Wednesday, November 6, 2024

This Is Who We Are

 

That Is Who We Are

November 6, 2024

 

This is who we are. What sort of person Donald Trump is was no secret. He has even boasted of some of his worst personal characteristics. The destructive nature of the policies and procedures he wants to impose on us was no secret. They’re all laid out in Project 2025. He was president for four years, though I won’t say he served as president because the only people he served were himself, his family, his uber-rich backers, and deranged people calling themselves Christians who want to subject women to control by men. We saw what kind of president he was. He told us to drink bleach to deal with COVID-19 and otherwise handled the pandemic about as badly as it would be possible to handle it. The Russians put him in power in 2016,[1] and he took the word of the Russian fascist dictator Vladimir Putin over that of our country’s intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the that presidential election. He made no secret of his admiration of murderous dictators like Putin, someone he clearly wants to imitate.

He instituted utterly inhumane policies at our southern border and spoke of immigrants in purely fascist terms. He put incompetent right-wing judges like Eileen Cannon on the federal bench. He put far right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, who overturned Roe v. Wade. He called white supremacists “fine people” and told gangs of thugs to “stand back and stand by.” He incited a seditious mob to attack the US Capitol to stop congressional certification of his loss of the 2020 election. He still spouts the big lie that he actually won that election. High ranking military officers who served in his administration have called him fascist, which indeed he is. We knew that he is inherently incapable of telling the truth and that indeed truth doesn’t matter to him. On November 5, 2024, we knew exactly what Donald Trump is, and we reelected him anyway.[2] We even gave him a majority of the popular vote, something we didn’t do when he became president in 2016.

And I can hear many of our people saying: “Well, that’s not really who we are. We aren’t like Donald Trump.” And I have to say: “Hell yes, that is who we are! Hell yes, we are like Donald Trump!” We would not possibly have reelected him if that weren’t who we are, if we weren’t like Donald Trump. In reelecting Donald Trump, the American people expressed the dark side of the American character. They tied themselves to and continued the dark side of American history. Perhaps most Americans will not acknowledge that our national character and our history have a dark side, but there simply is no doubt that they do.

What is that dark side? It has many facets, but it is at least a history of racism and genocide; and it is the refusal of most Americans to acknowledge that we are racist and that we have committed genocide. It is a history of enslavement of Black people followed by violent suppression of them as human beings and denial of their civil rights. It is a history of patriarchy and the oppression of women. It is a history of military violence. We stole much of the western part of our country from Mexico through an imperialistic war. We waged an imperialistic war against Spain in 1898 then made someone who boasted of his participation in that war a hero and president. We carried on a immoral, utterly useless war in Vietnam for many years. We started an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq in 2023. We have created the world’s largest military by far, and we have enough nuclear weapons to end all life on earth. We are and have been one of the most militaristic nations on earth.

We are mostly a nation of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, but we have a history of hatred and oppression of every new wave of immigrants that has come to us. Most of us may not know about our history of hatred of Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Chinese people, for example, but that hatred is part of our history and part of our character.

At least since 1980 we have had a federal government that, with a few exceptions like the Affordable Care Act, has worked for the benefit of the wealthy not of the people. That government has done nothing truly significant to address the global climate crisis. The dark side of American history is at least as determinative of American character as is our supposed advocacy of freedom and democracy, something has always been more words than reality.

Our reelection of Donald Trump as president is both an expression and a continuation of all of those dark aspects of our country. There is absolutely nothing good about the man or about what he wants to do to our country. Yet we put him in position to do immeasurable harm. He will make the federal judiciary fascist for decades to come, continuing something he started quite successfully the last time he was president. He will dismantle all federal regulatory agencies as much as he can, thereby leading to the destruction of, among other things, worker protection and the environment. If he gets control of the House, he will impose a nationwide abortion ban, something most Americans by far don’t want. Such a ban would make oppression of women national and not just regional policy. It would inflict immense harm on an untold number of women and the people who love them. On November 5, 2024, we either knew all of these things about him or had knowledge of them readily available to us. We reelected him anyway.

The only thing that made our doing so possible was the concordance of his character and ours. We reelected him because we are who he is. We reelected him because we fell for his pandering to our worst instincts and our worst fears. We reelected him because our professed commitment to “liberty and justice for all” is and always has been a farce. We reelected him because we have always been prone to fall for demagogues. We reelected him because so many of us are frightened by the changes taking place in our country and around the world. Perhaps most of all, we reelected him because we are as racist as he is. Because we are as sexist as he is. Because we are as mentally unstable as he is.

So no. Don’t believe the people who say “This is not who we are.” The hell it isn’t! It is precisely who we are. Yes, there are a great many good people among us, but there aren’t enough. We will never be better than we are until we admit that it is who we are and commit ourselves to doing something about it. I’m 78 years old. I don’t expect to live to see us doing that, if indeed we ever do. The dark side of our history and of our national character has us in its grasp. Donald Trump personifies that dark side. Yes, tragically, this is who we are.

 



[1] If you doubt this truth read Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom.

[2] We also gave him control of the Senate. As of this writing, it is unknown whether we also gave him control of the House of Representatives.

Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Road to Unfreedom

 The Road to Unfreedom

I just finished reading Timothy Snyder’s boot The Road to Unfreedom. Snyder is the most impressive historian I’ve ever read, but he is transitioning from history into political theory. His explanation in The Road to Unfreedom of what’s going on in the United States is bone chilling. It is immensely depressing, and the problem is that he is right. He says we are following the path of Russia to even greater inequality of wealth and the death of democracy. The Russians are pushing us along that path. They made Trump president in 2016, and they may well do so again in 2024. Snyder says, I think, that the only way to reverse the direction we’re going as a nation is to restore the notion that there is indeed truth. That’s because one of the foundational tricks of fascism is to convince the people that there is no truth. So just follow the leader. Believe the leader because his lies are not different from anyone else’s lies except that they play on your fears and your bigotries. We may or may not reelect Trump next Tuesday. If we do, American democracy is doomed. It may be doomed even if we don’t. Do Kamala Harris and the Democrats really understand what’s going on in this country? I doubt it. If they don’t, there’s no way they can lead a reversal of the country’s direction. Even if they do, they may not be able or willing to lead a reversal because the needed reversal would, at first, encounter massive and probably violent resistance. Snyder’s right, and we’re in bigger trouble than all but a very small handful of Americans understands.


Friday, November 1, 2024

American Democracy Is Critically Ill

 

American Democracy Is Critically Ill

American democracy is critically ill. Our political system still looks, more or less, like a democracy, but that appearance is a false façade. It covers up the truth that our political system is at risk of being no longer at all democratic—if indeed it ever was truly democratic to begin with. Of course, most Americans don’t know that American democracy is critically ill; and even if they suspect that it might be, they won’t admit that it could be. Several undeniable truths show how critically ill American democracy is. We’ll look at some of those truths here.

Before we get to those truths, however, we must consider what democracy is supposed to be. Linguistically, it means “government by the people.” In theory, in a democracy the people that the democracy governs determine the what their government is and who is to lead it. The people usually do that through free and fair elections in which every eligible voter has to opportunity to cast a vote. In a true democracy, all votes are equal. No one’s vote carries more weight than anyone else’s vote. Most commonly, the people elect representatives, who are the one who carry out the government’s work.

