic medallions so that I can look forward to their arrival and carry them about me during my present isolation and perhaps afterwards. There was a time in my life when I studied the art forms generated by medieval and renaissance preoccupation with death. A gentleman of John Donne’s time, for instance, might carry on his person a medallion such as the ones I have ordered to remind himself that the funeral bell, which tolled often in those times of frequent epidemics, could toll for him just as it could for anyone else. Donne was recovering from a serious illness at the time he wrote the famous seventeenth Meditation, and he alluded to his recovery in its opening sentence:

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

2019 was my year of near death. I have had three strokes. I am left with the knowledge that I can have another stroke at any time. I have stopped driving, though I intend to keep my license current in case of emergency. As I think about my new knowledge and what it means to me personally (I stress personally), I am remembering sitting in his office years ago with a priest friend who had had three heart attacks. He spoke of how he knew that the fourth coronary would likely kill him but reflected that there seemed some serenity associated with knowing how one will die.

I have been diagnosed with a species of heart failure known as diastolic dysfunction, which sometimes affects my breathing. I am a lifelong asthmatic and as an ex-smoker I have a bit of COPD. I use oxygen at night. I take blood thinners and a statin and medicine for hypertension, though not so much of that as in former times. I am also well over eighty. But my heart condition and other factors aside from age are under control. My only radical uncertainty is the tiny aneurysm in my brain and the too-small artery that branches off from it. While I am less certain that I will die of a stroke than my priest friend was of his potential death by heart attack (and by the way he did die of the fourth coronary), it seems a fairly good bet that a stroke will kill me.

Unless, of course, I should die of COVID-19.

Sheltering in place has been a pretty simple matter for me. I’ll not bore you with the details. It’s of some concern to me that as our hospitals are overwhelmed by the pandemic I might find it difficult to get emergency medical care if I should need it. I have already spent a night and the better part of the next day lying on a gurney in a hallway at SLU hospital the last time I was there because no rooms were available. We have 10,000 hospital beds in this city I’m told (I hope that means in the city proper outside Saint Louis County), but that’s not enough to meet the needs of our population in normal times. I find upon reflection I am troubled less on my own account than I am  when I think of the potential needs of others. As I’ve said before I’ve had a good run at life, and though I certainly don’t like the Texas lieutenant governor’s idea that I should be willing to die for the sake of the economy, I’m philosophical, as the saying goes, about death.

Donne’s famous instruction in the seventeenth meditation echoes down the centuries in the oft-repeated admonition that we are all in this together in the present crisis. The president’s duplicitous appeals in today’s media both invoke and deny the admonition, gesturing first towards social distancing, which in seeming to deny Donne’s admonition actually affirms it, and then offering the empty reassurance that ‘this will all be over soon, and besides, not everybody will get the virus, not everybody will die.’ The moral vacuousness of this consolation ought to be obvious, but the politics of divisiveness is so powerful among us, that it may be useful to quote Donne here, as much for the venerability of the ideal as for its timeliness.

No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

For myself, today, this instruction provides a partly inexplicable serenity wrought of the knowledge that death (my own death) is an inescapable part of life that I am able to consider apart from Donne’s recourse to his home in heaven. I grew up in the church; indeed I startled my family by asking to ‘join the church’ (our Methodist confirmation) when I was nine years old. But it has been more years than I can count since I have believed that heaven and hell are places that lie beyond this world. These, I believe, are Christian metaphors for very human and worldly conditions. I think of myself most of the time as a Christian humanist, following more in the footsteps of Darwin and Whitehead than of Dante or Milton or Isaac Newton. I believe that the cosmos is rationally describable and that my inability to understand it proceeds from my human inability to see it whole; but I also believe that I can trust my partial understanding, and that my partial understanding is informed by the science of my time rather than that of ancient times.

So if I am a stoic, I am a very modern one, having discarded the science of classical stoicism just as I long ago discarded that of the Hebrew Bible. Like Montaigne, I have always been attracted to the skeptical strain of stoicism and the humility it teaches, which is why I have never felt any solidarity with the more extreme forms of postmodern thinking. These seem to me, especially when they make a leap from epistemology to ontology, not to embrace uncertainty but rather to require a certainty that borders upon hubris. I am still a Christian in that Christianity gives me the fundamental terms of what Richard Rorty has taught me to think of as my final vocabulary. I am a humanist in the classical sense of being open to the teaching of many books other than the Christian scripture and its various tropes and theologies. Humanism has taught me to regard the copious mind as a positive good, and to nourish it in others as a teacher. Now it is teaching me serenity at the prospect of my own death.

But the principal difficulty with the stoic worldview for me is not its source in outdated science. It is rather a susceptibility to conflation with naive theodicy. Leibtniz becomes Pangloss, one of whose spiritual descendants is Norman Vincent Peale. But Voltaire spoofs only the second worst outcome of Pangloss’s teaching that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The worst outcome is that to which Candide comes in the end, moral quietism, tending one’s garden as the world cries out for reform. Voltaire may or may not have approved. Certainly he had plenty of knocks to deal with in a life devoted to railing against various establishments, and certainly he retired from all of it for a time. I am presently retired as well, but I don’t plan to embrace quietism in my present flirtation with the stoic ideal.