The US Constitution was never intended to be perfectly democratic nor has it ever been perfectly democratic. We see two significant ways in which it is not democratic in the document itself. It creates a federal judicial system. That system has immense power over many aspects of American life, but the people do not elect its judges. A judicial vacancy is filled by the president nominating someone to fill it and the Senate either approving or rejecting that nomination. There are solid arguments why this is a better way of selecting federal judges than having the people voting for them would be, but what this system is not is democratic.

Yet the undemocratic way our nation fills judicial vacancies is not the most important undemocratic aspect of our federal government. The undemocratic aspect of the Constitution that is the most important has two related features. The first is the way the number of senators is assigned to each state. Our states differ wildly in how any people live in them. The population of Wyoming, for example, is around 590,000. The population of California is nearly 40,000,000. Thus, California has an enormous number more people than Wyoming does. Yet each of those states has the same number of US senators, i.e., two. The vote of each citizen of Wyoming, then, is substantially more important in determining the makeup of the Senate than is the vote of each citizen of California. This system of allocating senators to the states may have made some sense when it was created in the late eighteenth century when the country was much more a union of sovereign states than it is today. It makes no sense whatsoever today; but even if it did make any sense, it would not be democratic because it weights the votes of some Americans more heavily than the votes of other Americans.

The undemocratic aspect of the Constitution that is closely related to the problem with the allocation of senators to the states is the electoral college. Under the US Constitution, the American people do not directly elect their president and vice president. Rather than count the national popular vote, the Congress approves the vote that each state has submitted to the federal government separately. The weight of the vote of each state is determined by the number of the members of the House of Representatives each state has plus two for the state’s senators.

A state’s number of representatives is based on the state’s population. Thus, Wyoming has one member of the House of Representatives while California has fifty-two such representatives. The allocation of the number of members of the House is thus more or less democratic. But the fact that every state has the same number of senators unbalances the presidential votes of the states. Just as small population states have disproportionate power over the makeup of Congress, so the small population states have disproportionate power in the election of the president and the vice president.

The disproportionate power of the small population states in the selection of the president and vice president has resulted on five different occasions in a person being elected president though that person lost the national popular vote. That has happened twice quite recently. George W. Bush was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2000. Donald Trump was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2016. A person who lost the popular vote becoming president is, of course, grossly undemocratic. Because our constitution allows it, it has actually never been appropriate to call America a pure democracy.

Then there is the question of money. It costs an immense amount of money to run any political campaign, with presidential campaigns, of course, costing the most. It seems that candidates and their staffs spend as much time and energy asking people for money as they do explaining their policy positions. Money has always been a corrupting factor in American politics, but it’s worse now than it has ever been before. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. That decision held that it is unconstitutional to restrict the amounts of money corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations may give to political campaigns. The result was the opening of the floodgates for unrestricted money to flood American politics through nonprofit organizations such as political action committees. That’s why so many political ads don’t come from a political campaign itself. They come from misleadingly named PACs whose donors are concealed or disguised.

Money corrupts politics. Of that there simply is no doubt. In large part because of Citizens United, political candidates most Americans would not support but for massive amounts of misleading political advertising have won election to Congress and to the presidency. Because of the influence of money, the United States Congress has often been controlled by a political party, the Republican Party, whose policies most Americans reject. Those Republican-led congresses have, among other destructive things they have done, passed tax cuts for the very rich and the very big corporations that do not benefit the American people at all and which most Americans would reject if given the chance to vote on them. Republican presidents, the most recent two of whom did not receive a majority of the popular vote, have signed that legislation. They thus have ballooned the national debt and imposed hardship on the American middle class, that is, on most Americans. Citizens United called the giving of money to political campaigns free speech. It isn’t. It is people doing something that involves speech not at all, i.e., donating money. The result of Citizens United has been to make American politics even less democratic than they were before.

There is, however, an even more important indicator that American democracy is critically ill. It is the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Trump and his deluded supporters are, quite simply, fascists. They do not believe in democracy, and Trump makes no bones about the fact that he does not. Trump has made it perfectly clear that he would be America’s Vladimir Putin if he could, and Putin is nothing if not a Russian fascist. Trump believes that elections are legitimate only if he and his designated candidates win them. He continues to claim that he won the 2020 presidential election when he undeniably did not. He tried every legal way he could to overturn the result of that election. When legal means didn’t work, he sent an angry mob to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty of counting and certifying the votes of the states in the electoral college.

One clear indicator of Trump’s fascism is his willingness to use violence to achieve his political ends. His attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is the most egregious example of that willingness, but it is not the only one. He openly supports anti-democratic movements like the country’s numerous white supremacy groups. He tells armed thugs who attack peaceful counter protesters to “stand back and stand by,” an encouragement to prepare for violence if ever there were one. As I write these words, we have just learned that Trump has called for his political opponent Liz Cheney to be put in front of a firing squad. He does not think of his political opponents as opponents. He thinks of them as enemies. He is quite prepared to treat them as such, which is another of his fascist tendencies.

There is very little doubt that if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, American democracy will be more critically ill than it already is. But, of course, he may not win the 2024 presidential election. What would it mean for American democracy if he lost? What would it mean if not only he lost but his designated minions running for Congress lost as well? It would mean at most that American democracy has received a stay of execution. Vice President Kamala Harris, as nearly as we can tell, believes in American democracy. She would not try to set herself up as America’s dictator the way Trump would. Her winning the 2024 election, however, would not be a miracle cure for American democracy’s critical illness.

That’s because even if Harris wins, nearly half of all American voters will have voted for the fascist Donald Trump. However the congressional races come out, at least nearly half of all American voters will have voted for Trump lackeys to represent them in our national legislature. Democracy is fragile. The American constitutional government, as not completely democratic today as it has ever been, has survived longer than any other democracy ever has. Yet it is still fragile. It cannot survive if nearly half of all Americans no longer believe in it. It cannot survive if a significant number of Americans take up Trump’s call to use violence to overturn legitimate election results. If that many Americans have lost their faith in their constitutional government, future elections will be what this one is; not a contest between legitimate candidates and legitimate though differing views of what the country needs but a battle for the very survival of America’s good if imperfect democratic system of government.

If that’s what future American elections become, the American people as a whole, including those who have not lost it already, will lose faith in their system of government. They will not continue to participate in such a bastardized democracy. Extremists on the left will arise to counter the MAGA extremists on the right. Politicians on the left will begin to assert that we need a leftist dictator to fend off would-be fascist dictators. If that happens, American democracy will not be critically ill, it will be dead.

The only way for our country to avoid that tragic fate is for the American people as a whole to reject Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Many of us, of course, already reject them. Indeed, we condemn them, but tens of millions of Americans don’t. Is there any way to lead those tens of millions of Americans out of the trap of Trumpist fascism? I wish I had an easy answer to that question. Perhaps our hope lies in Donald Trump’s inevitable death. I am not advocating violence here, but Trump is 78 years old and, like all of us, will die someday. Popular movements that are cults of personality the way the Trump movement it don’t often survive the death of the cult leader. After all, they essentially never have a system of succession that puts someone else legitimately in charge of them. We can hope that Trump’s cult of personality won’t long outlive him.

But the task we face of ending the MAGA movement is at best formidable. We can make all of the fact-based arguments we want to counter the deranged claims of that movement. But facts don’t matter to Trump or to his followers. If facts mattered, Trump would still be nothing but a sleazy New York real estate developer, and there would be no MAGA movement. It may be that the only thing that will end that movement is its coming to power and failing spectacularly to make life better for most Americans. Perhaps the country will have to hit a fascist rock bottom before it begins to recover from Trump and his fascism.

I hope that such is not the case, and I may not live long enough to see whether it is or not, for I’m just as old as Trump is. But German and Italian fascism ended (to the extent that they have ended) only when Germany and Italy suffered devastating defeat in World War II. Soviet fascism, calling itself communism not fascism, ended only when the Soviet economy failed dramatically because of the way the Soviets tried to keep up with the United States militarily and because of the internal contradictions of the Soviet planned economy. It may well be that something similar will have to happen in this country before we will truly be rid of Trump and his threat to American democracy.

So. American democracy is indeed critically ill. A healthy democracy would never produce a Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. A healthy democracy would never produce a movement like Trump’s that is grounded not in actual reality but it fear and hatred. We people of faith can pray and work for a cure for our country. I sure wish I had more hope that we could effect such a cure.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

On the Totalitarian Life

 

On the Totalitarian Life

October 31, 2024

He makes no secret of it. Donald Trump wants to destroy American democracy and replace it with a totalitarian or at least authoritarian regime with himself at its head, as an American dictator. As I write these words less than one week before the 2024 presidential election, we don’t know who will win. We do know that however the undemocratic electoral college vote comes out, around one half of the Americans who vote will vote for Donald Trump. Where they have the opportunity, they will also vote for Trump’s MAGA followers for seats in the next Congress, in the states’ governor’s mansions, and in state legislatures. We face an internal threat from American fascists unlike any we have faced before. Yes, there was a significant American fascist movement in the 1930s, but it never came even remotely close to putting on its advocates in the Oval Office; and thought it had members in Congress, it never threatened to take over that institution the way it does today.

Americans who vote for Donald Trump will be acting out of naivete and ignorance. Of that there is no doubt. There is one thing that they certainly don’t even know they don’t know. It is their complete lack of knowledge of what it is like to live under the kind of political regime that Donald Trump wants to create in our country. It’s not as though there weren’t numerous examples of what living under such a regime is like. Both history and present day reality give us lots of information on that subject. Totalitarian or at least authoritarian fascist and communist regimes (the distinctions between them being unimportant for our purposes here) exist in Russia, China, North Korea, Afghanistan, and no doubt other countries around the world. Anyone who wants to can easily find numerous sources of information about life in those countries.

I want here to examine what it was like to live in a totalitarian state that no longer exists, namely, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I have qualifications for writing on that subject. I have a PhD in Russian history. I spent five weeks in the summer of 1968 traveling around the Soviet Union on a Russian language study tour. I was in Moscow when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. I lived in Soviet Russia, mostly in Moscow with some time in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg), for the 1975-76 academic year doing research for my PhD dissertation. There certainly are scholars who know more about the Soviet Union than I do, but I certainly know more about it than most Americans do. So here’s at least some of what I know about what it meant to be a citizen of and live in the late, unlamented Soviet Union.

The Communist regime that ruled the USSR was totalitarian. It was Communist. It at least claimed to operate according to the principles of a political theory called Marxism-Leninism. That theory posited that what had actually been no more than a coup d’etat by a small group of zealots on November 7, 1917, was a popular socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks, as what became the Soviet Communist party was then known, led by Vladimir Lenin, somehow managed to win a years-long civil war against various monarchical and other opponents. By 1922, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was in complete control of most of what had been the Russian Empire.

The nature of the policies and practices of the Soviet Communists was apparent from early in their rule. One of the first things Lenin did was create what he called the Cheka, from the first letters of the Russian words for Extraordinary Committee. Most Americans know it better by one of its later names, the KGB, the initial letters of the Russian words for Committee on Government Security. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call this institution the KGB even though it didn’t always have that name. By whatever name it went under over the course of its existence, the KGB was from its beginning a terrorist organization that the Communist Party used to suppress and eliminate all opposition from within the borders of the USSR and, actually, even beyond those borders. Its methods were brutal. They were brutal in the beginning under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue stood in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow until the collapse of the Soviet Union as a symbol of the institution’s continuity over the decades and through its various name changes. It was at its most brutal in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He used it to murder at least hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens on claims that they were counterrevolutionaries of one sort of another. It was much less brutal after Stalin’s death in 1953. When I was in Russia in 1968 and in the mid-1970s, the KGB was still very much there and very much active in suppressing all opposition to the Communist Party, but it had, mostly at least, stopped shooting people in the back of the head without trial like it did so often under Stalin.

The KGB was the Communist Party’s primary instrument for controlling the lives of the Soviet people. Its agents and informants permeated every institution in the country, including the Russian Orthodox Church. No one could be sure who was an undercover KGB agent. No one could be sure who, without actually being a KGB agent, would nonetheless report any slightly anti-Soviet behavior or act to the KGB. It was especially true during the Stalin years that no one could be sure that even a member of their own family would not turn them in if they made some anti-Soviet remark, turning in family members being something Soviet propaganda encouraged people to do. Especially under Stalin, it often happened that someone looking for advancement in a profession or within an institution would tell the KGB that the person up the ladder from them had said something anti-Soviet. That person would disappear, and the one who told the KGB the lie about them would get a raise. Of course, someone else might very well do the same thing to them, which must have made a lot of people very uneasy. Especially under Stalin, Soviet people lived in terror of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. The KGB, perhaps in the uniforms of the civilian police, would arrest a family member, and in many cases that family member was never seen again.

Like most totalitarian regimes, the Soviet Union was controlled by a guiding ideology; or at least it always claimed that it was. It was the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. All of the people of the Soviet Union had Marxism-Leninism pounded into their brains as the only truth there is. In many ways, Marxism-Leninism played the role that Russian Orthodox Christianity had once played for the Russian people. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union propagated the ideology of Marxism-Leninism in every way it could. There was no escaping it. The Party even put up little shrines to Lenin that mocked the shrines to some saint that Orthodox Russians often had in their homes. They pirated Christian beliefs and sayings. They said “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live,” a rip off of the Christian belief in Jesus Christ if ever there was one.

Soviet life wasn’t quite as much compromised by the country’s totalitarian regime when I lived there as it had been under Stalin, but the KGB was still very much around. Here’s one story of how its presence worked. My family and I lived in a dormitory of Moscow State University while we were in Moscow. We lived in a wing of the enormous main MSU building that was many stories high. We lived on the fifth floor. Everyone, or nearly everyone, in the building knew that a man named Boris lived on the seventh floor. He, we knew, was a KGB plant. He wasn’t there to pursue university level studies. He was there to spy on the students who lived in that wing of the building and report any suspicious behavior or statement to the KGB.

My wife and I got to know a fifth year journalism student who lived in another part of the building. He apparently had connections in the Communist Party, for he could get friendly with American students without negative consequences, something very, very few Soviet people could do. Some of the things that happened while we were friends with him are quite telling about life in the Soviet Union. For example, we once asked him over to our rooms for dinner. The first thing he said in response was: “What floor do you live on?” We said: “The fifth.” Then he asked: “What floor does Boris live on?” We said: “The seventh.” So he accepted our invitation, I presume because he figured there wasn’t much chance Boris would see him hanging out with Americans, and not even this relatively privileged young Russian man wanted that to happen.

Several other things happened in my interaction with this man that illustrate what it meant to be a Soviet citizen. He was a journalism major, and once he said to me: “Everything we see is bad, but we are permitted only to write about what is good.” On another occasion he said to me: “You can come here and live in our country getting to know a good deal about us. I will never be able to go to your country to do that same thing.” Even though I am quite sure this young man was getting protection from someone in the Communist Party, he clearly felt constricted and controlled by his country’s totalitarian system.