My beloved is busy on the phone and online each day doing the various good works to which she is committed. Since I can no longer help her with much of that, I will continue to write and think. I have a good many projects saved up for a time like this one, another chapbook or two, a book of essays. By inheritance I have benefited from both my country’s disastrous adventures: slavery, and what we euphemistically call Indian removal. I have written a good deal about these things both here and elsewhere. I tried once to make sense of my story in an essay I wrote for Pembroke Magazine years ago. That essay was a failure, though I didn’t know it at the time, at least partly because the story needed more space to develop. I’m going to try again, using parts of that essay and some of the essays I have written for this blog. If I live, there will be a memoir. Beyond that, I leave to whatever gods there are.

Next year’s politics

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Back in 2016 I initially thought Hillary Clinton was the wrong person for my party to have nominated for president. After the disaster of that election I continued to think so for a time. But as the significance of Clinton’s popular vote victory began to dawn, something else occurred to me. Clinton had actually won the election of 2016. Her loss in the electoral college was a fluke. This understanding of the 2016 election outcome has the advantage over other understandings in that it conforms to Occam’s razor, which tells me that the simplist explanation of a phenomenon is the best.

To those among my friends who would like to see the hand of God in the momentary triumph of Trumpism, I can only say that their belief involves a gratuitous assertion I deny gratuitously. As for reasonable explanations of the Trump victory (i. e. politics of resentment, misogyny, racism, etc.), all of which have some claim to being true, I’m thinking today that all of them have followed Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit in overthinking something we should rather understand to have proceeded from the flaw in our constitutional system that has left us vulnerable to oligarchy at a time when the economics of oligarchy are already in place.

Bernie Sanders and the movement he has assembled are both a consequence of and a possible solution to the many cultural, social and political problems that have arisen in the wake of our present slide into the abyss of inequality. But I am more attracted to some of Sanders’ younger supporters than I am to Sanders, himself. I believe the country’s future lies with Sanders supporters who, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, found themselves able to praise Elizabeth Warren after her withdrawal from the presidential race. I’m not so sure about Sanders supporters like one who tweeted this attack on Warren’s SNL performance: “I’m actually disgusted that while the people are fighting for the soul of this country she is dancing and rehearsing fodder for the masses, , , ,” I cast my vote in yesterday’s Missouri Primary without being able meaningfully to vote for Warren, the candidate of my choice, a choice I believe I am as qualified to have made as my disgusted fellow citizen who by extension stigmatizes me as a person who is not fighting for the soul of my country.

One of the things that seems to characterize the Sanders campaign is humorlessness. I’m constantly thinking, “Lighten up!” If we lose the ability to “dance and rehearse,” to laugh at ourselves, the wowser’s have won. And I’m thinking of Nafisi’s reading group in Lolita in Tehran, who come to Nafisi’s house in the hijabs they are forced to wear, but beneath them dress in vivid colors that match their independent spirits, the poetry of their inner lives, the beauty of their souls regardless of what grief and despair their lives entail. And I’m thinking that a certain joylessness is characteristic of authoritarian politics. To the extent that we on the left lose the ability to have a good time, to take pleasure in the world around us and in things that are lovely, we have become what we deplore in the politics of the right. We have conceded the whole territory of life and the world to the enemy, which is not “dancing and rehearsing” but the despair that would forbid it.

Still, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that the Sanders campaign has developed a degree of toxicity that can be observed in the tweetstorm occasioned by Sanders’ SNL appearance and Ocasio-Cortez’ praise of her. On another front, today I note a whole series of memes alleging that Joe Biden announced on the Lawrence O’Donnell show night before last he would veto a bill authorizing medicare for all if it came to his desk as president. That Biden did nothing of the sort can easily be displayed, but few I suspect, will take the trouble to review video of the show in question. Russian trolls aside, distortion by recontextualization, though hardly new to politics, has had a new birth in the Trump era. It’s even defended by its perpetrators, as in the case of a doctored video tweeted by White House director of social media, Dan Scavino, and retweeted by Trump, that purports to show Biden urging Americans to re-elect Trump.

I’m amused, too, by fact checkers’ use of epithets like “partly false” for distortions such as these. I’m used to old-fashioned distinctions between truth and falsehood (i. e. a statement cannot be true and false at the same time). There’s really no such animal as a “partly false” statement. The distinction between truth and falsehood admits no relativity. But lying by distortion is an equal opportunity occupation these days. Many of the attacks on Barack Obama that came to be associated with Republicans, for instance, were first introduced by the Clinton Campaign in the run-up to the Democratic Convention of 2008. Now, I’m hearing from CommonDreams that “progressives” (i. e. Sanders voters) are appalled at a list of potential Biden appointees published recently by Axios. One can discount consternation expressed over usual suspects, Bloomberg and Dimon, but more interesting is a comment by Sarah Jones to the effect that “the highest expectation anyone should have for a Biden presidency is that he’d be a caretaker president.”