One thing that totalitarian and authoritarian regimes always do is take control of and rewrite their country’s history. Few Americans really get the importance of history, but most Russians do. The only Russian history this friend of my would ever have heard would have been a grossly distorted account of that history propagated not to teach people actual history but as a measure of control. History had to conform to the Party’s ideology. Of course, that history really does no such thing, but as it was taught in the USSR, it did.

Near the end of our stay in Moscow, the pastor (the Rev. Mike Spangler) of the Anglo-American Church, which was attached to the American and British embassies in Moscow, gave me a book. It was by a Russian writer named Nikolai Berdyaev. It was, of course, in the original Russian. Pastor Mike gave it to me to give to any Soviet person I wanted to give it to. Early in his life, Berdyaev had been a Marxist, but he abandoned Marxism and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. He became its leading theologian of the twentieth century. Of course, he couldn’t do that in the Soviet Union. He left that country and lived in Paris until his death. I gave the book to my Russian friend.

Now, this friend of mine was an atheist. He once asked my wife and me if we believed in God. We said that we did. He replied that belief in God was one thing about westerners that he could never understand. He was, after all, a product of the Soviet educational system and had had atheism pounded into his head for his entire life. He certainly had no source for a better understanding of Christianity or of any other faith.

Nonetheless, when I gave him Berdyaev’s book, he nearly broke down in tears. He said: “You will never know what you have done for me.” I didn’t ask him why he reacted that way, and he didn’t volunteer an explanation. I had learned that when a Soviet person didn’t volunteer an explanation of something it was best not to ask, but in this case my friend didn’t have to offer one. I am quite sure I understand why he reacted that way. He had surely heard of Berdyaev, perhaps in the course of his Soviet education or perhaps through some unofficial channel. In his education, he would have heard Berdyaev denounced as a class traitor and an enemy of the Soviet people. But one thing about him that the Soviets couldn’t conceal was that he was a Russian; and he was a Russian the Communist authorities thought they had to denounce.

My friend was an atheist, but he was a Russian. Russians love their history. Russians seek to know their history in a way few Americans seek to know theirs. Berdyaev was a major figure of what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture. That was, roughly, the ten or twelve years before the outbreak of World War I. It was a time when Russian culture truly flourished. The country produced any number of world class authors, painters, composers, and other artists. My friend would have know that much about it. He would also know, however, that what he had been told about it was badly distorted at best and an outright lie at worst. He didn’t react the way he did because Berdyaev as an Orthodox writer. He reacted that way because Berdyaev was an important Russian writer. I believe that my friend’s reaction reflected the fact that the Communists had stolen the people’s history from them and that they knew that the Communists had done it.

So what was it like to live under Soviet Communist totalitarianism? It was to live with several aspects in one’s life that were unhealthy at best and terrifying at worst. It meant first of all being constantly bombarded with an ideology that few if any people actually believed. At least, few if any people believed it in the latter years of the USSR’s existence. The Soviet Union’s “founding fathers,” that is, Lenin and most of his immediate cohorts, certainly believed in Marxism-Leninism, but it is probably true that by the 1970s only the more committed members of the Communist Party did. Nonetheless, that ideology was the only thing that gave the Soviet regime any legitimacy at all, so the Party kept saturating the country with it. The people had to mouth their acceptance of it at least in their public actions, though they certainly ignored it much of the time. Still, it was always there distorting reality in the interest of the Communist Party.

Living under Soviet totalitarianism meant that actual truth was denied, distorted, marginalized, or ignored in essentially every aspect of Soviet life. The Party told people they were the freest people in the world when in fact they were hardly free at all. It told people that the Party always acted in their interest when in fact it almost always acted only in its own interest. The Party told the people that life in the USSR was more prosperous and better in every way than life in the west when in fact the USSR was essentially a third world country with nuclear weapons and consumer goods were scarce at best and often simply not there.

One foundational example of the distortion of the truth was the way the Soviet Communists stole the people’s history from them. I gave an example of the consequences of their doing so above. Here’s another one. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the thought and policies of a man named Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. It doesn’t matter much for our purposes here who he was. Just know that even western historians (not completely correctly) consider him to have been an arch reactionary who affected the policies of the last two tsars. I found one book about him that had been written and published in the USSR. It wasn’t actually history. It was propaganda masquerading as history. It made no attempt actually to understand the man, it only vilified and condemned him. To be an historian in the Soviet Union meant being more a propagandist than a scholar.

I fear that few Americans can understand how significant the Party’s theft of the people’s history in the USSR was. (I speak here of the Russians in the USSR. I think that what I say is also true of Ukrainians and Belarussians. I don’t know if it is true for other peoples in the Soviet empire.) One of the great shortcomings of American culture is the ignorance about and indifference of most Americans to their history. Americans tend to think that history is just things that happened in the past that don’t matter anymore. At best they would agree with the old saw that “the past is prologue.” But the past isn’t just a prologue. Indeed, as has been said, it isn’t even past. It is very much with us every day of our lives. Our past determines our present reality. It forms our nation’s institutions. It forms our nation’s culture. It forms the way people think today, not just the content of their thought but the very process of thought itself. It shapes what people think is real and how they think they know what is real.

Russian history does all of that for the Russian people, but for them there is another function of history as well. Russian history is important to them precisely because it is Russian. That means that it distinguishes them from all other people. Most importantly, it distinguishes them from the peoples of western Europe and North America, especially the people of the United States. The Russians are or at least want to be proud of their history and the culture it formed. Every people’s history is unique, but the way in which Russian history is unique matters to the Russians a lot. It is the history of a people living where Europe and Asia meet. It is a history very different from that of western Europe or the United States. It is the history of a culture that developed without developments like the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment that still so affect western culture today. It is a history of a people surviving poverty, authoritarian or totalitarian governments, and repeated foreign invasions. It is a history of nearly all of the people living, for centuries, under a system of serfdom that differed little from actual slavery. The Russian people want to know their history. The Russian people value their history highly.

And the Soviet Communists stole it from them. They turned it into a history of class struggle on the western model that simply wasn’t there, or was there in forms very different from those of western Europe, throughout the country’s history. In good Marxist fashion, the Soviet Communists turned some of the greatest minds of Russian history into mere tools of bourgeois oppression. They did the same thing to the Russian Orthodox Church, which had for centuries been one of the foundational institutions of Russian life.

The Communists distorted and even lied about their own history. They made Lenin’s coup d’état against a government that was no longer monarchical into a great people’s revolution against an unbearably oppressive tsarist regime, something that it was, at least at first, hardly at all. After about 1956, the Party suppressed the horrific truth of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and turned the monster Stalin into nothing but a hero who defeated the Nazis. In short, no Soviet citizen could gain anything like a valid understanding of Russian history from the history the Soviet Communists taught, which was the only history they allowed to be taught. And that mattered to the Russian people a lot.

Then, most significantly, living under Soviet Communist totalitarianism meant living in oppression and fear. We Americans quite rightly value our history of the people’s civil rights. We cannot imagine living without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, due process of law, indeed without all of the rights the US Constitution guarantees that we have. The constitution of the Soviet Union (yes, it had one) gave all of those rights to the Soviet people too, but in practice the constitution was a dead letter. No one could raise it as a defense in a criminal prosecution the way we Americans can and often do plead our constitutional rights in court. The Soviet Communists controlled all publishing, all journalism, and all broadcast media in the country. They allowed nothing that contradicted the party line to be published or broadcast. The country had a legal system that worked reasonably well in handling ordinary civil and criminal cases, but it didn’t function well at all in any case in which the KGB expressed an interest. If the Party, often through the KGB, said it wanted a criminal defendant convicted, that defendant would be convicted regardless of the facts or the law of the case. Soviet citizens could assemble publicly only in gatherings the Party had approved; and, it course, it would approve only gatherings called to exalt the Party and its policies.

I mentioned above my journalist student friend’s displeasure with the fact that he could not travel freely abroad. Some Soviet citizens did travel abroad, but the Party tightly controlled who could go abroad and where anyone could go. It was relatively easy to get permission to travel to the communist countries of central Europe that were under Moscow’s control. It was also possible to travel to Cuba. Yet whenever anyone went abroad, especially if they went to western Europe or the United States, the Party made sure they would be reluctant to defect. Usually, when a Soviet person went abroad, they had to have family members back in the USSR, a fact that made it more likely that the traveler would return home. At least under Stalin, the Party threatened to punish those family members if the traveler did not return. We Americans take freedom of travel for granted. Soviet citizens never could.

In theory, the Soviet people had freedom of religion. In practice, they had only a sort of it. At times over the course of its existence, the Soviet Communist Party tried to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin tried to destroy it until he decided to use it as part of his effort to raise the people to fight the invading Nazis. As my late, great main PhD professor, Donald Treadgold, was found of saying, the churches and other places of worship were the only institutions in the USSR whose ultimate goals were not those of the Communist Party. The Party never succeeding in destroying the Russian Orthodox Church. There were functioning Russian Orthodox churches in the country when I was there, but attendance was very sparce. People said that only old women go to church. That may have been more or less true, but it seems there was generation after generation of old women.

Yet neither the Church nor its people were really free to practice their faith in public. It was illegal to take minors to church. It was illegal to teach the faith to them. There were three Orthodox seminaries in Soviet Russia that trained Orthodox priests, but those priests could never criticize the government or the Party. Indeed, some of them were KGB agents working undercover. The Bolsheviks restored the Moscow Patriarchate that Peter the Great had abolished, but the patriarch could never really act as a patriarch. He too had to mouth the Party line. To the extent that any Russian people valued the Russian Orthodox Church, they valued it not because it was Christian but because it was the most Russian of all the institutions in their country.

Soviet people lived under all of that oppression, but that wasn’t the worst aspect of Soviet life. The worst aspect of Soviet life was that the people lived in constant fear. The strength and depth of that fear varied depending on what the Party was doing against supposed opposition at any particular time. It was worst under Stalin. It was significantly less after him, but it was always still there. Doing anything the Party perceived as counterrevolutionary, that is, against the Party, would still get you arrested and sent to prison. Stalin’s successors didn’t murder anywhere near as many people as Stalin did, but the country still practiced capital punishment for so-called political crimes. Citizens could still report alleged counterrevolutionary acts by other citizens to the KGB.

Soviet people had to assume that they were under KGB surveillance at all times. When I was in the Soviet Union, first during the summer of 1968 and again for the 1975-76 academic year, we could safely assume that the KGB didn’t care a whit about what we said as long as there were no Soviet people present when we said it. Yet we always assumed that our dorm rooms were bugged. So were any hotel rooms we stayed in. Soviet people had to assume the same thing about their homes and their workplaces. The constant awareness that they were always under the eyes of the KGB produced a good deal of constant fear in Soviet people.

That, folks, was a good part of what it meant to live under Soviet totalitarianism. Tragically, today we have some vocal and even powerful people who want to create some version of that life here in the United States. They want the government to ban books they don’t like. They want the government to assert control over women’s bodies, and they have had an appalling amount of success at the state level in getting it to do so. They don’t want the US to become a Marxist-Leninist country of course, they just want it to be a “Christian” nation, with “Christian” understood only as they understand it. They want to take civil rights away from sexual minorities. They want systemic racism to continue to function in American institutions, and they advance its doing so by denying that it exists. They want to take true American history away from the country’s people. They don’t want actual American history taught in the public schools. They want only a whitewashed version history that ignores the unpleasant aspects of actual American history like slavery, racial discrimination, white supremacy, and our genocide of Native Americans.

Just as the Soviet government operated only in the interest of the Communist Party, these people want the American government to operate only in their interest and in the interest of the wealthy and the large corporations. Just as the Soviet Communist Party persecuted actual or perceived opponents, these Americans want the American government to persecute people they perceive as opponents. I mean, just listen to what their Dear Leader Donald Trump says about prosecuting “the enemies within,” by which he means people who don’t support him.

I don’t mean to suggest that any Americans want to recreate the Soviet Union’s Gulag, its extensive network of prisons called labor camps where much of the oppression of the Party’s actual or imagined opponents took place. They do, however, want the government to arrest millions of people who have committed the supposedly heinous crime of immigrating to the United States, to hold them in camps, and to deport them even if they have become American citizens.

In short, a significant portion of the American public wants to turn the country fascist. Not Communist, for communism is atheistic, though in practice there’s not much difference between Soviet Communism and European fascism. They want us Americans living much like the citizens of the Soviet Union lived, and, for that matter, how Russians still live under Putin. They don’t realize, or maybe they do, what that life was like. It’s not that Soviet people didn’t have a life. They did. They had families. They had places to live. They went to school. They had jobs. They had vacations. But that life was severely impacted by the totalitarian regime under which they lived. I for one do not want my life and the lives of my fellow Americans turned into anything remotely like that kind of life. Yet that is exactly what Donald Trump and his fascist minions seek to do. I write today just five days before the 2024 general election. Will Trump and his fascist voters win? I don’t know. I just hope and pray that they will not.

Monday, October 28, 2024

What Would It Mean?

 

What Would It Mean?

October 28, 2024

 

What if? What would it mean if, one week from tomorrow, the American voters returned Donald J. Trump, convicted felon, to the White House? As of today, just over one week before the 2024 election, we do not know whether or not the American voters will make that tragic mistake; but there is a real possibility if not a probability that they will. To answer the question of what their doing so would mean, we must understand two things: First, America has always claimed to be, and second, what Donald Trump and his MAGA movement truly are and truly would do if put in power. We’ll start with the first of those two issues.

What has the United States of America always claimed to be? What it has always claimed to be constitutes what we must call the American myth, though you can call it “the American dream” if you can’t handle the word myth. By myth, I don’t mean just something that people think is true that isn’t true, though that is part of the word’s meaning here. The other part of that meaning is that the American myth has always been a story about what this country is that has elicited the loyalty of most Americans, or at least most white Americans, to the country. It has been a story through which people have gained an allegiance to the country, thinking that the country is and has been what the myth says it is.

What is that myth? It is the claim that our country is the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” It the story that we are the beacon on a hill, a light of democracy and freedom from which the rest of the world should learn and which the rest of the world should imitate. It is the story that in our country “all men are created equal.” It is the story that in America everyone functions on a level playing field with everyone else, that anyone can become anything through dedication and hard work. It is the story that there is such a thing as a “self-made man” and that becoming such a person is a worthy goal for anyone’s life. People today often express the myth by saying “America is the greatest country in the world!”