I submit the same had best be true of a Sanders presidency. Both Biden and Sanders are old, as I am now, Sanders the elder of the two. “There is a fundamental instability in a gerontocracy,” writes Sarah Kendzior in her most recent piece for the Globe and Mail. “November will bring a reckoning” she says. It’s inconceivable to me that the first stages of that reckoning involve any other than a rebuilding of the country’s distressed institutions. I am convinced that reform must wait upon that rebuilding. Still, rebuilding will require that Sanders or Biden form “a broad coalition of younger colleagues” in order to confront “the structural rot that allowed Mr. Trump to triumph in the first place,” as Kendzior puts it. “Mr. Biden is better at coalition-building and Mr. Sanders is better at identifying root problems,” she says further. “They will both need to embrace each other’s skills to move forward.” Kendzior’s remarks avoid ageism, though just barely. Her final sentence sets one generation against the other in a manner that is becoming typical.

One cannot blame young people for being disillusioned about the future in this era of climate catastrophe and ceaseless corruption. To capture their votes, Democrats must make a compelling case about how they will protect that future – even though their presidential nominee will not live to see it.

Today I am reading comments on Facebook to the effect that Biden is a ‘poor, demented, old man.’

That being said, neither Sanders nor Biden should aim to serve more than one term. Beyond rebuilding, the fundamental task of that term should be to groom a cadre of successors. It is perhaps just to claim that Biden’s resurgence as a candidate means that a substantial number of Americans think of him as safe. I think, given the fact that both Sanders and Biden are soon to be eighty, as I am now plus a couple of years, their ideological differences should be viewed as matters of political style as much as reflections of the views of their respective supporters. The great need for structural reform will not go away if Biden is elected, and American style capitalism will not go away if Sanders is elected. This country is inconceivable without the wealth-generating engine at its heart, as problematic as that has been for America’s past, as problematic as it will be for the future of our planet. Today, as I watch more election returns, it seems evident the electorate all around the country are turning out in record numbers to vote for Joe Biden. I very much hope this presages a blue wave that will sweep Trump and the Republicans out of office in November. It will be tempting for the pundit class to overthink a Biden victory, if it occurs. What I think is that the electorate could just as easily have coalesced around Sanders.

Assuming that a Democrat president is elected in the fall and is given a Democrat congress to work with, the job of government next year will be the same whether the president is Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. It is a pure accident that Biden is emerging as the victor, just as it was a fluke that gave us Donald Trump and robbed us of our first female president. Next year’s president, assuming it is not Donald Trump, must assemble a brain trust like the one assembled by Franklin Roosevelt and begin the hard work of rebuilding what Trump and the Republicans have destroyed. The Sanders movement has done the country the great service of moving our political discourse to the left. We can now talk about health care as a human right. We can now consider reigning in the multinational corporations, the big banks and hedge funds, the telecom giants, big data, big pharma, etc. We can at the very least return to the Kyoto accords. Beyond these things it will be the task of next year’s politics, as Sarah Kendzior says, to empower a new generation of Americans to lead our nation. They are already there in the persons of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Pete Butttigieg, etc. It isn’t necessary that they agree, but it will be their task to determine whether humanity and the planet survive.

I’ve just read “To Live and Love with a Dying World: A conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Wendell Berry” in the current issue of Orion. DeChristopher is a West Virginian and Berry is a Kentuckian. Both are keenly opposed to mountaintop removal, which is more or less where they begin to talk. But the subject of their talk soon turns out to be that despair that comes from conviction that it is too late to save our planet, or human life as we know it: that is, the despair that seems to follow upon thoughtful approaches to the Anthropocene. The difference between the two men is only partly a difference between youth and age, and it almost parallels that between Sanders and Biden: Sanders being like DeChristopher, seeking a movement, working out his dreams on the unfolding canvas of American vista; Biden, the specialist in retail politics, seeking always the smile, the handshake, working the ropelines, a bit like Berry, a specialist in localism and economies of scale.

Their disagreements are sharp, but they find at least partial agreement as they come to the end of their talk. DeChristopher can’t quite sign on to Berry’s thought that the world is still a good world, but he does find it in him to say:

That’s why the despair is not paralyzing. Knowing that it’s too late to prevent collapse, knowing that we’re not going to stop the catastrophic end, knowing that we’re going to die—it doesn’t mean that we stop. It means that we live in this moment as fully as we can.

Berry, typically, goes further:

That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness, but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows—a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.

I smile a bit at this and think of Elizabeth Warren dancing on SNL a few nights ago and making ‘pinkie promises’ with little girls as she bravely ran for president, because “that’s what girls do.”

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.