Now, there surely can be no doubt that the American myth has never equaled the American reality. That myth denies our country’s horrific country of slavery and racial discrimination against people of color. It refuses to acknowledge the genocide white Americans committed against Native Americans, a genocide so horrific that Adolf Hitler thought it meant America could not object to what he was doing to do to the Jews. It denies our history of white supremacy and male supremacy. It fails to understand the systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that still taint most of our institutions, our legal institutions perhaps most of all. It overlooks the fact that, though we claim to be the richest country in the world, an appalling number of our people are poor, and even completely homeless, without access to any of the things they need to live a decent life. It overlooks the way we are destroying the environment on earth and denies human responsibility for that destruction. It is willfully ignorant of the way money controls American politics and the harm that control does to ordinary people. No, the American myth has never truly reflected American reality.

Which in no way means that the myth isn’t important. It has given ideological cover to most of the things our nation has done since its foundation. That myth has colored the relationship of most Americans to the American nation for all of that nation’s existence. That relationship has been one not only of the allegiance to which the Pledge of Allegiance refers but of enthusiastic support and willingness to sacrifice for what the nation’s powers tell the people are worthy and necessary ends.

The American myth had us fighting World War I “to make the world safe for democracy.” It has us claiming that we are the ones who defeated Nazi Germany when in fact it was the Soviet Union that played by far the biggest role in bringing about that defeat. It had us insisting that we needed to be a world-wide bulwark against Communism, an insistence that led to the utterly unnecessary and tragic Vietnam War. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists and hasn’t for quite some time now, the America myth still has us spending unconscionable amounts of fiscal and human resources on our military. The American myth convinces most Americans that our military really is there “to defend democracy”  and “to defend American freedom” when in fact it is primarily there to project American power around the world for political and economic purposes. The American myth has most Americans accepting the notion that we must be the world’s police force and supporting our leaders when they use our power as such, all under the claim of defending freedom.

The history of American politics is steeped in the American myth. That myth says, actually with some justification, that the US Constitution is the best national foundational document humans have ever produced. It says that we truly are a democratic country. It says that our votes really do matter, that it is in fact the will of the American people that decides who runs the country. It boasts, with good justification until after the 2020 presidential election, of our history of peaceful transition of power from one president to the next and one congress to the next. The American myth about money and freedom of expression led the US Supreme Court to say that giving money is speech and to gut most of the existing restrictions on the power of money in our politics. The American myth of the equality of all citizens led the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, rendering it largely meaningless in the struggle against racial discrimination. The American myth has Americans believing that they live in the freest, most democratic, most egalitarian nation on earth.

So. What would a second election of Donald Trump to the presidency and the elevation of his fascist MAGA movement mean? It would mean that the country has at long last rejected the American myth. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement clearly reject the core elements of the American myth. They reject the myth’s assertion of racial equality and embrace white supremacy. They scorn the country’s history as one of immigrants (at least one of immigrants after the first white people appeared on the North American continent) and cry “Close the border!” Meaning of course the border with Mexico not the border with Canada. Canada is, after all, mostly white, and most of its people speak English. They cry that the immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a fascist statement if ever there were one.

Trump and the MAGA movement reject the legitimacy of American democracy. They reject the legitimacy of American elections and believe that any election is legitimate only if they win. They believe that it is legitimate for them to use any means up to and including violence to put their people in power even when those people have undeniably lost an election. They reject the very notion of constitutional government and want Donald Trump to be, in essence, an American dictator, an American Hitler, something Trump’s vice presidential running mate J. D. Vance once said Trump was. They see American politics not as a peaceful contest between people with differing views of what is best for the country, which is what the American myth says American politics are, but as a war between MAGA and its opponents, whom they call not opponents but enemies. They reject the notion that the national economy should work for everyone’s benefit. They embrace the economic lies that tax cuts for the rich are good for everyone and that tariffs on imported goods are good for the economy.

And there is what is perhaps an even more fundamental way in which the election of Donald Trump as president would mean that the country has turned its back on the American myth. That myth has always asserted, sometimes against all the evidence, that its contentions are grounded in accurate facts. Before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016 and thereafter, American politicians always asserted that the things they said were factually correct. They weren’t always factually correct of course, but the contention that national policies must be grounded in actual facts has always been part of the American myth.

Donald Trump, however, is an inveterate liar. Nearly everything he says is a lie. Nearly every thing he says contradicts that facts of whatever it is he’s talking about. The “Big Lie” is a classic fascist tactic. Hitler’s Big Lie was that the Jews were responsible both for Germany’s defeat in World War I and for all of Germany’s problems in the 1920s and 1930s. Donald Trump’s Big Lie is that immigrants are responsible for all of America’s problems today. Yet that is, of course, not all he lies about. He lies about everything, and we have to ask: Why does he lie so much?

There are I think a couple of parts to the answer to that question. The first part is that Donald Trump simply does not live or operate within the categories “true” and “false.” He doesn’t think in terms of true and false. He thinks only in terms of “What is good and what is bad for me and my immediate family?” He is “afactual.” Facts don’t matter to him, so he never bothers to find out what the actual facts of a matter are. Everything he says comes from a context in which the truth just doesn’t matter.

The other part of the answer to that question is that fascists telling lie after lie is not actually an attempt to get people to believe that the lies are true. It is, rather, an attempt to get people to believe that there is no truth. It is an attempt to get people to give up caring whether something a politician says is true or not. If there is no truth, then there’s no reason actually to believe anything anyone actually says. But, of course, there is one exception to that part of the answer to our question. People are to believe anything the Dear Leader says, for in an afactual world, we might as well believe what he says as believe anything anyone else says, especially if he convinces us that, as fascists like always claim, only he can solve our problems.

So. If Donald Trump wins next week’s presidential election, we will know one thing for certain. Enough Americans scorn the traditional American myth to put a fascist in the White House. To put in the White House someone who is nothing but a cynical fascist who wants nothing but power and wealth for himself. He will, of course, take the presidential oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but he won’t mean it. His saying that he will do so will, of course, be a lie; but then nearly everything he says is a lie. A Donald Trump victory next week would mean that enough Americans no longer believe in American democracy and therefore would put a would-be tyrant back in the Oval Office. It would establish that truth no longer matters in American politics. It would mean that enough Americans are white supremacists so that commitment to racial equality no longer matters for them. (Of course, most of them would deny being white supremacists, but that in no way would mean that they aren’t.) In other words, the reelection of Donald Trump would mean that the American myth is dead.

Now, of course, the American myth is not a one-sidedly good thing. It covers at lot of reality that in truth contradicts it. So would it matter the American electorate has rejected it? Well, yes, I believe that it would matter. Myths like the American myth exist in every aspect of human life. They give life meaning. They give people purpose. Perhaps most importantly, they can and sometimes do express ideals toward which people can strive. The American myth actually does that, or at least we could use it in that way. It speaks of democracy. Of racial equality. Of equal justice. Of equal opportunity. It says that we must act on the basis of actual facts. None of those things is a pure reality in our country, but they are all worthy goals toward which we can and must strive.

American governments have never acted fully according to the American myth. I mean, the American myth would never sanction Andrew Jackson in the crime against humanity of the Trail of Tears, to cite just one extreme example. Yet the United States has never had a truly authoritarian government, and it certainly has not had a totalitarian one. The American myth is the foundational reason why we have not. It has always said, and most Americans have always believed, that authoritarianism is not our way, and totalitarianism certainly is not our way. It simply isn’t true that Americans are freer than people in many other places in the world, but it is true that we Americans have always valued freedom. We have always valued democracy. Most of us, in more recent decades at least, have said we value racial justice and equality. Most of us, in more recent decades at least, have said that we value gender equality. All of those things are part of the American myth. Valuable, worthwhile parts of the American myth. Parts of the American worth keeping, worth clinging to. Donald Trump and his fanatical followers in the MAGA movement have rejected all of those parts of the myth. They have turned their backs on the best parts of the American myth. They advocate radically un-American policies and practices. They are, indeed, American fascists.

German president von Hindenburg made a tragic mistake when, in early 1933, he asked Adolf Hitler to form a German government. We face the real possibility that, one week from tomorrow, the American public put Donald Trump and his MAGA minions in power the way von Hindenburg put Hitler and the Nazis in power. Our doing so would indeed be a tragic mistake. I don’t mean that I think Donald Trump would ever create another true Auschwitz, this one aimed at immigrants not at Jews. He is, after all, an American fascist not any other sort of fascist. Yet he would dismantle as much of American democracy and constitutional government as he could. He would make himself as much of a dictator as he could. He would make this country as fascist as he could. Heaven help us if, in just over a week, we make the tragic mistake of electing Donald Trump. If we do, it will mean that the American myth, the American dream, is on life support if not totally dead. May it not be so.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

States Are the Problem: What Is the Solution?

States Are the Problem: What Is the Solution?


I’m beginning to believe that essentially all of the world’s problems result from the fact that we humans have organized ourselves into nations, into so-called sovereign states. With a few exceptions, human beings are not violent. With a few exceptions, we are not physically aggressive. With a few exceptions, we humans, left to our own devices, are not filled with hate. At least, human children are not born hating anyone. Nations are all of those negative things that most individual humans by far are not. Few, very few, of us will  voluntarily kill another human being. But when a government trains us to kill and sends us to kill, we kill any number of other human beings, against whom we have nothing personal, quite willingly. Why? I sure as hell don’t know. Governments portray doing it as an honorable duty. It’s a duty only because the government says it is, and it isn’t the least bit honorable. It is, in effect, murder sanctioned by one’s country. 


States pass laws that put unchecked power in their own hands and favor some people over other people. States pass laws that tell some people to kill other people and call it justice when all it amounts to is state-sanctioned murder. States have human societies spending obscene amounts of fiscal and human resources developing ever more effective ways of killing people, and they call it defense. It’s not defense, it’s investing in the means of killing large numbers of other human beings most effectively and efficiently. Nations compete with each other for political, military, and economic power whether the state having those things actually benefits people or not–and mostly it doesn't. Even, or maybe mostly, democratic governments pander to the people whose money puts and keeps them in power. In the US, the Republicans are shameless about doing it, though they lie and say their policies that benefit only the rich actually benefit everyone. The Democrats are more subtle about it, but they too need massive amounts of money to win elections, a truth that gives people with money tremendous power even over the Democrats. 


Is there anything to do about it? Probably not. Even if I could propose a better way of organizing human societies, there’s no chance that states are going to disappear soon. We can work to reform our state. In the US, we can try not only to defeat the MAGA fascists but to crush them and eliminate them as a political factor in our country. Those are worthy and necessary things to do. They will not, however, change the underlying social, economic, and political systems within which we must operate. So we’re pretty much stuck with what we’ve got.


Christianity warns us against nations, against sovereign states. That’s what the New Testament book of Revelation is about. It’s about the evil of the Roman Empire specifically. More generally, it is about the evil of every nation that operates in any way like an empire, which the US certainly does. No nation has ever existed that has come anywhere close to embodying the realm of God on earth. None has ever been truly nonviolent. None has ever adequately cared for “the least of these.” None has ever put the welfare of the world above what it perceives to be its own welfare. In other words, none has ever truly embodied true values, true morality. 


Christians cannot make any nation their ultimate concern. Neither, for that matter, can people of any other faith tradition. The world would be so different if people truly made God their ultimate concern. Not some nation. Not some theology, though I do think theology is really important. Not some institution be it secular or ecclesiastical. Not any person be that person a pope or a real or would-be dictator.Not their family. Certainly not themselves. Not to anything other than the utterly transcendent, perfectly moral God, Who is nothing but absolute love beyond human understanding. 


The world would be so much different if everyone really got it that love is all that matters. Love is all that makes life worth living. Love leads to nonviolence. Love leads to true justice. Love leads to true peace. God is love, and no ultimate concern other than love can lead us humans to overcome all of the evil to which we are so prone. 


And no nation, no state, has ever truly been organized and operated according to the ultimate concern of love. Some nations, some states, the United States more than most, claim to be good. Claim to be virtuous. Claim to stand for what is right and good. All of those claims are nothing but propaganda. They are nothing but lies designed to attract people’s commitment, people’s devotion, people’s willingness to perpetuate the myth of a country being something it is not and to commit evil acts of numerous kinds when the nation tells them to. 


Sure. Some states are worse than others. The United States is not Nazi Germany, though Donald Trump seems to want to make a sort of thin copy of Nazi Germany.. The United States is not the Soviet Union. The United States is not Idi Amin’s Uganda. It is not communist 

China. It is not North Korea or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There are many countries with histories and/or present realities arguably worse than those of the United States.


None of which means that the United States is good. We have a history of genocide against Native peoples so bad that Hitler thought it meant we could not object to what he was going to do to the Jews. We have a history of centuries of slavery and more centuries of racism that we still have not overcome. Sinful white supremacy remains present and active among us fanned by Donald Trump and his fascist MAGA movement. We Americans, or most of us,buy the myth that we are the greatest country on earth. We aren’t, and we never have been.


My point is only this. The organization of human beings into nations, into states, may well be the cause of many if not most of the world’s problems today. If I could, I would not defend national borders, I would eliminate them or at least make them stop being the obstacles to human wellbeing that they so often are today.I don’t believe that there will ever be a world government nor am I convinced that a world government would solve our problems. After all, peoples and nations the world around have very different histories and cultures. World-wide human homogenization probably isn’t desirable or effective in eliminating humanity’s problems. 


So I don’t know what the solution is. Is there some way to get humans to see all other humans as their equals? As beloved children of God worthy of respect and care? Is there a way to get humans to live and work according to the principle of love rather than the principle of self? Is there a way to get people to understand that nonviolence is the way and that all violence is sinful? Is there some way to get Americans to stop idolizing Ronald Reagan and realize that the greed he claimed was good is actually evil? I wish I knew. 


My faith says I am supposed to have hope, but, frankly, I find hope a very difficult thing to find in this world. So I fight a feeling of despair that threatens to overwhelm me. I said in a sermon not long ago that God is our only source of hope, and I suppose that’s true. Still, that notion sometimes seems to be quite a thin reed to which to cling. Belief in some transcendent reality has been a factor in human civilization for as long as there have been humans, and the world is still the God-awful mess that it is. Yet it remains true that God is all we’ve got. So I cling to God, or try to. Doing so is enough, or so I try to convince myself. So be it.


Tuesday, October 1, 2024

On Charity and Justice

 

On Charity and Justice

There is enormous need in the world. There is need in my country, the United States, and there is even more need in poorer parts of the world. People are suffering in all parts of the world. They suffer from hunger, illness, violence, and any number of other ills. God calls us Christians (well, actually, all people, but I’ll focus on Christians) first to be concerned about people suffering, then to act to alleviate that suffering to whatever extent we are able. Few of us do that as much as we could, but the call is there nonetheless.

There is a story in the Old Testament that points to something important about our response to human suffering. It’s the story of a drought and the prophet Elijah responding to it in a particular way. The story begins at 1 Kings 17:1. There Elijah tells evil king Ahab that “there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word.” Elijah, in other words, is causing a great drought to come upon Israel and indeed on the lands surrounding it. Drought causes great suffering in the world today, and it caused great suffering in the world of ancient Israel too. Egypt has the Nile, and Mesopotamia has the Tigris and the Euphrates, all of them great rivers. Israel has no such river. Agriculture in Israel, particularly in ancient times, depended on rain. Harvests were good in Israel when the right amount of rain fell on the fields at the right times. When it did not, harvests were bad or even nonexistent. Drought was a horrific disaster, something of which people lived in constant fear. And the great prophet Elijah causes such a drought, apparently because he’s mad at king Ahab for worshipping Baal.

The next significant story in the Old Testament is at 1 Kings 17:8-16. In that story, Elijah has gone to a place called Zarephath, which, we are told, “belongs to Sidon.” Sidon was a Phoenician city not a Hebrew one. So Elijah here is among Gentiles not among Jews. He has no reason to believe that the people there worshipped Israel’s God Yahweh. He encounters a widow. He first asks her for some water. He also asked her to give him some bread to eat. The widow replies that she has no bread. She has only a handful of meal and a little oil. She says “I am now gathering a  couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” 1 Kings 17:12 NRSV. This woman and her son are about to become victims of Elijah’s drought, and they were far from only ones for whom that was true.

Elijah tells the woman not to be afraid but to bring him some bread and then to make something for herself and her son. “For thus says Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”[1] 1 Kings 17:14 NRSV. The widow does as Elijah directed her to do. She and her son eat well. The meal and the oil don’t run out just as Elijah said they would not.

So we have here a situation in which Elijah happens upon a Gentile woman and her son who are about to starve to death because of a drought. It isn’t, however, just any old drought. It is a drought that Elijah has caused. Elijah’s drought is the larger circumstance that is causing the widow and her son to believe that they are about to starve to death.

And what does Elijah do? He does charity. He addresses the immediate need of the widow and her son for food. It is, of course, a very good thing that he does so. He is acting one on one with someone with a dire need for food, a need she cannot satisfy herself. Elijah is a great blessing for this widow and her son. Now they will survive the drought that they were sure was going to kill them.

But what does Elijah not do? He does not address the larger circumstance that puts this widow and her son in need of charity. He addresses the need, but he does not address the cause of the need. We know, though the widow presumably does not, that Elijah is the one who has created the drought that has produced the woman’s need. We must, therefore, assume that Elijah could have ended the drought but did not. He did charity, the work of addressing people’s immediate needs, but he did not do justice.

Justice is the work of addressing the systems and institutions that create need among people. That keep people in poverty. That wrongly imprison them. That discriminate against them in myriad ways because of the color of their skin, their faith, their sexual orientation, their gender identity or expression, or the part of the world they come from. Justice is the difficult, slow work of changing the underlying causes of people’s suffering.

Now, charity and justice are not the same thing, but they are both vitally and equally important. God calls us Christians to work at both them. To ignore neither of them. Not to consider one of them more important than the other. God calls us both to address people’s immediate needs and to work at changing the systems that put people in need. There is simply no way for us Christians to avoid those divine calls from God.

We Christians are often really good at doing charity. Those of us who are able to do it give money to any number of worthwhile charitable institutions and causes. We give money to food banks, shelter and housing programs, medical assistance programs, educational programs, and any number of other organizations that do good charitable work. Many of us who are able to do it give of our time as well as of our treasure to these organizations. We volunteer in countless ways with countless charitable organizations. It is a very good thing that we do. Charity makes the lives of a whole lot of people better. Doing charity is our duty as Christians.

It is, however, not our only duty. God also calls to do justice. God calls us to do what we can to undo unjust systems and institutions that put so many people in so much need in the first place. It is, however, true that it’s a lot easier to do charity than to work for justice. It isn’t often easy to know just what we should do. Injustice arises in numerous different ways. There is the systemic racism that produces different results for similarly situated people because of what we call their race. The same thing, or at least something very similar, happens to people because of their gender, sexual orientation, or sexual expression. There is the injustice that results from conservative politicians enacting a tax code that favors the rich over everyone else in unconscionable ways. What are we to do, actually?

Justice is about the polis. It is about the ways we live together in society. It is, therefore, unavoidably political. We hear people say “keep your religion out of politics.” We hear it over and over again, mostly from secular people who are objecting to the conservative politics of conservative Christians.[2] But Christianity is political. Jesus had more to say about how God calls us to live together than he had to say about anything else. He called, and calls, us to do the work of building the kingdom of God on earth; and “kingdom” is nothing if it isn’t political. In Matthew’s the Beatitudes, for example, Jesus says not one thing about belief. He speaks about people and the people like peacemakers who do God’s will on earth.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is unavoidably political, especially but not exclusively in the Gospel of Luke. There Mary sings of the downfall of the wealthy and the lifting up of the poor. Luke 1:46-55. Luke’s Beatitudes don’t just bless the poor, they condemn the rich. Luke 6:20 and 24. There is simply no doubt that in conflicts between the rich and the poor, God is on the side of the poor. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church speaks of God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Economic and tax policies make people poor, and politicians set economic and tax policies.

God does not call us to keep our religion out of politics. Rather, God calls us to do exactly the opposite. God calls us to build the realm ( the kingdom) of God on earth, and there is no way to do that without being political. The problem with religion and politics in this country isn’t that people of faith act in politics on the basis of their faith. It is that very vocal people who get the Christian faith all wrong speak so loudly of the politics they have gotten all wrong.

So. God calls us to both charity and justice. God does not call us to do what Elijah did in the story of the widow of Zarephath. He did charity, which is a very good thing; but he could have done justice, but he didn’t, which is a very bad thing. God calls us both to be like Elijah and not to be like Elijah. Do charity. Feed the widow and her son. Jesus condemned religious figures among others who oppress the poor. See Mark 12:38-13:2.[3] God calls us to active, creative, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. See Matthew 5:38-44.[4] Resistance to evil certainly includes reforming the institutions and systems that produce the evil in the first place, and doing that is necessarily political.

So God puts both charity and justice before us and calls us to act on both of them. We Christians are a whole lot better at charity than we are at justice. Tragically, the most vocal Christians among us advocate policies that produce injustice not justice; but God will have none of it. God never supports calls for policies that harm God’s people (and all people are God’s people). God calls us to lives of both charity and justice. So let’s keep doing charity, and let’s get on with doing a much better job of promoting justice than most of us most commonly do.



[1] When in the Old Testament the word Lord is spelled this way, in what are called small caps, it means that the Hebrew being translated is Yahweh, the name of Israel’s God.

[2] “Conservative Christian” is an oxymoron, but never mind—for now.

[3] These verses include the story known as the “widow’s mite.” Preachers use it in stewardship sermons all the time. This story absolutely is not about stewardship. It is about the temple authorities lording it over the people and making people as poor as the widow is. It ends with Jesus saying their “house,” that is, the temple will be destroyed just as they destroyed the widow’s house.

[4] These famous verses do not call us to meek passivity in the face of evil as they are so often said to do. For an explanation, read Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be.